She’d seen her in the store, standing by the test aisle. A girl in a black velvet jacket and a red dress, her presence strange against the cold fluorescent lighting. She hadn’t seemed to belong to that place, that sterile, clinical space filled with small boxes promising futures, filled with waiting and hoping.
Her gaze, intense and far too knowing, met hers for a moment before she turned and disappeared down the aisle, her steps soundless, almost like she was floating. The strange smile the girl wore lingered in her mind long after.
Not a smile of joy, but something else—a half-secret, something unfinished.
The encounter felt like a warning, but she had brushed it off.
The next day, the test sat on the bathroom counter, its faint pink line lingering like a half-finished promise. It wasn’t much—a sliver of hope, like a half-formed ghost drifting just out of reach. It was enough, though. The kind of quiet pulse in the air that makes your veins hum with something electric and sharp, a sharpness you can’t quite name.
A baby. No—the baby.
The one she’d been waiting for, the one that had haunted the edges of her days. Not the kind of joy that sends you spinning, not yet, but the kind of breath you hold deep in your chest. Like watching a match flicker, trembling, almost snuffed out, but still glowing.
Days blurred. The house, impossibly still, seemed to echo with an emptiness that whispered of something that might have been. The light streaming through the window was golden and soft, filling her with the joy— for a child who had not been born yet.
She tried to ignore the tiny shifts in the world around her. They were subtle, these shifts—too small to speak of, too quiet to name. But she let it be. Let it grow. Because somehow, it felt like the right thing to do.
It wasn’t long before the small signs appeared, the soft tremors in her body that whispered too faintly to be warnings but too persistently to ignore.
A little cramp.
A ripple that passed as easily as breath. She let it go.
She was used to these things, after all. But now she felt the pain. She saw blood. It was alarming yet there is a strange cadence to it all. Like the world had started humming, and she was the only one who could hear the song.
Then, it came. Not with the force of a storm, but with the silence of a breath held too long.
The child was gone.
No scream.
No wailing.
Just a soft, muffled absence, as though something important had slipped quietly through her fingers and was never meant to be caught.
A week after losing the baby, the pregnancy test was still in the drawer. A forgotten relic of something that no longer felt real. And yet, the promise—the pink line—lingered, fading now. It felt brittle, as though it might shatter if she dared to touch it.
That afternoon, the sun streamed through the window in bright golden strips, casting shadows that seemed to move of their own accord. She sat in the living room, wrapped in the strange stillness. She has gone to the doctor but she hadn’t told anyone.
There were no words for what had happened, no language to describe the in-between.
The absence felt like a secret—a thing the universe had kept hidden, a thing she was never meant to understand.
But then, there was the stir.
Not in her body. No, this wasn’t her body anymore. It was something else. A sensation like the whisper of wind through curtains, but warmer.
A shifting in the very air, like something ancient was stirring.
And then she saw it. A figure, thin and tall, stepping out from the shadows. It was neither man nor woman, neither alive nor dead, but something in between—something that existed on the edge of memory and forgotten dreams. It was smiling, though its smile had no teeth, no edges. It was a smile that wasn’t meant for this world, but somehow was.
“You’ve been waiting for something,” the voice came, not from the figure but from everywhere. The walls. The floor. The air.
“For something that never had a form. Isn’t that funny?”
She tried to speak, but her mouth felt sewn shut.
She realized, then, that the child—this child, this thing she had been waiting for—was never a child at all.
It wasn’t a life that had been lost, but a dream.
A passing thing, a fleeting thing, woven into the fabric of time itself, too delicate to hold, too ethereal to touch.
But there was something. Something left behind.
Not loss, but change.
The room felt different now. Like a river finding a new course, soft and flowing. There was something ancient about it, something that had always been here, rearranging itself.
The figure began to fade, its form melting into the very air, becoming part of the room.
It wasn’t gone, not really. It was simply… everywhere.
“You’ll never understand it,” the figure whispered as it faded.
“Not yet. But you’ll feel it, always, always in the spaces between… that’s where the healing happens.”
And just like that, the room was still again.
She understood then.
The loss wasn’t an absence—it was a part of something greater. The child hadn’t gone anywhere. It had changed, become something that could never be held, never fully understood.
But it was there, in the spaces between the words, in the shadows that flickered just out of sight. She would never see it again, but she would always feel it.
