You left her there, in the driver’s side footwell of your dead father’s truck, violently shivering and biting her tongue. You could barely hear the screams over the pounding heartbeat in your ears. A hollow breeze gently rattled the skeleton trees lining the drive up to your childhood home.
Winter never truly left your comatose, desolate town.
At some point after you pulled the keys out of the ignition but before you died and left her with more trauma than any eleven-year-old knew how to handle, the screaming stopped. You still don’t know who it was.
i. thielking can be found a number of places: drinking tea, on sunrise hikes, complaining about legal jargon, constructing vague metaphors about grief, and being tall. Also on twitter @ithielking.