This Is a Story that Ends in Death
- Sep 2, 2020
- 3 min read
by Regan Puckett
At the end, a body is found beneath a log. Wet earth clings to torn denim. Roly polies take solace in greying flesh. At the end of this story, when the mother finds out, she feels the pain in her belly. Before, pain had always lived in her heart, but this new pain is reanimated, something so deep it digs into her womb. For decades, the emptiness will rot inside her, prickling like a ghost when she remembers the blonde-haired baby that left home and never came back. For now, the mother lies awake in bed, eyelids slipping as she watches the window for her daughter’s headlights.
Two towns over, a second mother with a dead daughter sits awake in front of a laptop screen. Her eyes are raw from hours of scouring true-crime forums. Her printer is running out of ink. Every surface around her is littered with paper, fresh clues, a makeshift map to find her daughter’s murderer. In the kitchen sink, unwashed dishes bloom mold. The fridge is a wasteland. The rest of the home, a museum cloaked in dust. The second mother lives in the den now, survives on granola bars and energy drinks.
Five months after her daughter’s death, she thinks she’s getting close to finding the killer. She’s seen enough movies to know that if she doesn’t keep looking, no one will. When her eyes grow too strained to search the screen, she falls asleep with the laptop perched on her thighs. At the end of this story, the laptop will ding. The screen will light up. RIP, the posts will read. It will take a moment for the second mother to realize these posts are no longer about her daughter.
Across town, a third mother is watching her daughters walk up to a snow-cone stand. Thirteen and fifteen, they are young and beautiful. The eldest drove them, showing off her new permit. The third mother felt every jut of the steering wheel and scratching of tire to tar like a gut punch. Something that knocked the air out of her. From the backseat, the youngest cheered as they pulled into a parking spot. Now, as an older man holding a dripping blue cone leers at her daughter, the third mother feels it like a burnt tongue. Something that steals her words.
The eldest daughter notices the old man’s stare. She wants to sink until her chest is concave, until she shrinks away and disappears into the cotton of her tank top. The youngest daughter notices too. She stares back with hard eyes, cementing her jaw until he looks away from her sister. At the end of this story, both daughters will be sprawled on the couch, limbs entangled, watching a horror movie that their mother wouldn’t approve of as their nail polish dries. When the eldest gets the news that a girl’s body has been located, she will hug her mother.
I knew her, the eldest daughter will sob, letting the grief spill into her mother’s chest, straight to the heart.
I could’ve been her, the mother hears.
At the end of this story, there are a thousand missing faces hanging on bulletin boards. The weight of them could rip the boards right out of the wall. Bring down chunks of plaster as they fall. Baby-faced girls with braces. Girls with braids, or turquoise streaks. Girls wearing eyeshadow, girls wearing light-up sneakers. Girls with mothers who were told not to hold their hands too tightly. Mothers who wished they’d never let go.
This story ends with a mother lying in bed, staring at the whirling fan above. The night is vengeful, when the quiet swallows any chance of sleep, when fear crowds the synapses. This story ends with a mother listening for the creak of the front door, the squish of flip-flops against hardwood. Her daughter tells her that she doesn’t need to wait up. The mother doesn’t listen. She lies awake, waits for the beacon of safety that is her daughter’s headlights flooding through the curtains, because mothers know how this story ends before it’s ever written.
Regan Puckett writes from the Ozarks. Like a hipster ghost, she spends her time haunting local coffee shops and complaining about the non-dairy milk upcharge. Find her work at Rejection Letters Lit, MoonPark Review, and more.
