The Spaces Between Losses
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
She first noticed it during the argument with her sister, the way time seemed to stretch like taffy between "I never" and "loved you anyway." The words hung suspended in the air, vibrating with possibilities that hadn't yet collapsed into the singular, terrible truth they both knew was coming. Sarah reached out without thinking, curious, and her hand passed through something that felt like warm honey and static electricity. When she pulled back, the kitchen was empty, the fight still frozen mid-sentence, and her sister's face was a mask of grief she hadn't yet been given permission to wear. That strange loneliness, mind and soul separated and held apart by invisible space, followed Sarah out of the kitchen, through the hallway and into the dining room and living room, separated right down to individual moments in time. When she walked past the bedroom door she couldn't resist the urge to push it open and peer into her sister's room. The summer day seeped into the room through the drawn window shutters, the only sun visible here in the shadow of the street and tree. Grace wasn't there.
Sarah closed the door softly and leaned against the wall next to it, suddenly feeling much older than she looked, even older than her cousin, as though time had paused for her by some mischance and she was adrift in a river the rest of the family was already on the other side of. Puzzling it over, pacing the house, thinking back before the fight, before the visit from Grace's boyfriend, just to be sure of what she knew, she tried to decide whether it was grief that caused time to shift or whether it started with the treacle and static electricity. Momentarily suspended between history and forever, her eyes caught the corner of a picture lying on the dresser and she stopped to pick it up. Still warm with time, it had slipped from its frame and with it she grasped an alien third sense she didn't know she possessed until that moment, felt herself pulled back in time to a moment right before she'd lost what she was trying to save, told herself to do one thing differently, to beg and plead as she wouldn't now, and failed, unbelieving, to feel anything. Awkwardly squinting, she fought the foreign magic, the sense of separation from her mind and body, her soul drawn back into that lost moment with her parents before time could move on yet again. Almost against her will, she started to say the words aloud and then stopped, splitting time and sound, and tried to put them back, order things in a different way, desperately holding the picture and◆ About the ending
❧ About the title