“Who’s going to take care of me when you die?”

“Baby, when I die, you’re going to be taking care of me.”

She kissed her daughter on the forehead and caressed her cheek tenderly with the knuckles of her fingers.

“Goodnight, baby.”

“G’night, momma.”

She turned the light off and a cold black enveloped the room. The low hum of the fan was the only noise that could be heard as it whirred steadily. She closed the door softly behind her, turning the knob slightly before reaching the door frame so as to minimize the impact. She walked down the narrow hallway of the house to her bedroom. A dull darkness meant she saw only outlines of figures, vague shapes and the familiar profiles of furniture.

A muffled thud rang out somewhere in the house. She froze. Still, after all these years, she was easily unsettled by the random bumps of the night. Houses make noises, she told herself, it’s nothing more than that. She walked back to her daughter’s bedroom and listened from outside the door. She heard the soft, indiscernible whispering of her daughter. It sounded like she was singing to herself. She smiled and resumed walking, past the game room. Without thinking, she tried the door and it was locked, of course, as it always was. It had been in that room that she had found her husband hanging from a low beam that ran across the ceiling, his feet inches from the carpet. The fan had been on and she remembered it rotating ominously close to his head. In his stiff fingers he clenched a hastily written note.

It was a short letter. It read, “My dearest Jane, I fear the voices have reached beyond me. They’re no longer inside of me. They bounce around the walls of our home, they echo in the rooms, they follow me. They tell me terrible things, try to convince me to do awful things. I take my life in the hope that I take the voices with me and keep you and Emma forever safe. Yours always, Tom.”

Stolen story; please report.

She had collapsed upon seeing him. She had fallen to her knees, clutching her body, and sobbed while her husband hanged above her as if guarding her. His eyes were bulging and bloodshot and his mouth hung open in a perpetual scream. The air from the fan created a small draft and it chilled her to the core and made her husband’s body sway ever so slightly. In six years she had yet to shake that chill.

            She continued walking.

It was in this darkness where she felt his absence the most. Among the various silhouettes of chairs and lamps and pots that were scattered around the house she could sometimes see her husband. She would stare at the dark figure, allowing herself to imagine it was him bending down to smell the flowers in a vase or curled in his favorite chair reading a book. She tried not imagining the bulging veins or swollen tongue she had last seen him with.  But her eyes would soon adjust slightly more to the darkness, and in place of her lost love would be the nightstand or a stray wooden chair that Emma must have moved.

She crawled into a cold bed that was too big for her alone. She pulled up a thin sheet and the coolness of it against her soft skin soothed her. She bade a whispered goodnight to her deceased husband as a singular tear wet her cheek. It rolled down with grace before catching at her chin and hanging precariously for a second until it dropped. She squeezed her eyes shut, but that didn’t stop the tears from flowing. Her brow was scrunched, and she grimaced as if pained, but the grief that came pouring out of her was silent. Her chest heaved and her heart felt so constricted she felt it would burst, but she made no noise. It was her husband she craved. His face, his touch, his embrace. His voice.

She heard almost inaudible whispering in her ear that surely must have belonged to Emma in her room. And before she fell asleep, a thought that she wouldn’t remember when she awoke the next day made its way into her mind. The whispering came from a voice that was much deeper than Emma’s. A voice that was much deeper than Tom’s.