The Children's Menu
Chapter 6 of Black Coffee. We meet Kat at ten years old, trying to find a sense of childhood normalcy but finding out she can't ignore the sound of crying.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
When Kat was around ten years old, the yard behind the house felt like its own country. The grass was patchy and thin, more dirt than lawn, with weeds that came up in stiff little armies between the stones. A line of cracked concrete ran close to the foundation, and beyond that, tucked low where the siding met the earth, were the basement windows.
They were small slit windows, too narrow for anyone to fit through. Each one wore a rusted metal grate like teeth. The glass was streaked with old rain and spider webs. To the left, the neighbor’s maple tree leaned halfway over the property line, dropping whirligig seeds that jammed themselves into every crack like tiny, eager visitors. There was a smell back there that was part damp soil, part hot bricks, part something faintly sour that seemed to rise from the ground itself.
Kat spent most afternoons in that yard. There weren’t many children on the street, and the few who lived nearby rarely came outside. You saw them in quick flashes, pale faces at upstairs windows, or in the back seat of cars as their parents whisked them away to lessons and soccer practice and somewhere else. Somewhere that was not there.
At school she had a couple of friends. Girls who would share crayons or laugh at her jokes, who might sit next to her at lunch if there was space. They were kind enough, in the absentminded way of children who knew their own home was a safe place they could always return to. But no one ever came over. That was just a rule, as fixed in Kat’s life as the sun going down.
Other parents didn’t like her house. She had overheard them once in the parking lot after a school concert. Her mother had been digging through her cracked leather purse for the car keys, and the two women who’d been walking with them pulled ahead. Kat left her mother and slipped to the right of a row of cars, following the two busybodies, because she had heard her father’s name on their lips. Travis. She wanted to keep listening to the grown up noise surrounding the Maxwell family. One of the women’s voices came out, low and tight.
“I don’t feel right about it,” she said. “That man drinks. I saw him last week in the grocery store, and you should see the way he looked at the cashier, that young thing. What’s her name? Denise? Well, it just gave me chills. I’m not letting Stephen spend an afternoon over there. I know their little girl is nice enough, but I just can’t trust that family.”
Her father. Of course they were talking about her father. Her mother had laughed then, as she came up behind Kat. Her laugh came out brittle and shiny, like a piece of glass that was trying very hard not to break.
“People talk,” her mother hissed. “They always have.”
Kat had pretended she didn’t understand. Ten was old enough to know that pretending not to understand was sometimes safer than understanding too much.
So the yard was hers, for the most part. She made up elaborate games that stretched across the fence lines and along the cracked pavement. She drew chalk kingdoms that were washed away by the rain. She stacked small rocks against the basement wall and called them towers. When she tried to picture herself from far away, she sometimes thought she looked like the stick figure girls she drew in the margins of her notebook, skinny and smiling and not quite connected at the joints.
On the day she first heard the crying, the sky was the clear hard blue you only got after a night of heavy rain. The concrete was still damp in spots, and the air smelled like worms. Kat was kneeling near the foundation, picking tiny stones out of the gravel and arranging them into circles. If she squinted, the circles could be villages, or runes, or rings that might trap something like a bug inside, or a slug.
A car went by on the street out front, its engine rising and fading. A dog barked down the block. A plane hummed overhead. Then, beneath all that, something else. At first she thought it was the wind, just a strange note in the way it squeezed between houses. She paused, stones in her hand, listening. It came again, longer this time, thin, quivering, a sound that was trying to escape from somewhere deep inside the earth and failing.
Crying.
Kat went very still. It was not the wail of a cat in heat, which she had heard before from one of the houses next door, and which always made the hairs rise on her arms. It wasn’t a baby either, not quite. There was language knotted in the sound, hidden words that fell apart into sobs.
She turned her head slowly, as if any quick movement might scare the sound away. It seemed to be coming from the wall, from the low basement windows with their rusted grates. Kat leaned closer.
The crying hit her in a strange way. Not in her ears at first, but in a thin, bright line down her back, like someone had drawn a cold finger along her spine. It was so quiet that she could have convinced herself she was making it up, except that her body refused to believe that. Her stomach tightened. Her throat went dry.
“Hello?” she whispered.
The crying didn’t stop. It didn’t get louder. It just kept going, the way a faucet drips in another room, steady and helpless, completely indifferent to its owner’s frustrations.
Kat pressed her palm to the glass. It was cool but not cold. She tried peering through the grime, but the angle of the sun cast the glass into a blind glare. All she could see was her own reflection, faint and distorted: her round face, her dark hair frizzing at the edges, a smear of dirt on her cheek. There might have been something behind her in the reflection, but if there was the light swallowed it.
“Hello,” she said again, a little louder.
The crying faltered. For one hopeful second, she thought the voice was listening to her. Then it resumed, this time with a small, hopeless hitch, like the sound was folding in on itself. Kat’s heart thudded so hard it hurt.
She crawled back. Then back again. Her legs felt cut on the sharp gravel.
The back door to the kitchen banged open. Her father’s voice floated out, annoyed and rough. “Catherine, get in here. Your mother needs help with the laundry.”
She flinched. No one at school called her Catherine. She hated the way it sounded in his mouth, stiff and old, as if he wished he had a different child and was trying to shape her into it with every syllable. Her name was Kat. He should know that.
Kat hesitated for half a heartbeat, eyes still fixed on the window. The crying continued, thin and distant. If she said she couldn’t come in because there was something wrong in the basement, her father would look at her in that particular way he sometimes did, a slow, dangerous look that started soft and then sharpened, as if he were deciding which piece of her to cut first.
Nothing’s wrong, she told herself. It’s the television. It’s pipes. It’s the sound of some other house, and some other child, calling out from within the walls of a cold, dark foundation.
“Coming,” she called.
Kat trotted to the door, each step feeling like a betrayal. She didn’t look back at the basement window.
That night, she fell asleep with the covers pulled over her head, breathing in the dusty cotton smell. When the house settled and the plumbing sighed and a car’s headlights slid across the ceiling, she told herself the tiny sounds beneath were only the rattling of old vents. Nothing more. She dreamed of water, of standing on the edge of a black lake while someone sobbed beneath the surface where she couldn’t see.
The second day, she told herself she wasn’t going to go near the basement windows. There was no reason. There were other things to do. She could ride her bike up and down the driveway. She could climb the maple tree on the neighbor’s side until the bark scraped her knees. She could pretend she had never heard anything at all.
She started that way. Ate her cereal at the sticky kitchen table, listening to her parents move around the house in their separate orbits, her mother humming tunelessly in the bathroom, and her father rattling ice in a glass, even though it was still early. A talk show burbled in the background. The host’s voice sounded like someone smiling too hard.
“You have that book report,” her mother said, passing behind Kat to run water in the sink. “You ought to be working on it.”
“I will,” Kat answered, though she had already finished the report. She always finished things early. It made her feel safer, to have something done and tucked away, proof that she wasn’t failing anyone in the ways that counted.
When she slipped out the back, the light was flatter, the sky gone a soft white. She pushed her bike in a wobbly circle, then abandoned it by the fence. The yard felt different. Not dangerous, exactly. Watchful.
She found herself drifting toward the foundation without meaning to. Her feet knew the way, tracing the familiar path along the concrete strip. The house wall rose at her side like the flank of some huge animal.
There it was; the small, grated window rising from the gravel below it.
She could walk past. She could keep going to the far corner where the dandelions grew tall. No one was making her stop.
But she did.
For a moment, she heard nothing, just the faint rush of traffic on the main road, the scratch of a bird in the maple tree, the buzz of a fly near her ear.
See, she told herself. There’s nothing. You’re just being weird. It was the television. Or maybe the crying in her own mind.
Then, from somewhere beyond the glass, the crying began again.
It rose slowly this time, like someone was waking up to their own grief, a small, ragged sound. It rolled up against the window and seeped through, thin but unmistakable.
Kat’s fingers curled. Her nails bit into her palms. She walked up to the window and got down on her hands and knees.
“Hello,” she whispered.
The crying stuttered. For a moment there was only breathing; faint, quick breathing, as if the person on the other side of the wall had just run a long way and then stopped.
She cleared her throat and tried again. “Hello? Can you hear me?”
Kat imagined, with a sudden vividness that made her sway, that a small figure was pressed against the far side of the foundation, just below the glass, eyes wide, ears listening, not brave enough to answer and not sure if she should.
“It is okay,” Kat murmured. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
If someone had walked into the yard just then, if one of the neighbors had opened their window and seen her kneeling by the foundation talking to the earth, they would have thought she looked crazier than her parents. The thought made her cheeks flush hot.
“Eunice?” the tiny voice said softly.
Kat’s breathing stopped. Her whole body froze, and she didn’t have it in her to respond. Then, slowly, the crying began again, but muffled, much quieter than before. It sounded like the person had turned away from her or buried her face in her arms.
Kat stayed there for a long time, listening. The gravel pressed into her knees. Ants explored her shoelaces. The house wall radiated a faint warmth against her shoulder. It occurred to her that she should be scared, really scared, in some big movie way, with screaming and running and doors slamming. Instead she felt a kind of hollow ache. The sound of the crying slid into that hollow place and curled up.
When she finally pulled herself away, the day had faded into a hazy gray. Her mother called from the back door for her to wash up for dinner. Kat moved like she was underwater, her limbs slow and heavy.
“Did you spend all afternoon out here?” her mother asked, dropping a plate of overcooked pasta in front of her.
“Yes,” Kat said.
“Play is good for you,” her mother went on, already half turned away. “Keeps you out of trouble.”
Her father didn’t say anything. He twirled his fork in the noodles, staring past them at the wall.
Kat lifted her head, listening. The basement windows were almost directly beneath the kitchen. If she focused, could she hear the crying through the floorboards? But all she heard was the clock above the sink ticking, ticking, ticking.
That night she couldn’t sleep at all. Every tiny sound snapped her eyes open. The creak of the house, the drip in the bathroom sink, the low murmur of the television in the living room after her parents thought she was sleeping. She tried to picture the basement beneath her, the concrete floor, the boxes stacked along the walls, the furnace in the corner. She tried to imagine there was nowhere for a child to be. No small shape huddled in the dark.
Her mind refused to cooperate.
On the third day, she didn’t pretend to herself anymore. She knew she was going to the window. She knew, the way she knew the shape of her own hand, that she couldn’t stay away. That day school went by like molasses, and every time Kat looked at the clock in her classroom it seemed the minute had went backwards. Finally, when the bell rang, she sprinted from her chair and ran home.
The sky had gone gray with impending rain, clouds dragged low and soft. The air prickled on her skin. Her mother was cleaning the bathroom with the radio turned up loud. Her father had gone out somewhere in the car and had not said when he’d be back.
After dropping off her bookbag, Kat slipped through the back door and closed it gently, as if the house itself might wake. She crossed the yard in a straight line this time, no hesitation, no detours. Gravel shifted under her sneakers as she knelt by the window.
“Hello?” she whispered.
The crying started at once, as if the word had been a switch. Not from far away this time, but right up against the glass. There was a wet gasp in it, a desperate catch.
“Eunice?” the voice said again.
“It is okay,” Kat said. Her voice trembled. She pressed her hand to the window. “I’m Catherine. Who’s Eunice?”
The crying faltered. Then, softly, a voice.
“My sister.”
The sound hit her like a physical blow. It was small. High. Definitely a girl. There was a wavering echo to it, like the words were on the brink of hysteria.
“You can hear me,” Kat breathed.
A pause. “Yes.”
She swallowed. Her heart thumped. Every part of her body felt very awake.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, knowing too many questions were coming out at once. “How did you get down there? Are you a ghost?”
Another pause. She could hear the girl’s breathing, quick and unsteady. The silence stretched so long that Kat wondered if she lost her.
Then, very quietly, “I don’t know where I am. Can you help me?”
The words were so small that Kat barely heard them.
“Are you hurt right now?” Kat asked. The questions felt clumsy in her mouth. She was trying to talk the way people talked in movies when they called 9-1-1, careful and calm. She didn’t know how to be careful and calm at the same time.
“My arm,” the girl said. “And my leg, I think. And my head.”
A hiccupping breath. A tiny whimper. Kat’s stomach twisted hard. Ghost’s didn’t have arms and legs and heads to hurt. A wave of nausea rose in her chest and settled there, burning.
“What’s your name?” Kat hissed.
There was a little rustling sound, as if the other child had shifted. Kat pictured a small hand brushing over concrete, searching for balance.
“Tiffany.”
The name brought with it a sudden, painful burst of ordinary images. The girl in her class named Tiffany who wore pink barrettes. The baby dolls in the store with names printed on their cardboard boxes, Tiffany and Amber and Crystal, smiling with identical painted eyes.
“Hi, Tiffany,” Kat said. Her voice was hoarse. “How long have you been in my basement?”
“I don’t know,” Tiffany whispered. “It’s dark.”
The word dark came out in a rush, as if it carried more weight than the others. Kat suddenly imagined sitting in a space where there was no window at all, only thick flat black, for so long that day and night stopped mattering. Her throat closed.
“Do you know what day it is?” Kat tried.
Another long pause. A sniffle. “No.”
“How old are you?”
“Six.”
Kat was ten. She didn’t know how long police took to answer calls. She didn’t know how long a five-year-old could go without help. She didn’t know how much of any of this was real. She only knew that her chest hurt and her hands were sweating and if she stopped talking she might start screaming.
“Who brought you here?” she asked.
The question tumbled out faster than she meant it to. Her heart thudded painfully after, as if trying to catch up. A strange buzzing had started at the base of her skull. She was aware, in a muddled way, of a thought she refused to let finish itself. A thought that began with her father’s heavy footsteps on the basement stairs, the smell of him when he came back up, the things he kept in the locked cabinets. The reasons the basement door was always locked.
She didn’t let the thought put on a face. She kept it a faceless man in the shadows. A shape.
“I don’t know,” Tiffany said. Her voice was even smaller now, collapsing in on itself.
“Was it a man?” Kat asked. The buzzing in her head grew louder. The words scraped their way out.
“Yes.” A tiny shiver of sound. “He goes up and down the stairs.”
Kat felt something cold travel through her, as if someone had poured water down her spine.
“Does he hurt you?” she heard herself say, and the words sounded strange, like they already belonged in a story told later by someone else.
Silence. The longest silence yet. Kat held her breath. Her lungs burned.
Finally, a muffled, “Yes.”
The word seemed to carry all the weight of the basement with it. Heavy, damp, impossible to push aside.
“All the time,” Tiffany added, and that broke something in her voice. The crying came back in a rush. “I want my mommy! I want to go home! Please help me.”
Kat sat down hard in the gravel. Her legs didn’t seem to remember how to hold her. Rocks dug into her skin. Her head spun. Sweat began to form on her forehead, though it wasn’t warm out and the clouds were just about to let loose a cold rain.
“I…” She swallowed. Her mouth tasted metallic. “I’ll get help.”
The promise came out before she had time to think about what it meant. It seemed like the only possible answer. If someone asked you for help like that, if they said please and their voice cracked on the word, you said yes. Anything else would be monstrous.
The crying quieted to soft hiccups. Kat leaned her head against the wall. “Do you have any light in there?” she asked. The question was stupid. She knew the answer.
“No,” Tiffany whispered.
She didn’t know how long she sat there after that. Time blurred. Her mind buzzed, jumping from one jagged thought to the next, never settling anywhere long enough to make sense.
Who could she call?
The police, obviously. That was what they did in books. Children found something terrible and called the police, and the police came with flashing lights and firm voices and made things stop. They took bad men away. They wrapped shaking victims in blankets and told them they were safe now. In books, that happened.
She pictured herself picking up the phone that hung on the kitchen wall, the long curling cord swinging. Dialing nine and then one and then one, the buttons clicking under her finger. A voice coming on the line, asking what was her emergency, and she would have to answer. There’s a little girl in my basement. A man is hurting her.
They’d ask for her address. Of course they would. They’d write it down. They’d send cars with sirens to this house. Neighbors would look out their windows and see. They’d watch the officers walk up the front steps. They’d watch the officers walk back down.
The police would look everywhere, opening doors that were never supposed to be opened, shining their flashlights into corners made to stay dark. They’d ask questions that wouldn’t stop at the basement.
And what if they didn’t find Tiffany? What if the crying stopped when anyone besides Kat listened. What if they found nothing at all, nothing except the things her parents had hidden for their own reasons and decided that those things were the problem.
Her stomach clenched hard. The nausea rose to her throat.
She thought about telling her teacher instead. Mrs. Adlar had soft hands and a tired smile, but she always had the patience to listen. She wore long skirts and had a picture of her own children on her desk, two boys with big teeth. When she bent over Kat’s desk to help her with math, she smelled like peppermint and chalk dust.
If Kat stayed after school and asked if she could talk, if she said in a small voice that she thought there might be someone in her basement, would Mrs. Adlar believe her? Or would she tilt her head and say, “Sometimes when we’re under a lot of stress, our imaginations can get very vivid.”?
Kat could see that scene too, almost as clearly as the one with the police. The polite smile, the adult words. We’ll keep an eye on things. Maybe you could give the school counselor a visit. You know you can always tell us if something’s wrong at home.
Wrong at home.
The phrase sat heavy in her mind. It was a phrase adults liked to use, she had noticed, in pamphlets and assemblies and speeches. It made things sound like broken appliances. like something that could be fixed with a screwdriver and some patience.
She thought of telling one of her friends and asking their parents to help. Maybe Emily’s mom, who volunteered in the classroom and always wore earrings that looked like tiny chandeliers. Or Priya’s dad, who had kind eyes and always remembered to ask about homework.
It only took a moment for that fantasy to collapse. She pictured herself standing in their nice clean kitchens, with their lemon dish soap and their neat rows of magnets on the fridge, saying, “Excuse me, I think there’s a hurt child in my basement,” and watching their faces. The way their mouths would tighten. The way their eyes would skip away and then back.
Those people already didn’t let their children come over. They were already afraid, or suspicious, or at least wary. Asking them to step inside the house, to go down into the basement, would be like asking them to step into a story they already decided they didn’t want.
Kat’s thoughts spun and spun, chasing themselves in circles. In each version she was either not believed, or believed in a way that made everything worse. She tried to imagine an adult she could trust unreservedly and came up blank. It felt like someone had taken a big eraser to that part of her mind.
She noticed, distantly, that she hadn’t once seriously considered going to her own parents. The realization came slowly, like a bruise appearing.
But why not? The question floated up, light and poisonous.
Because she knew. Even though she was never told in so many words, she knew: there was a part of the house that belonged to them in a way nothing else did, a part of the day and the night that was theirs to patrol and police and populate. The basement was their territory. If she brought this voice into the light, if she told them someone was in their downstairs space, there’s something down there they hadn’t told her about, they wouldn’t thank her for her vigilance. They’d get angry.
Her father’s face flashed behind her eyes, that flat stare he got when she stepped over a line she hadn’t known was there. So did her mother’s sharp little intake of breath, the one that said you have made things so much harder now.
Kat pressed her palms to her eyes until colors bloomed behind them. Maybe, she thought wildly, Tiffany wasn’t actually real. Maybe the crying was her own thoughts, echoing back at her. Maybe she invented a whole person out of the empty parts of the house.
She had done something like that before.
When she was seven, there was an imaginary friend for a while. Hazel. Hazel lived in the closet and liked to talk after the lights were out. Hazel knew jokes that made Kat laugh into her pillow, helpless and silent. Hazel knew how to sit with her on the long walk to school and keep her company without being seen.
Her parents hadn’t liked Hazel. Her mother shrugged it off at first, muttering something about phases, children and their make believe. But her father had gotten that pinched look around his mouth.
“We do not need ghosts in this house,” he had said once, when he overheard Kat saying goodnight to Hazel. “You have enough company.”
Hazel had stopped visiting not long after that, or maybe Kat had stopped letting her. It was hard to remember which came first. One night she whispered goodnight and there was only her own breath in the dark.
Maybe Tiffany was a new kind of Hazel, a way for her brain to put a shape to the dread that already lived inside those walls. Maybe if she ignored the voice, if she refused to feed it, it would fade away like Hazel had.
She pushed herself to her feet on shaky legs. Bits of gravel clung to her knees and her palms. She brushed them off, leaving dull gray streaks on her skin.
“I have to go,” she said quietly, her voice thick.
“No.” Tiffany’s voice climbed, sharp with despair. “No, please, don’t leave me.”
“I’ll come back,” Kat said. “I promise. I just… I have to think.”
A sob pushed through the window in response, high and thin. It ripped at Kat’s heart. Her own sob climbed up from her bowels, threatening to break out in a wail. Tears rose to her eyes, and she wiped them with the back of her hands as she walked away from the basement window and towards the back door. She thought she might throw up, right there in the scraggly grass, but she made it to the back stoop.
Her hand shook on the door handle.
As she stepped into the kitchen, the cool indoor air washed over her face. It smelled like lemon cleaner and stale coffee and something frying in old oil. The familiar ugliness of it grounded her for a second.
She pulled the door closed behind her and leaned against it, eyes closed, trying to breathe evenly.
“What’s the matter?”
The voice was close and sudden. Kat jumped so hard her teeth knocked together. Her eyes flew open.
For a bright, terrible instant, she expected to see someone from the basement standing in the kitchen, a dark man with large, grasping hands, or a little girl with a bloody face and broken limbs. Something impossible.
Instead, a teenage girl stood at the sink, elbows deep in soapy water.
Abbey.
Her name, in Kat’s mind, always arrived with a little burst of color. Abbey from next door, who sometimes came over after school to help clean when her mother’s back was bad. Abbey, who wore black eyeliner that smudged under her eyes and nail polish that was always chipping. Abbey, who smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and cheap cherry body spray. Abbey, who had once, in an unguarded moment, told Kat she liked her drawings and that they looked like something you would see on a real book cover.
Abbey glanced over her shoulder now, eyebrows lifting.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.
The words made Kat’s skin prickle. She straightened up too fast, and she was suddenly dizzy.
“I…” Her tongue felt thick. “Do you hear something?”
Abbey tilted her head. Suds slid down her bare forearms. She wore a red bracelet on her wrist, a band of red beads that Kat had always liked. Abbey spun it sometimes when she was thinking, the way other people chewed their nails.
“Hear what?” Abbey asked.
Kat swallowed. Her pulse fluttered at the base of her throat.
“Listen,” she said.
She held perfectly still. The kitchen hummed around them. The refrigerator motor buzzed. The faucet dripped once, then again. A faint noise came from the bathroom where her mother was still cleaning, the scratch of a scrub brush and the low drone of the radio.
Beneath it, unmistakable if you knew what you were listening for, came the sound of crying.
It was fainter than in the yard, muffled by layers of floor and insulation, but it was there, a small, insistent wail. It rose and fell with the same desperate rhythm. Kat felt every hair on her arms stand up. Her eyes flew to Abbey’s face.
The older girl had gone very still. Her shoulders were held stiff. The red bracelet under the soap foam spun hard, the plastic catching the light as her fingers twisted it.
“You hear it, right?” Kat whispered.
Abbey’s jaw tightened. For a moment, something flickered across her face, a shadow of recognition, quick and scared.
Then she shook her head.
“No,” she said.
The word landed between them like a stone.
Kat blinked. “But it’s right there,” she said, louder this time. “Don’t you hear it? Listen. It sounds like… like a little kid. In the basement. Crying.”
Abbey’s eyes flicked to the floor, then back to Kat. Her mouth pressed into a line.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said.
Her voice was light, almost careless. Almost. The red bracelet spun faster on her wrist.
Kat opened her mouth to insist, to drag the sound into the space between them and make it undeniable. She wanted to say the girl’s name, Tiffany, as proof. It’s Tiffany, God dammit. Her name is Tiffany. The angry words rolled through her mind like thunder. She never used words like that, but she heard kids at school talk like that and worse. But she held her tongue. The same voice that gave her all those angry words, also told her that saying them wouldn’t make a difference, and that maybe Abbey wasn’t so safe after all.
It was the way Abbey’s eyes weren’t quite meeting Kat’s, the way her cheeks had gone a little pale beneath the blush, the way her jaw muscles flexed like someone grinding their teeth in their sleep. It looked, Kat realized, like fear.
“It must be in your head,” Abbey said, forcing a small laugh. It sounded wrong, like a recording played at the wrong speed. “You spend too much time by yourself. Makes you hear things.”
The girl turned back to the sink. Plates bumped softly together in the water. Soap bubbles rose and popped.
“Maybe you’re right,” Kat said, her voice very quiet.
Abbey didn’t look at her. “Of course I am.”
Kat pushed off from the door and crossed the kitchen to the table. Her legs felt wobbly, as if the floor had shifted under her. She sat where she always sat, in the chair with the cracked vinyl seat and picked at the peeling edge.
She could still hear Tiffany’s sobs, ghosting up through the floor boards, though now she noticed just how faint they sounded, just how much like echoes in her head. She could feel the weight of the promise she had made to whatever it was she heard. Maybe, she told herself, if Abbey couldn’t hear it, it really wasn’t real. Maybe the only way to make it stop was to pretend it didn’t exist. And maybe it didn’t.
Kat stared at her hands. At the faint lines of gravel dust still ground into her skin. At the tiny half-moons her fingernails had left in her palms when she was gripping too hard. In the sink, the hot water ran. A dish clattered. Abbey hummed tunelessly, too loud, as if trying to layer another sound over what she refused to acknowledge. And below their feet, the crying faded away into nothingness, smothered by denial, turning from human to ghost to distant memory, until she was never heard by anyone ever again.
This was my favorite black coffee yet.
That was incredibly good and hugely sad too. A terrific piece of writing.