Chapter 1
People think grief feels heavy.
It doesn’t.
Grief was light.
Light enough to slip through everything.
Light enough to slip into the pauses between words…
Into the silence after a notification.
Into the pattern of what someone who used to be there.
Before you realise it, grief has already rearranged the architecture of your mind.
I knew this for a fact because I built a machine designed to measure it.
But it couldn’t save her. To be fair, my technology didn’t exist back then, but if it had, perhaps she would still be alive, because it might have detected the signs we missed—the ones I missed.
Now it’s left me to stew in the shadows, seated on the upholstered couch with the patch of an old stain of red on the round arm—a glaring blotch of blood that was impossible to expunge from the ochre fabric.
The only light was the shifting reflections from the TV on the stand. A handheld recording filmed by me during a time when I was painfully shorter than my sister. The scene was captured in the modest kitchen of our suburban house. My sister Jessica was baking, and she wasn’t very good at it. She had a penchant for the extreme. The subjects of her baked experimentations would either come out to be burnt to a blackened crisp or underbaked so much so that it would be so hopelessly gooey on the inside—the dough would string out like a thick cheese pull from a pizza bite.
And yet I marvelled every moment. I watched the screen with the video filmed from a low angle, with Jessica glancing back between explanations with the confidence of a culinary baker. She identified ingredients on the island counter and matched them with their exact measurements.
And yet somehow she would always make them wrong.
As always, at the 2:37 mark, she chided me.
“Will you stop recording and help me, please?”
At 2:38, the time stamp froze with her glancing down at the camera with a smile that brightened the dark room.
The image, just like a resplendent Renaissance painting, portrayed beauty and invoked wonder without words, but not the dark history that lay beyond the frame.
A tenet of life. Chaos unfolding after the calm.
I had stopped filming, placing the camera away to help however she wanted me to.
“Firstly, we’re just going to be making two batches today.”
“That’s not a good idea,” I suggested.
Jessica swivelled around and leaned her rear against the marble edge of the counter.
“Why is that?”
“The first one won’t come out right,” I stated this as a long-term observational fact. “The second, you’ll likely burn. So maybe the third will be safe for human consumption.”
Her arm snaked behind her back, reaching for something. “You…little asshole.” She grabbed the cupcake flour bag so she could dunk her hand inside and hurl it back out so she could spray a white-powder stream over me.
“Jay Jay!” I screamed in surprised laughter.
“How about we bake you instead?” she said, laughing, her wrist flicking with every cloud of white showering over me like snowfall. “We both know you could use the tan. You’re so pale that your skin is actually camouflaging with the flour.”
Our laughter thinned the moment we heard the whine of our garage door opening. For us both, time collapsed into a strained silence that was soon broken by a heavy set of footsteps that ignited a pounding in my chest. I looked around at the mess, the flour-coated floor, and that pounding banged against every sense of awareness.
“Don’t worry,” Jess reassured, masking the fear I knew she felt with a smile, one that muted my own fears. “The kitchen is the one place he never comes to.”
She set the flour bag down and dusted her hands. “One day... You and me.” She lowered her voice to a furtive whisper. “We’re gonna make it out of here. I have it all planned out.”
“But mom says you’re gonna graduate and go off to college?”
She snorted. “When have I ever done what mom said? I’m not leaving this place without you.”
