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There is a faceless woman scattered through time, leaping between points the way frogs leap across wet stones in a river.
Her voice is low, a comforting hum in the background of a memory kept tight to the chest, treasured and guarded. Her hair drapes over young shoulders, the feel of it too distant, too long ago to be adequately remembered. She exists in the mind and in the mind only; her presence like a ghost, possessing moments and photos and memories laden with regret.
Her son clings to her like a child to an old toy, worn thin and on the verge of breaking through. It’s not her he clings to; it’s what he has left of her, the remnants of the pieces of her that she left behind in his heart, the same way that that she has left behind pieces in the building he lives in, the timeline he dies in, the timeline his father dies in.
She looks at her son with the face of a stranger and eyes that aren’t her own. Her voice is tilted in all the wrong ways, pitch too deep and words too familiar. She’s sure, focused; not on him. Her goal burns up in fire in every life, and in every life, she dives back through time to try and put it out before it begins.
There is a faceless woman scattered through time. Her mind is as unknown as her face, her words vague and too much from the mouth of someone her son does not remember to be comforting. Would it have been a difference, if she had looked at him with her own eyes, set in her own face? Would it matter, when she slips through time and bodies and events the way a snake sheds its skin?
She has goal posts. An end in sight. Her time is neverending. She is her son’s phantom, forever haunting him with her absence; her husband’s failure of a guardian angel, never quite managing to keep him from turning to ash. She exists in all the moments that she left behind and in all the people who she left with the dust of her rubble dotting their skin, seeping in until she sees through their eyes and they cannot see her.
“Mom,” says her son, and he does not know who he’s talking to. “My wife,” says her husband, and the woman he thinks of no longer exists. Not in the way that he knows, that he thinks, that he remembers; moral, stalwart, her hands in her son’s hair as his father abandons him, teaches across the globe. This man doesn’t know that his wife will follow him. Not to his death, but to keep his life going.
There is a faceless woman scattered through time.
Each and every time, she fails. Each and every time, she closes her eyes and dives again.
There is a woman waiting at her kitchen table, nails tapping anxiously. Spayed out across chipped wood is her phone, the light grainy and dim, the white background to the chat she’s reading over ruined by the crack that runs through the screen.
Her husband scolds her. His voice is tinged with a worry of his own, yet so different than hers - he accuses her of nagging, of being too pushy, says their daughter is an adult with a good job and a good girl who knows how to manage herself. Her husband says not to bother her. Her husband says the woman will only push their daughter away.
The woman makes food with wrinkled hands, the motions repetitive and soothing. She tries to calm herself as her phone remains on as she cooks, lighting up the counter, the battery slowly draining as she waits for a response. Her messages are many. She asks, have you eaten? What did you eat? Are you being healthy? Do you exercise? Shall I send you some food? I worry, you know I worry. Mom worries, you know Mom worries.
Her daughter doesn’t respond. Her daughter’s side of the chat stays empty, and her chair at their old dining table is like a gaping wound. When she was young, her daughter had been ambitious; vivacious; gracious. She had smiled with gummy lips and sworn to buy them new clothes and shoes and belongings, eyes shining with the determination of someone who did not know how the life she wanted so much ached.
Her daughter sends them new clothes, new shoes, new belongings. She sends them money in envelopes and bank transfers and the woman’s husband declines them. Her daughter sends them possession after possession and reassurance after reassurance and the circles under her eyes get darker every time they video call.
Her husband says not to worry.
There is a woman waiting at a train station, nails tapping anxiously. Splayed out across the cloth of her pants is her phone, tilted into the dip of her thighs, the light like a beacon to a lost sailor in a storm. Her daughter’s heart races faster than her legs can take her, trapped by distance and transportation and life, life, the sheer unfairness of life, that when she has finally found her daughter and her daughter has finally found her, life has found them both.
Her husband scolds her. His voice is tinged with worry which only grows more frantic as time passes. They wait there, shoulder to shoulder, joint in hysteria instead of separated. The cold wind beats over the warm jackets their daughter sent for them; somehow, that makes it all better. It makes it all better, as long as she comes home.
There is a woman waiting in the cold, nails tapping anxiously. Her chest aches. Her phone has been on all day; the battery flickers, on the verge of life.
Her phone dies.
There is a woman waiting in the cold. A mother waiting for a daughter who will never come home.
There is a worker in a bubble tea cafe, her hair just a bit lopsided and smile stretched too thin.
Her face is streaked with sweat, heat and exertion both. Her mind flickers from one thing to the next; sounds overlap one atop the other, demands and orders shouted, complaints whispered. It strains against her nerves, the line between stress and overwhelm razor-thin.
Her husband works behind her; his hands are sure and quick as he receives the orders she gives him, makes them according to the requested specificity and pushes them out. Even when she trips, falters, pauses, he keeps going; steady where she is mountains and valleys, the energy of her anxiety the same thing which screeches her mind to a halt when there’s just a bit too much.
There’s a tug on her pants; she spares a second to look down, and a second is too much. Her son’s face is screwed up in boredom, loneliness hiding just behind the innocence of childhood he has yet to lose. In the heat, his face is round and red; hers is thin and pale. She shakes her head, says something, keeps going.
The world keeps turning. The world goes on. She cannot stop; she does not stop. Her husband does not stop.
Success feels so important, when life is in the corner of your eyes and it is in front. Success feels like it’s just a penny dropped in the jar away from shattering all together.
Her son cheers, somewhere in the front. The sound of his cartoon nearly grates against her ears, against her lungs, too tight; she inhales and takes the next order. She’s heard this cartoon, his cheering, even when her mind feels as if it will fall out of her skull with exhaustion, too many times.
Not enough times.
Time is so quick; so fast. There is never enough time. Never enough time.
Never enough time to satisfy everyone. Never enough to satisfy themselves. Never enough time to succeed and never enough time to make this business worth it.
There is never enough time for her son.
There is a woman in a dark house, hair just a bit lopsided and smile stretched wide and eternal across her face.
It’s lined with exhaustion, with pain. Her eyes are empty. The flicker across the television - cartoon characters, cheering a chorus she once could have gone without ever hearing again and now is the closest thing she has to happiness - is the only thing which reflects against them.
Her husband works behind her; his hands are shaky, worn down by years of loss, digging deeper until they are both hollow shells. Their house reflects them; dust scattered across countertops and shelves and items shoved carelessly into corners. In his hands, paper wrinkles - he makes posters quicker than she can open her mouth and cheer at the last remnants of her son on the television screen and pushes them out, their son’s face plastered across each one.
He keeps going. He keeps moving.
She is stuck. She’s stuck desperately searching near an empty stool, clawing at a grainy TV, praying what she finds under her nails will bring her back to time.
There was once a worker at a bubble tea cafe.
There was never enough time for her son.
There’s a camera sitting in a cabinet drawer. It lies in its case; forgotten by the man who it once belonged to, ignored by his wife, unknown by his son.
His wife looks over at the cabinet, sometimes. She recalls being in front of that camera, laughing as her image was flashed into its memory. She recalls the memories stored in metal guts, twisted between wires and left to die on the same shelves that she dusts, once a week, and then she turns away from it as if it isn't even there.
The man who had once owned that camera had turned away from this house much the same way. Something bitter curls in her gut; at him, for leaving, at the world, for taking him away, at herself. Her son’s eyes drift by her the same way that her husband’s did, shooting out and locking on the world outside, sunrise dipping behind the spindly shadows of trees and beneath the blanket of brown dirt roads which lead outside their little, middle of nowhere town to the city, huge and prosperous.
The camera is an old model. It has no use in this world of new, flashy technology, in cameras which shutter fast enough to take ten pictures in the time it takes one and a great enough capture of detail that even the glint of a fingernail in the afternoon sun can be seen. Its skills have run their time; alone, it has no purpose. It rests amongst the innards of other forgotten things, unable to do anything but guard the memories it stores within its body.
The man who it once belonged to has left it behind. His wife does not take it out; she’s too busy, cooking between two pots on her stove and folding piles of laundry and arguing with her son across the dinner table, loud shouts which echo through their small house and only curl around the boy they’re directed at, never to properly enter his mind. His eyes skip over her, too; just another forgotten thing in this house of forgotten things.
Her temper is quick and constant, and her love equally so. Her worry presses and nags. She tugs at her son’s ear and he waves her away, chasing after teammates and girls and a father who left for things greater than them. He wants to leave, too; and in one world, their last moments would have been this. One set of eyes near teary with abandonment and anxiety, and the other keyed up and shoulders hiked with indignation.
In this world, they are stewing in the sour coating the fight leaves along their tongues when the world crumbles around them, and then they will never have another fight again.
There’s another world, though. Nothing really changes enough to mean anything, not in the long run, but things change nonetheless.
Her son’s eyes are wide as they lay in the rubble. He rasps hopeful, hopeless thoughts - just hang on a bit longer, just wait, help will come. His voice is like the dust floating in the air around them, grainy and harsh and stings at her eyes, makes them water, even through the soft smile on her lips.
It’s not a fake one.
The camera lays with them, somewhere. Her last moments before the world had fallen apart had been to find that camera, tuck it to her chest like a miracle. The camera is an old model. It has no use in this world, when everyone has moved on from it, except for the lives it has witnessed and the memories it protects with its body; memories of those who leave it behind.
The man who once owned it is shouting, his voice hoarse from how hard he screams. He’s here; too late for his wife to hear. Her body would ache beneath the rubble if she could feel it; she doesn’t. She can’t feel anything but the shake of her son’s body beneath her own, but the way he can feel her last rasps of breath against the back of his neck, the last dregs of her strength as he takes his hand in his.
She has no use for the people she loves. No skills to get them where she wants to go, no temperament to guide them. All she has is worn hands to grip her son’s own with. All she has is her son to protect with her body - the son who screams for a mother even as he leaves her behind.
There is a woman draped in designer clothes and makeup, hanging off her husband's arm.
Her lips are cherry red and bright enough people whisper behind their hands about her shamelessness. Her demeanor is cold and sneering, the click of her heeled boots across the floor where she thinks everyone with a bank account emptier than hers ought to reside. Her sons have darkness flickering behind their eyes and at their lips when they tilt their heads back to drink from the glass in their father’s room, the alcohol bitter.
Her family spend more time staring at themselves than at each other. She’s the worst of all. Her youngest son watches the rest of them with something like soft, confused disgust building in his bones, and her oldest takes on his father’s temper and his mother’s vapidity until he dies a man no one could respect.
She loved her sons, once. Perhaps she still does. Perhaps she never did. When her eldest son died something flickered in her chest, but her mind and mouth moved on so quickly to note appearances and advantages and how to use this it might as well have never existed.
She loved her husband, once. Perhaps she still does. Perhaps they once loved each other.
Perhaps they all once loved each other more than they loved themselves, but that time passed away long before her eldest son did.
There is a corpse laying on the wooden floor of her apartment, scattered with broken pieces of ceramic and spilled food with drying blood splayed out over everything like a coating of paint. It cools on her body, beneath her body, her hands still cupped where she had pulled her children to her chest for the last time, as if by dragging them inside of her, as if they were inside of her, she would finally be able to protect them. As if she has ever been able to protect the things which were inside of her.
She was a walking corpse years before she took her last breath. Violence lines their house, her husband spitting with rage at the whispers which make their way into his ears. His ownership is tight and cruel and it aches, and any attempt to alleviate the pressure is a betrayal.
Her children have her hair and her quiet footsteps. Her son has his father’s eyes, alight with anger. Her daughter turns her eyes away in the same breath she turns her voice off, covers her ears to try and hide.
They live in the flashes of moments at the dinner table, before it all explodes. When the food is warm and steaming, the smell pleasant and not bitter and overwhelming. When their floor is clean, when their dishes are unbroken, when she is unbroken. There remain the remnants of damage in the corners of the room where she hasn’t been able to sweep it away; chips along whichever bowls and plates and cups survived. There is too much damage for her to be able to keep it away.
There is a corpse laying on the floor of her apartment, blood dripping from her broken nose and a bruise on her cheek. Her husband’s hands grip her hair, shaking her hard; his eyes are so dark it is as if he isn’t even looking at a person. She’s not dead yet, but she might as well be.
Her son takes his sister’s hand and walks her to their bedroom, words silent and eyes at his feet. She does not see the way they burn. One day, they’ll burn everything, enough they’ll burn her too, but today the only fire is the one which is killing them all, slowly, turning the air too polluted to breathe and making every breath ache.
She tries to dig herself out of her own grave, scooping at the dirt with shaking hands and bloody fingertips. She leaves fingerprints on divorce papers, holds them to her heart like an ice pack to a burn. Escape and abandonment feel as if they might as well be the same; too much cold can make the burns worse, after all. Her daughter watches the papers drip as they melt in the heat and cries, her tears so much like the woman’s own, that something in her breaks.
To ice the wound would be to hurt her children. To stay here would be to hurt her children. To do anything would be to stand in front of a fire and let herself be consumed, slowly, until her ashes scatter in the wind, indistinguishable from the grey smoke.
She was not always a walking corpse. Perhaps she was once alive. Perhaps there is a world in a forest where she had her children live, with unburdened shoulders and undarkened gazes, where their footsteps are as loud as they want them to be and their legacies are not tainted enough to kill them.
Her son smashes his father’s head with a hammer using her hands. Her son digs her grave for her, handful after handful of dirt, and only notices when she pulls him to her chest and her skin feels clammy.
There is a corpse laying on the wooden floor of her apartment, blood cooling from the wound in her stomach. She failed at every step to keep herself alive, and the grave she tried to dig herself out of is the same house in which she died.
One by one, her children will join her. Even the cups and plates and glasses which did not immediately shatter were left with enough chips and cracks that they will eventually fall apart.