Subsidence
By
Sarah Jackson
This is the morning you notice the crack, but it could have been there yesterday. Perhaps even the day before. It’s alarming, but intriguing too. Delicate and soft as a pencil line. You trace it gently with your finger, from your collarbone to just below your left breast.
All day long you catch yourself slipping your fingers into your shirt and following the fracture. There’s no pain, no scab to crumble. It’s not a scar, just a pale slit, like a paper cut. You feel the same as usual. But you know it’s not supposed to be there, meandering like lightning across your body.
After a few days there’s another crack branching away from the first, slim as a hair. You pry open one of the cuts with your brow tweezers to look inside. Bloodless and deep, it frightens you. Tomorrow you’ll go to the doctor. Today, you pull on a high-necked sweater.
Tonight you’re out, laughing and drinking bright wine, almost enough wine to forget about the shadow threading over your breastbone. You’re touching up your makeup in the bathroom when you feel a strange pressure under your sternum, and you put your hands down on either side of the sink to steady yourself. After a few moments your shoulders heave in a deep spasm as something gives inside you with a crack. A chill ache blooms across your chest. Lifting your sweater with trembling hands you see a hole, collapsed below your collarbone.
It’s impossibly dark. When you look into it some small part of your brain starts to scratch and panic even while you stand frozen with shock. The emptiness is hypnotic. You can’t tear your eyes away. It’s only when you hear laughter and the clatter of heels approaching that you move, tugging your sweater down over the gap. You run into the night, wild with shame.
Shivering in your bed, you run your fingers around the neat, raw edge of the void where your heart should be. It’s sore like a bruise, and like a bruise you press it again and again. You knew, of course. You always knew. All that pain and fear had to go somewhere. You hollowed yourself out to survive. But it’s not an emptiness, it’s heavy, full. Every time you were hurt it filled up a little more. It’s dense, like a tar pit, or a black hole, silently sucking at your ribs all these years. Now it’s gnawed through and you won’t be able to hide it anymore. You lie there, crying quietly, brimming with death.
When you wake a few hours later, pale light is seeping into the room. You ache everywhere. Carefully you swing your feet out of bed and tread lightly to your mirror, tenderly pulling your t-shirt up over your head. The hole is still there.
You stand staring at it for a few minutes. Then, slowly, you reach the tips of your fingers into the hole. As you watch them dangle in empty space you feel sick, but after a couple of deep breaths it passes. You reach in past your knuckles. Flinching, you slide your whole hand inside your chest. Your heart space is cold and dead as a tomb.
Fear blazes at the base of your skull like a firework then fades into a sadness that nearly pulls you to your knees. But you take another breath and reach further, until you’re wrist deep in the dark of yourself. You stretch your fingers out as far as you can. You stretch further, eyes hot with tears and wrist twinging painfully.
The tips of your fingers brush something soft. You feel a pulse, a flicker. A seed opening. A tendril unfurls in the light.
You let out a sob and pull your shaking hand out of the space inside you, sinking weakly to the floor. For a few dazed moments you just sit there. Then, to your surprise, you laugh. You laugh. As the sun comes up you wrap your arms around yourself, around the hole in your heart, and the unkillable spark inside it.
Sarah Jackson's work has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, and Translunar Travelers Lounge. They are also the editor of Inner Worlds magazine. Their website is https://sarah-i-jackson.ghost.io
By
Sarah Jackson
This is the morning you notice the crack, but it could have been there yesterday. Perhaps even the day before. It’s alarming, but intriguing too. Delicate and soft as a pencil line. You trace it gently with your finger, from your collarbone to just below your left breast.
All day long you catch yourself slipping your fingers into your shirt and following the fracture. There’s no pain, no scab to crumble. It’s not a scar, just a pale slit, like a paper cut. You feel the same as usual. But you know it’s not supposed to be there, meandering like lightning across your body.
After a few days there’s another crack branching away from the first, slim as a hair. You pry open one of the cuts with your brow tweezers to look inside. Bloodless and deep, it frightens you. Tomorrow you’ll go to the doctor. Today, you pull on a high-necked sweater.
Tonight you’re out, laughing and drinking bright wine, almost enough wine to forget about the shadow threading over your breastbone. You’re touching up your makeup in the bathroom when you feel a strange pressure under your sternum, and you put your hands down on either side of the sink to steady yourself. After a few moments your shoulders heave in a deep spasm as something gives inside you with a crack. A chill ache blooms across your chest. Lifting your sweater with trembling hands you see a hole, collapsed below your collarbone.
It’s impossibly dark. When you look into it some small part of your brain starts to scratch and panic even while you stand frozen with shock. The emptiness is hypnotic. You can’t tear your eyes away. It’s only when you hear laughter and the clatter of heels approaching that you move, tugging your sweater down over the gap. You run into the night, wild with shame.
Shivering in your bed, you run your fingers around the neat, raw edge of the void where your heart should be. It’s sore like a bruise, and like a bruise you press it again and again. You knew, of course. You always knew. All that pain and fear had to go somewhere. You hollowed yourself out to survive. But it’s not an emptiness, it’s heavy, full. Every time you were hurt it filled up a little more. It’s dense, like a tar pit, or a black hole, silently sucking at your ribs all these years. Now it’s gnawed through and you won’t be able to hide it anymore. You lie there, crying quietly, brimming with death.
When you wake a few hours later, pale light is seeping into the room. You ache everywhere. Carefully you swing your feet out of bed and tread lightly to your mirror, tenderly pulling your t-shirt up over your head. The hole is still there.
You stand staring at it for a few minutes. Then, slowly, you reach the tips of your fingers into the hole. As you watch them dangle in empty space you feel sick, but after a couple of deep breaths it passes. You reach in past your knuckles. Flinching, you slide your whole hand inside your chest. Your heart space is cold and dead as a tomb.
Fear blazes at the base of your skull like a firework then fades into a sadness that nearly pulls you to your knees. But you take another breath and reach further, until you’re wrist deep in the dark of yourself. You stretch your fingers out as far as you can. You stretch further, eyes hot with tears and wrist twinging painfully.
The tips of your fingers brush something soft. You feel a pulse, a flicker. A seed opening. A tendril unfurls in the light.
You let out a sob and pull your shaking hand out of the space inside you, sinking weakly to the floor. For a few dazed moments you just sit there. Then, to your surprise, you laugh. You laugh. As the sun comes up you wrap your arms around yourself, around the hole in your heart, and the unkillable spark inside it.
Sarah Jackson's work has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, and Translunar Travelers Lounge. They are also the editor of Inner Worlds magazine. Their website is https://sarah-i-jackson.ghost.io
