Chapter 13: All The Things We Don't Discuss
All The Things We Don’t Discuss continues this week. This is a genre-bending literary gothic novel with a missing person at its core. If you like magic realism, unreliable narrators, 19th century Gothic, dreamy slipstream type stories, and mysteries…you’ll like this. Maybe. You can read the entire book so far from the beginning here.
I came back and back to her room. Back and back and back.
During the sickness of her nights they seemed to reach out at me, pawing at me from all sides with their mercurial glow that I found myself unable to look away for hours on end. I would change cloths on my sister’s forehead, eyes fixed on the vials. MEMORY #69. MEMORY #120.
Those long nights I became more familiar with the phases of darkness than I was with the hours of sun. I had both the stars and the bottles to guide me through that endless murk. My time as Sarah’s nurse was orchestrated by her ragged, sucking breath, the cough, when she’d lurch sideways or up into a sitting position, hands clamped over the lower half of her face as her shoulders heaved. She made a sound that was not human.
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