Summer, Jackson by Anna Helldorfer

Julie was living with ghosts.

They followed her every move, from her dreams, into the waking moments of quiet when her vision would blur and the scene in front of her would change. Sometimes their faces were friendly. Other times—most times—they were the cracked versions of what she remembered. A horrible arrangement of wide eyes and bloody teeth.

She did her best to keep them at bay.

When they were clear of the winter months, Julie took her family to live on a farm, on the outskirts of town. They had a barn and a new kitchen and yellow lace curtains.

It was nice.

She felt, for the first time in a long time, like she could breathe, away from her old house and the constant reminders of her loss. Of what she’d done. No one to lie to her, or to throw her a pitying glance when her brain took a break and no longer wished to connect to her vocal chords.

She could watch her son grow up in peace. She could tend to her sheep.

Eva seemed happy, too. They cooked and painted together, and laughed when their son wooed and awed at the twinkling windchimes on their porch. All of the horrors that kept Julie from sitting still for too long, Eva had lived through with her. Unlike Julie, she wore her loss like an old, favorite coat. She’d tug on memories for comfort, or say things like, Darren was such an asshole, without choking on the word was. It seemed... easy.

Julie felt like a stick in the mud.

Everybody wanted her to talk about it. To get it out.

Julie thought that made the memories sound like poison—like something she could squeeze out of her until they no longer hurt.

Talking was the last thing she wanted to do. And she worried that once she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

“Maybe try writing it down,” Eva had suggested one night, over dinner, when Julie failed to hide the shaking in her hands while she robotically spooned mashed potatoes into her mouth. That had seemed promising, until the dead began to talk to her.

The conversation was always one sided, and reeked of accusation.

Your fault. You did this.

Usually, she listened as an acquiescence. It would make her head pound and her skin feel tight, but she thought that it was the least she could do to atone for the blood on her hands. While the world moved on, Julie stirred.

She slipped away like a late afternoon summer—slow and lazy, until she found herself blinking in the darkness, wondering where the time went.

Eva tried her best to keep Julie present.

“Let’s go for a hike today,” she said, early one morning, when the light had just begun to peek over the mountains and they lay in bed, listening to the birds chirp. A cool breeze from the window tickled the hair on Julie’s arms. She felt normal. It felt like an indulgence.

“Okay,” she said, and the morning stretched into early afternoon. They packed lunches and made their way to the worn trail behind the barn. She followed Eva—her son strapped to the front of her chest—through the forest and over the ridge, to the wide, blue lake that sat nestled in the neighboring valley. It reflected the same color as the sky as they set up a blanket by the shore.

They lay on their backs to look up at the clouds, their son tucked between them. He cooed, and Eva picked at a container of berries that they’d packed.

The moment was lit with a hazy sort of color.

“I started a new painting,” Julie said, her voice quiet.

Eva propped herself up on an elbow. “Yeah? Of what?”

“Joe.”

A small smile pulled at the corner of Eva’s mouth.

“I’d like to see it,” she said. “When you’re ready.”

“Okay.”

Julie closed her eyes, breathing deep. She drifted, suspended somewhere between the lake and the sky, until something tugged at her mind.

She could no longer feel the sun on her skin.

When she sat up, everything was how it had been. Eva and their son lay on the blanket. The clouds rolled above them. But the color had been seeped from the world.

A ripple on the lake caught her eye, a few yards out from the shore.

Then they began to rise out of the water.

The faces of her dead stared with blank eyes as they surrounded them, chanting, Julie, Julie.

“Julie. Julie, wake up.”

She bolted upright to find that she was still blinking in darkness.