Work Text:
Zelda still talks to our daughter like she’s alive.
She sets an extra plate at the table, slices strawberries lengthwise just the way the girl liked them, and hums a lullaby to the empty room upstairs.
I stopped correcting her after the second week.
At first, I thought it was her way of mourning. We all stumble through grief like sleepwalkers —bruising our arms on doorframes, forgetting which pills we’ve taken, speaking aloud to ghosts when we think no one’s listening. But with Zelda, it was more than forgetting. It was choosing.
She chooses not to believe her daughter is dead.
She chooses to wake up each day and pretend the nursery isn’t silent.
She chooses to stand at the garden gate at 3:15 sharp, smiling faintly, waiting for the child who will never come home from school again.
And me?
I sit beside her, hands curled in my lap, rehearsing the words I never say.
There is a line I read once in a battered philosophy book in college. “When a child buries their parents, it’s natural. But when a parent buries their child, it’s tragic.”
I think of that often when I watch her, still in her silk dressing gown at noon, brushing the curls of a girl who isn’t there. Each movement is so delicate, so motherly, as if the air itself has been sculpted into a little girl’s form.
Her name was Scottie.
Four years old.
Bright blue eyes and the kind of giggle that made you believe in angels.
Until the fever came.
Three days, that was all it took. Her body curled in on itself like a dying flower. Zelda never left her side—stroking her hands, singing old Southern hymns from her Alabama youth. Her voice trembled but never cracked.
Not until the morning Scottie stopped breathing.
I remember Zelda whispering:
"Francis, she just needs rest. That’s all. Just rest."
And then she turned back to the still body and sang again.
The doctors came. Then the priest. And finally, I arrived—though I’m not sure I should have. I hadn’t stepped foot in that house in six months, all because of the Guild’s endless work.
Pathetic. I couldn’t even be there for my own wife and daughter. One’s dead, and the other’s lost her mind. And me? I showed up with nothing but hollow eyes and trembling hands.
I could feel their stares—the quiet judgement, the whispers behind closed doors. He chose work over family, they’re probably saying. A man married to his job until it buried his child and broke his wife. And maybe they’re right. Maybe I deserve every glance.
I then glanced at Zelda.
But Zelda didn’t weep at the funeral.
She didn’t even attend.
She was upstairs, brushing the curls of a girl who wasn’t there.
Weeks passed.
I cooked. I cleaned. I wrote letters Zelda would never send. I threw out the milk she let sour on the counter, and folded the little dresses she left scattered on the couch.
Zelda painted. Not canvases. Walls. Doors. The floor of the upstairs hallway.
She painted Scottie.
Sometimes it was the girl as she was—tiny, smiling, and caught mid-laughter. Sometimes she was older—seven, twelve, seventeen—impossibly imagined futures etched in oils and pastels.
One evening I found her painting a nursery in the corner of the guest room. She’d painted a crib, with shadowed depth so convincing I nearly reached out to touch it.
“She’s sleeping now,” Zelda whispered to me. “We mustn’t wake her.”
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake the truth into her.
She’s dead, Zelda. She’s gone. You have to let go.
But Zelda looked at me then—really looked—and I saw it:
A storm behind her eyes. Not grief.
Terror.
Zelda knew on some level. But to admit it fully… it would end her.
One night, I dreamt of Scottie. She was in the garden, beneath the cherry tree, twirling in her little blue dress. I called out to her—Scottie!—and she turned to me with Zelda’s eyes.
“She won’t let me leave,” she said.
“She won’t open the door.”
When I awoke, I found Zelda downstairs, barefoot, soaked in rainwater, standing in front of the oven—the pilot light casting a flickering blue beneath her pale feet.
“I made her favourite,” she said. “Pecan pie. But she didn’t come down.”
I stepped closer. “Zelda, she’s not—”
“Don’t say it.” Her voice was sharp, trembling. “Don’t ever say it. She’s upstairs. Sleeping. Growing. Just like little girls do. I won’t have your poison near her.”
And in that moment, I realized:
She wasn’t just pretending.
She had built a world.
A world where Scottie was brushing her teeth right now.
Where she was feeding ducks on Sundays.
Where she was growing up, little by little, safe and warm under her mother’s gaze.
Zelda had built a fortress from her madness. And grief was the moat.
Some days, I leave her be.
Other days, I sit at her side and pretend along with her.
I ask how school was.
I comment on the drawings Zelda says Scottie made.
I nod when she says they’ve started ballet lessons.
I do it because I love her.
Because I remember the way her laugh once filled the garden.
Because I saw her joy once, real and bright, before it shattered.
But sometimes, late at night, I hear her crying.
Not weeping.
Wailing.
Animal sounds.
Like the grief is clawing its way out from inside her chest.
I sit outside her door, back against the wallpaper she painted with stars, and I say nothing.
Because what is there to say to a mother who has buried her child—and refused to let the earth take her?
Zelda believes her daughter lives because the alternative is a world where nothing is sacred, where the universe can rob you of your light and expect you to continue breathing.
She believes, and so she lives.
In rooms filled with lullabies and ghosts.
And I—
I stay by her side.
Because sometimes, the only thing you can do for the grieving is to hold their hand inside the dream.
And wait.
Until they’re ready to wake.
Or until the dream is all that’s left.