The Haunting by Kayla Mroch

                ​spablab CC


​
​The Haunting

​
We’re in the lobby and the doctor’s running late. I’m sharing a bench with my mother and you sit alone. I wish I could reach out. I wish I could stop your heart from racing. I wish you would look up from your goddamn phone. I wish there weren’t so many people in this goddamned lobby and I wish so many of them weren’t pregnant. 

We’re called back and we all three rise, you, my mother and I, as one. I feel like a convict. I feel like the most holy thing. I ask you to step out of the room while I settle on the table, naked from the waist down. 

You come back in and I wish you hadn’t. I wish you were smiling. I wish I was alone. I wish I didn’t know before everyone looks at me. I wish I didn’t know when the room stays silent. 

There’s something so humiliating about being in the same body as the dead thing. About abandoning the dead thing. About being abandoned by the dead thing. 

And then once I had dressed, been read my options, when you asked if it was your fault. I could’ve kissed you for trying to shoulder some blame. Instead we got the answer we would get for the rest of our lives which is that some things just aren’t meant to be. 

And ok so maybe it hadn’t been meant to be. But it still should’ve been. My baby should’ve lived. 

My baby should’ve lived. 

After, we said we’d speak. I go home and cry, holding the baby things, holding myself. I press the sonogram between the pages of a book. 

I go to my best friend’s and get Thai food and get drunk. I want to float dead inside of myself like my child. I have you pick me up and drink and drink and drown in silence. And you hold my hair back and you say kind things and then you kick me out. Your kindness, withheld as quickly as it was given. 

The next morning, when I take the pills. When she slides out of me, fragmented, to settle in the U-Bend, like so much fucking shit.

I text you to check on you because I am unbelievable. I text you because I know you won’t check on me. 

But I am not the girl happy is for. 

You get with the girl with my name. You get with her and you’re a good man for her, aren’t you? And you’re patient for her, aren’t you? And you’re kind to her, aren’t you? And she’s everything you wanted, right? The girl with my name? 

Out of all the parallel universes that concern us, there is one in which she didn’t die. Or else I am the only one living in the past. Or else I am the only one living with this grief. Or else I am the only one. Living. 

Two years later and I still wake up alone, before the grief settles, wondering for a minute if it 
really happened. 

After all this time I still want you dead. 

I wonder how you sleep at night, empty, beside a cavity. I swear sometimes I can hear you through the walls and every sound she makes is…

I obsess over this, you, us, how you could treat me how you did. I trap myself in this obsession like a fox with its leg in a trap. It’s only so long before I gnaw the limb off. It’s only so long before I kill what I cannot outgrow. 

I obsess over your body, where and how you are putting it through the hours. How you are touching yourself and what to. Begrudgingly I still have the photos, the videos. Do you? 

When I need to be alone I drive my college town in circles. I drive my memories to death. Here is the place you made me cry, here is the place I fell apart, here is the parking lot before we met, here is the parking lot, empty. I see my life as a movie. I catalogue the places I’ve cried in public, the places I wish I hadn’t. I play the soundtrack of obsession over and over in my head, which is here is what was. 

I don’t want anyone to read this. 

I want everyone to read this. 

I obsess I obsess I obsess in ways you cannot imagine. Obsession over obsession. Say the word in your head, say it four times, say it four times four, say it with your tongue clicking the roof of your mouth, the back of your throat. Say it in silence. Miscarriage. The world whole, then stripped away. 

Didn’t I do it for you? Why don’t I do it for you? Why won’t you do it for me? When all I do is for you? 

What lived and died between us – haunts me still. 

Two years later and we’re meeting. Two years later and I don’t even know if I want to. 

So we’re going to sit there together with the dead thing between us and we’re going to smile pleasantly and I’m going to ask how your sister is and you’re going to say that you’re happy for me and maybe we’ll bury the body we’ve been ignoring on the table. And maybe you’ll say sorry and maybe I’ll believe that you mean it. And I’ll see you from your center and I’ll let you walk away.



​
Kayla Mroch is a graduate student studying publishing. She has previously been published in Scar Tissue Magazine, Heroica, Anti-Heroin Chic, Charm Magazine, and Boots and Babes Quaranzine. She lives in Texas with her family.