UNMARKED

Fog

Bex

The second blackout came on a morning, heavy with fog, hauling wash water up from the southern creek with an older omega named Petra, who had never once, in three weeks, spoken an unkind word to me.

I don't remember what set it off. That's the part that still unsettles me more than anything else. Not fear, not pain, just absence, a clean gap where a memory should be.

One moment I was climbing the bank with a full bucket, the fog thick enough to blur the tree line, and the next I was sitting on wet ground ten feet further up the path with no memory of falling, sitting, or arriving.

Petra was on her knees a few feet away, very still, staring at her own hands the way Rian had all those weeks ago, that same grey, unmoored look, like the ground beneath a fact she'd never thought to question had simply given way.

"Petra." My voice came out thin. "Petra, are you"

"I'm fine." She said it too fast, already pushing herself up, already putting distance between us that had nothing to do with the mud. "I'm fine, Bex. Just tired."

She wasn't fine. I understood that the way you understand a lie told kindly, to spare you both. The way you let it stand because the alternative is worse for everyone involved.

She gathered her bucket and left me sitting in the wet grass, and I didn't call after her, because some part of me had started to be afraid of what would happen if she turned around and I saw her face clearly.

This was longer than the gap with Rian. Longer, and closer, and this time there was no bucket, no shove, no reason I could point to that had provoked it. It had simply happened, unbidden, the way a held breath eventually escapes whether you're ready to release it or not.

I sat alone by the creek for a long time after she'd gone, fog curling low over the water, and made myself say the thing out loud for the first time, just to see if I could survive hearing it.

"Something is wrong with me."

The fog didn't answer. Nothing ever does, in stories like this, until it's far too late to matter.