Page 170 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
That starts another round of bickering between the three of them, harmless, loud and easy in a way my life rarely gets to be. Cheyenne keeps talking over Maria. Silas answers with that half-bored, half-amused drawl that makes it obvious he’s enjoying himself more than he wants to admit. A soft smile stays on his mouth while he argues back, one hand still on my leg beneath the blanket, absentmindedly keeping me anchored to him.
Then my phone buzzes.
The sound is small.
It slices through the room anyway.
My attention drops immediately. Their voices blur at the edges while I reach for the phone beside me, the soft grin still fading slowly from Silas’s face as he keeps bantering with Cheyenne, completely unaware of the way my stomach has already started to tighten as the screen lights in my hand.
A picture fills it.
At first my mind takes it in wrong. Color before meaning. Texture before recognition. Dirt-dark shadows. The ruin of cloth. Flesh made into something that no longer belongs to the living. Then one detail slides into place, the rest of it following in one sickening rush that feels like the floor has dropped out from under me.
My mother.
Not as memory. Not as the woman who lived in my nightmares with smeared lipstick, shaking hands, and a voice that always sounded one drink away from turning mean. Not as the mother who dragged strangers through motel doors and called every fresh horror survival because naming it anything kinder would have required admitting what she had made of me.
Her body.
What is left of it.
Dug up. Exposed. No dignity left to hide behind.
The image is worse than decay. Decay would almost be merciful. This is interruption. Rot dragged into daylight. Skin collapsed in places where time has already claimed it, earth still clinging to what was once her, clothing half-torn and blackened with grave dirt, the shape of her face warped enough to make recognition feel like its own violence. It is not a body meant to be seen. It is a body that was ripped out of the dark and arranged in front of me like a threat.
There is something especially sick about the fact that I know it is her anyway.
The line of her hair. The ruined outline of her mouth. The old familiarity of the woman who made my life a grave long before they ever lowered her into one.
This is not just death on a screen.
It is desecration right before my eyes.
A message hidden inside a photograph.
Look.
Look what we pulled back up.
Look what still reaches for you.
Look what refuses to stay buried.
Look how far we can drag the dead just to make sure you understand that nothing in your life, not even the things already rotting in the ground, is ever really beyond our hands.
Everything inside me turns over at once.
The room tilts so violently I barely understand I’m moving until I’m dragging myself away from Silas, the blanket tangling around my legs, my hand slipping on the edge of the mattress. My stomach heaves before I can even breathe through it. I barely manage to twist away from them before I vomit onto the floor in one humiliating, violent rush.
The sound of the room changes immediately. Cheyenne says my name. Maria gasps. Something falls over beside the bed. None of it lands properly because another wave hits me just as hard, my whole body convulsing around it. Tears spring to my eyes from the force of it. My throat burns. The image stays in my head anyway, obscene and impossible to outrun.
A hand is on my back before I even register anyone moving.
Silas.
Of course it’s him.
His palm spreads between my shoulder blades, steady, rubbing once, then again, firm enough to keep me in my body while everything in me is trying to recoil from the screen, from the memory, from the fact that even death has not been enough to end what my mother left behind.
