“What were you thinking?!” she shouted.

“I wasn’t,” I confessed.

She rolled her eyes. “Obviously!”

I was sitting by the kitchen table, fiddling with a pen, and mom paced back and forth. Her footsteps echoed like ticking clocks, marking each second of her anger.

“You and Michael…” she began, her voice breaking into sharp edges. “I can’t believe you’d do something so reckless!”

“Mom—”

“No!”

Mom launched into one of her usual scoldings - echoing out in a familiar rhythm. My chest tightened, but my thoughts were elsewhere—on Michael. On what we’d done.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It was supposed to stay hidden, just between us. A secret scribbled down on a dirty note.

Her voice snapped me back. “Alicia, do you even understand the consequences?”

I understood. Not in the way she wanted me to, but in my own way.

“I just wanted to help him,” I said softly.

Mom’s laugh was sharp, bitter. “Help him? You call that helping? Alicia, you’ve embarrassed yourself—embarrassed us. And for what? A boy who barely even sees you?”

Her words hit harder than I expected. I clenched the pen in my hand until my knuckles turned white.

Mom continued on about my obedience, her voice sinking beneath the weight of my distraction. I was distracted by the figure in the doorway.

He raised one of his tentacles toward what might have been his mouth and gestured for me to be quiet.

“Are you listening to me, Alicia?” Mom asked.

I turned to her and nodded. Behind her, in the kitchen wall, there was a wide-open door.

There wasn’t supposed to be a door there. It didn’t make sense—on the other side of that wall was the neighbor's kitchen. But all I could see inside was darkness.

Mom kept talking, but her words slipped away like water through my fingers.

The octiman motioned with a big tentacle toward the door, inviting me into the unknown.

I pushed my chair back and stood up. Mom stepped back as I rounded the table.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded. “I’m not nearly finished with you!”

The moment I stepped over the threshold, darkness swallowed me. Laughter echoed—the distorted symphony of my past unraveling in black.

My discarded, inky tears ran around like children, dropping their sandals and mittens, jumping puddles, scraping their knees.

The echoes of high heels resonated through the vast darkness, leaving elegant and proud sound prints.

I could sense those legs—knowing just which way to go. They walked with purpose. 

Mom was banging on the doorway, her screams drowned in silence. Her wide, panic-stricken eyes felt so close, yet impossibly far away.

I closed the door and disintegrated into the dark.

Standing on the roof, I overheard the disbelief inside. No one believed Mom when she insisted I walked through the wall.

In my dissolved hands, I could see her trembling on the kitchen floor, her head on Dad’s lap.

With a sledgehammer, she’d torn a hole in the wall to the neighbor’s. Worn out and delirious, she didn’t make sense to anyone.

And the fact that I’d disappeared that same night left everyone puzzled.

I stepped down from the roof, stepped on air into the evening breeze. My dress fluttered around my ears as I whirled down and landed softly on the doormat.

When I touched the handle, static sparks of images flooded my mind. Memories of a young girl slamming the door on a thundering sky.

She felt safe in her mother’s arms, shielded from a bewildering world.

And in those arms the girl grew into a juvenile teen. And even though she eventually detached herself from her mother’s hug, she still depended on it.

The memories turned into visions. I saw us stepping in through that front door and telling Mom and Dad that Michael and I were going to have a baby.

When Mom began to cry, Dad couldn’t hold back his tears. He called her silly and hugged her.

David, my child, grew up in my arms.

Standing there, hand on the doorknob, I longed for the tears I could no longer shed. 

My existence, hollow and dry, had no place for them.

I let go and turned away.

The moonlight spilled in over the school desks. They had put flowers and cards on mine - pale and washed out in the dark.

*We miss you* and *Be safe* the cards read.

I knew each person who had signed them, but especially Michael Mathis.

I would never be Alicia Mathis. And David would never come to be.

I wasn’t sure why I’d returned to this point that disarranged me so. Why it pulled my thoughts and kicked my fibers about.

Was it an impulsive act of sentimentality or a calculated choice made in awareness?

I took out my phone to record a video message. The phone was as it had been: dirty and covered with stickers I’d bought from Japan.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m—”

I let out a sigh for nobody to hear; air through my nose.

I dropped the phone on Michael’s desk, leaving behind a piece of myself.

Then I picked up a marker and started to write on the whiteboard. 

I was never really here - Alicia.

Michael Mathis never forgot Alicia.

He should’ve protected her from their words and punches, but he hadn’t. And he should’ve protected her from himself, but he hadn’t done that either.

Although Michael hadn’t given much thought to Alicia before her disappearance, she came to occupy his thoughts thereafter.

The shadow of Alicia overlaid his life, a phantom whispering in the silence, pulling him back to the night she disappeared.

Michael’s classmates figured it was because he found Alicia's phone. The shock of it had messed him up in the head. The scream he let out when he saw the video was the sound of his sanity leaving him, they said.

Because dead girls don’t talk.

Her body was found. Alicia had died the night she disappeared. Her final hours were murky.

The years of police investigations and journalistic inquiries ended in nothing.

Still, Michael couldn’t let Alicia go.

When he researched his book, "Alicia - My Mysterious Love", Alicia’s mom had to file a restraining order against him.

In this existence, I’ve lost the ability to decipher time into years. There is only space here—or rather, here, there, and everywhere.

The form of Alicia was still within me. I could mold myself into her.

So I climbed the black hills, swam the murky oceans under starless skies, and ventured into the charcoal forest.

In a clearing, I found our kitchen, looking just as it had when Mom was scolding me.

The kitchen table, the pen I was fiddling with and the octiman in the doorway.

“I’m going to craft you a more fitting story,” the octiman said, his voice curling like smoke.

“In my own ink.”  

THE ÖND