Loss
Twenty-eight days. Ten hours. Seven minutes. She didn't know the exact seconds. Staring at the clock on the wall, her grim reminder clicked in once the minute mark was passed. She remembered every minute since, the zombie trance of day and night floating by in a slow flow of grief. The clocks were melting. The days were smashed together by the hands of gods, forcing her to face the consequences of love and her lifestyle. Their lifestyle. But she had yet to face him, her accomplice in so many matters, and her partner in the one that truly mattered. Their crime filled her with black guilt, bubbling past her lips every night in screams from the terrors behind her own eyelids.
Twenty-eight days since they had buried their daughter. In four weeks, her confidence in the surgeon she had fallen in love with had ceased to exist. The tiny cannibal had donned clothes sizes too big to hide the scars and the body that had rejected their chance of a family, however unplanned. Despite the fact that he hadn't pushed and had only been the sweetest to her in their time of need, Fauna had slowly curled in on herself, pulling away from Theo despite soft murmurs of love and reassuring words. She didn't blame him, but the nagging guilt made it impossible for her to look at him and not see the flash of a smile that would have resembled his own.
Her days and nights had become ritualistic. In the dark, her screams were muffled by a pillow as she awoke from nightmares. Scabbed hands appeared in the daylight, chewed on in the dark as she paced the hallways throughout several hours in the night, unable to return to a fitful sleep. Dark circles had formed under her eyes, which in and of themselves had hollowed out into green shells of the lovely soul she had become around Theo, blossomed by love and trust. During the day, she spent her hours in corners of their small Grecian paradise, curled up with books she would never read. Not a word on a page stuck. Between attempts to choke down literature, she was found in the bath, hours spent soaking in water that could easily choke her with the heat.
And there she was now, a tiny figure floating under the steam of a newly drawn bath. She had replaced the water after two hours in the previous bath, dazed in her own filth. Fauna had stopped bothering with the locks on the door, knowing Theo would eventually check on her if she didn't make an appearance. He seemed to like to know she was okay, and his worry had become evident. But she saw the way he visibly sunk into himself as well, torn at the seams by the miscarriage. Eyes closed, she drifted, haunted by the image of a child that they never had the chance to see. A little black-haired beauty with green eyes full of wonder and a smile that matched her father's, charming and magnetic. As time melted around her, she floated, prepared to let another day flow by with a hole in her chest. A hole she was sure was shared by the man she loved.