BY MICHELE M. TAYLOR
Copyright is held by the author.
Chapter One: Month 636 — The Prologue
The Fire Demands
Twenty-two years — the ghost of a book sat like a
stone on the lungs. It wheezed its name in the small
hours, then vanished beneath groceries, dishes,
silence. I buried it, but the earth kept heaving.
Once, I dreamed it a clean thing — recovery in
heroic light, a parable trimmed of blood. But the
truth came howling from the basement, filthy
fingered, refusing to be dressed in Sunday clothes.
There were children. And I was the fire in their
cradle. The kind of flame no water forgives.
I wanted to write of sobriety, a shining bridge back
to myself — but the soot kept falling on every
sentence. The wreckage would not be left offstage.
I am a mother of unslept nights. A builder of broken
toys and grief. I write now with the hand that once
held a match too long.
Years of silence spun through the mind like old
cassette tape — rewind, distort, erase. But there was
no edit that cut out the damage clean. Only scar
tissue demanding ink.
This is no triumph. This is no hymn. This is a scar
learning to speak.
The smoke burned my eyes until I cried from the
pain and watched the pages turn completely to ash.
They are only words, after all, and you can’t change
ignorance.
The Remains
I wanted to leave some things outside the frame
the burning of bridges, the hands I let go of on the
cliff’s edge.
My children — quiet craters where joy should have
bloomed. I gave them the inheritance of absence.
That reserve in their bones is mine.
I thought I could sculpt a clean monument —
recovery like a silver medal, held up for others to
see. But the victory always tastes like saltwater on
cracked lips.
Life does not accept a redacted story. The shame,
the bruised ribs of memory, the nights of forgetting
their names to remember a high — they come back
with the morning.
To rebuild is not to forget. It is to kneel in the
remains and pick up every charred beam by its
name. To recognize the fire was mine — not a
metaphor, but a furnace fed on alcohol and
amphetamines.
There is no clean slate. Only the slow layering of
breath upon ruin, hands trying to hold what was
dropped. Actions that don’t flinch in the light. They
stare back, fleshless, a truth with no eyelids.
Still — this is the work. Not polishing a life but
confessing it. Not erasing the fire but naming every
burn and learning how to live inside the remains.
After the Silence
There came a point when the mirror stopped lying.
No angle left to dodge the shape of me. No clever
phrasing to cage the past.
It was never about finding the right words — only
the courage to let them stand naked, shivering,
alive.
I gave up on beauty. On the neat arc of redemption.
What mattered was the voice that shook loose from
my throat like a bone caught too long.
I had tried every reticence — the kind that hums
behind the teeth, the kind that makes a meal of your
sleep. I buried the words under calendars, under
excuses, under fear dressed as humility.
But the story waited. Not like a seed — like a
carcass in the walls. It didn’t want release. It wanted
to rot out the house until I saw it for what it was.
Even the act of writing was a kind of violence —
pulling open doors that time had tried to weld shut.
Every sentence scraped rust from bone.
There is no prize here. Only what’s finally been
spoken. The strange quiet that follows when the
body stops bracing against the blow and starts
learning how to breathe again.
What I’ve written here is not for applause. It is not
even for forgiveness. It is because the silence
became a scream that only ink could hold.
Let the truth stand, as ugly as it must, as sacred as it
is.
This is the book I could not write until it refused to
be unwritten.
Chapter Two: Fragments of Rust
Sanctuary
That summer, the heat had teeth. It bit down on the
trailer’s skin and held.
We lived on the edge — of forest, of town, of what
could just barely be held together.
Mom broke the soil like it had wronged her. Each
row a reckoning — shovel, sweat, a battle fought
beneath the sun’s unblinking eye. The weeds rose
like old ghosts. She had us cut them down.
Dad carved the land as if permanence could be
summoned by grit. A septic pit. A well bored deep.
A room added on like an afterthought, like hope
stapled to the side of life. His body was a ledger —
debts paid in pain and determination.
Where metal met the sky, old cars rusted into
something holy. Weeds growing through steering
columns. Sunlight finding the rot and naming it
beautiful. Their decomposition was a slow hunger.
Their quiet knew things. We climbed inside like
priests entering a ruined chapel, lit stolen cigarettes
with wooden matches, inhaled smoke and the
metallic breath of decay.
The torn leather seats stuck to our legs. Ashes fell
like dirty snow. We whispered there, not out of fear,
but reverence — as if the cars might remember us
long after everything else forgot.
We were children learning how to vanish — how to
turn a hollow frame into sanctuary, how to sit inside
ruin and pretend it was enough.
That land held it all — the sweat, the cursing, the
aching backs, a father’s childhood tears, and rusted
out dreams parked in the weeds. It asked nothing.
The earth doesn’t flinch. It takes what you bury, and
keeps it.
Grave Markers
He drank with sorrow, not rage. Rum didn’t sharpen
his hands but hollowed his eyes, and when it poured
through him, he would weep for his father — that
ruin of a man whom he’d had to drag to bed at eight
years old. Piss-soaked. Heavy. The kind of tonnage
a boy never stops carrying.
There is a mercy in sadness that does not harden.
His fists stayed closed around grief, not violence.
But silence, that faithful son of shame, stayed too.
I watched his hands turn a socket wrench like a
prayer, his back seize up when no one thanked him.
He gave us a home, another new start, a pit for the
waste and no words for what broke in him.
In the stillness, his sorrow made him kind. But he
never spoke about what it meant to bury a father
while he was still breathing.
I wonder if he saw himself in those old cars —
sinking into weeds, bones red with rust, something
once useful, now just forgotten steel.
Maybe he kept the cars as a way of holding onto
himself: their husks a kind of proof — that
something in his world had run smooth, had roared
with life, even if they would never move again.
Doors hung crooked, like arms too tired to hold.
Wind flaking paint like dead skin. I like to think
that he appreciated how those cars didn’t ask for
anything — just stayed where they were left.
A man can live like that too — still shaped with
purpose, but going nowhere.
He’d stand out there on the weekend, beer in hand,
watching the dust settle on the cars like dusk on a
memory. Like they were grave markers for
something he couldn’t bury.
Girl-Shaped Oblivion
The years piled deep like the Cariboo Region’s
snow — I knew better than to wait to be seen. The
rocks came anyway. Small missiles of recognition,
each one saying, We know what you are. Even if I
didn’t.
“Butch,” the kids taunted, and the word landed
harder than the rocks. Their cruelty caught like a
bear trap, jaws clamped hot beneath the skin.
So I traded the rocks, the jeers, and the bus stop for
frost-bitten gravel, two kilometres of ice and
silence. The road took me in. It didn’t ask. Boots
cracked open the morning. Each step a small
resistance against vanishing.
No one looked. No one had to see what had grown
quieter than shame.
I walked beside the fields, wheat stubble frozen in
place, the sky grey as old breath. Deer walked the
margins between the forest and the field, and a
raven watched like it knew my name, but even it
said nothing.
Life was learning to live with what couldn’t be
spoken. Like my father. He swallowed sorrow like
well water — clear, cold, necessary. I drank too.
Not the words, but the anonymity they sat in.
My difference was carried like a blister — tight
skinned, tender, close to bursting. Body misfiring
against the others, wrong pitch, wrong posture.
Their laughter buffeted like wind and I was built of
papier-mâché. Thin shell, soft core, painted to pass.
I didn’t know then that stillness could corrode,
could eat through a soul the way water eats metal.
Slowly, without apology. Still, I kept walking, a
girl-shaped silence pressed thin along the ditch line,
hoping the snow might cover everything I couldn’t.
Chapter Three: The Shape of Possibility
Not Home Here
What I had was not a childhood but a long tension
in the earth — a waiting for the fault to break.
I learned obscurity like breathing. Not imposed, but
chosen. Rooms became weatherless caverns. Books
opened like doors into forests where the creatures
spoke and never expected explanation.
My spine learned how to disappear. Laughter hit
like hail and left no mark but retreat.
Possibility was a smell in the next room. I pressed
myself against the wall, listened to it decay.
What entered me stayed. Television glow. The split
skin. The heat of asphalt after a body hits. I wore
shame like a second mouth — closed, but always
chewing.
I knew then that light didn’t save you. It only made
your outline visible — a thing to point at.
I tried on God like used clothes — Pentecostal,
United, Jehovah, Mormon. Each faith a coat with
someone else’s smell, shoulders sagging where
belief had worn through. I stood in their pews like a
mannequin, arms posed in borrowed reverence,
waiting for the fit.
Boys tried me on like prophecy — called me
woman with their eyes, laid names across my back
like hands at altar call. Each glance a liturgy of
hunger I hadn’t learned to speak.
Fathers and grandfathers watched too — language
thick with blood and fire. I was nine. Still, they
offered the world in sideways smiles, as if my body
had agreed to be an answer.
The mirror was the only thing that didn’t lie — and
even it refused to speak. It held me like a threat, a
sketch half-erased, watching the eyes blink without
sending word to the inside.
I’d stare until the glass grew bored and let
something else through — the outline of want, a
fracture forming behind the brow.
What looked back was not a survivor or child, but a
signal from the skin to the soul: We are not home
here.
Slit in the Ordinary
The form arrived like a dare. I smoothed its corners,
read the prompt as if it were a spell: Democracy in
Canada. A place my persona existed inside like a
pupae.
Words dragged themselves out — half-formed,
feral. Sentences gnashed their teeth, then lay down
beside me like animals too tired to fight.
At thirteen I didn’t know what I meant, only that I
meant it. Each line a vein I hadn’t known was mine.
I folded the essay like something sacred, creased the
paper — not to close it, but to contain what might
escape. Twice smoothed like a prayer no god would
answer.
The reply arrived like a dare — a slit in the
ordinary. Windowed name punched through its
plastic, proof that I was not invisible.
Fingers shaking. Breath, held. Everything waiting.
Inside: Congratulations. The future cracked open
just enough to taste.
Ottawa bloomed like copper and law. In Parliament
I watched language burn — arguments sparking like
lightning in dry slash.
A francophone boy from New Brunswick grinned at
me like a cut in light, words slanting sideways until
I could understand how laughter could be its own
tongue.
For a moment, I stopped vanishing. The air did not
push me out. No longer the girl called butch behind
locker doors, not the stranger four towns deep. Just
this: a name held still in someone else’s hands,
gently.
At night, I held the moment like a stolen object —
half-lit, trembling — afraid of what it meant to be
seen and still be alone.
The Threshold to Somewhere Worse
Girls orbited the halls in clusters — tight, glittering,
fluent. Their laughter lit corridors like fish flicking
silver in the shallows. I stayed pressed to the glass,
a breath fogged on the other side.
In gym class, I hammered fastballs into sky — the
only time the body obeyed. But no one passed the
bat back. Afterwards, the quiet clung to me like
glove sweat.
The drama teacher looked through me like glass —
invisible — not even backstage, not even paint on
the flats. The ache turned inward, found no theatre
for its epilogue.
So I drank. Not to vanish, but to prove I had edges.
Mint chapstick, sour liquor — my mouth becoming
the threshold to somewhere worse.
My brother offered friendship in the form of a
cracked booth in a greasy spoon. Salt-stained
fingers, fry heat, boys talking loud over the hum. I
laughed too hard, a decoy for wanting.
Then the car — his dare curled into the keys. No
license. No headlights. Just the Skaha blacktop
unspooling like a sin you could only commit once.
One hand on the wheel, the other pressed to the
hum of my chest — not afraid, but peeled open,
exposed to the dark like a live wire in rain.
By autumn, my outline had thinned — the girl I’d
been a spectre like exhaust in morning air. What
remained was raw edge and hunger — a shape that
didn’t fit classrooms, but could carry silence like a
blade in the sleeve.
Not healed. Not even wrecked. Just moving — one
frame deeper into the darkroom of myself.
Chapter Four: Single Serving Lives
Popcorn Ceiling
Cheap room, Fuggy with Freon, stained with old TV
light and fights gone mute, the walls still echoing
divorce. A motel gutted of hope, where the 70s
wallpaper curled like burnt skin.
He was two years older, called me trouble like it
meant desirable — like my laugh was flint — and
he meant to strike me into something brief and
bright.
I leaned in before he did. Said nothing when it
ended. Pulled back slow, heart ricocheting off the
inside of my ribs. Popcorn ceiling above — blurred,
spinning gently as if I’d tipped the whole world
off balance.
It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even like. It was more
dangerous — it was the first time I mistook
attention for meaning. A mistake that drew fists in
the dark.
Blood bloomed in my mouth, metallic, thick — I
tasted the room in it, stale smoke, something left too
long. Her legs tight around my waist, pushing me
back into the bed. The springs groaned beneath us
— and her fists, fast and heavy, one after another.
Outside, beyond the thin walls, life went on, the
world never slowing. Inside, a cold thought rising
— if I could just get my hands on her throat, I could
end it. But the thought was gone before I could
reach for it.
When she let me go, I stumbled outside into the
night, drunk and dazed. The boy followed,
mumbling apologies, the ex-girlfriend beside him,
her head down, avoiding my eyes. No one looked
me in the eye.
Violet shadows leaked beneath cheekbone — bruise
like a thumbprint pressed from inside. No one
asked. I stitched my mouth with silence.
The girl’s sister promised death if I showed my face
at school. That vow clung like a wet shirt — thin
threat soaked in certainty, stuck to my back. So I
left town, carried her voice like a wasp in the ear,
the road unraveling under me like a fuse.
Motion, Not Hope
At the edge of town the midway slouched, all
hinges and rust — a last-resort sort of refuge where
even the light seemed to turn away.
I lay behind bleached tarp and broken signage,
learning how to slip out of myself without leaving a
mess. My name thinned. Body pared down by
skipped meals and distance.
I hitched forward again. Another house, a mother
who counted the welfare before it came. A boy I
never touched even as we slept shoulder to
shoulder, both of us holding whatever ghost we
brought to bed.
Salt swelled the lungs clean for a time. The ocean
dragged its iron scent through alleys of cedar and
dust, and I thought I could breathe there — in the
mirror-flat lull between harm and its echo.
He traced the outline of me without pressing.
Kindness like a tide that didn’t ask — but the
shadow curled under my ribs never left. Even in
sleep it whispered.
So I moved. Packed inconspicuousness into a
flowered suitcase and followed the thrum of hunger
down the coastline. I became the outline of a girl —
an imprint in other people’s sheets, the faint scorch
of burned toast, a hum in the walls no one listened
for.
Then — the fat slug in room sixteen, who peeled off
twenties like fruit skin. I gave him what he couldn’t
carry, took the cash like a dog takes meat thrown
hard across gravel.
It wasn’t need so much as inertia. Not hunger — just
the effort of continuing. The Greyhound breathed
through heat and pine — life flung open, stories
passing seat to seat.
Powder on a cigarette exposed me from myself. It
was like stepping into sky — wide, empty, blue
with forgetting. And always the road — coiled in
me, tugging.
Not hope. Just motion. Even still, I think I left
something behind in each of those rooms — a
breath, a scrape of skin, the last good look in
someone’s eyes before I turned away.
How to Vanish Without Dying
The face in the mirror kept changing. Spaces
learned to forget me. My name washed off in
borrowed showers, left in the bottom of bottles or
smeared in lipstick on the rim of borrowed cups.
I slept with the TV on for company — flickers of
saints and sitcoms over linoleum floors and skin
rubbed raw. Some nights I spoke to God like a
payphone — coin in, voice out, no answer.
Once, I tried to write a letter to myself. “Dear girl
who disappears.” But the pen dried mid-sentence,
and I took it as a sign. The world kept circling, off
ramps leading nowhere but forward. I learned the
quiet science of staying alive — how to vanish
without dying, how to laugh without sound.
Even now, I carry myself like those bruises — not
tender, just remembered. I don’t regret the rooms,
only how long I stayed in some.
There was always a window, though, open or shut
— something to stare through, a way to let time slip
by. The city beyond felt like a story I was in, but
never the main character. I watched it all pass by
with one foot out the door, never quite in.
Sometimes, I’d lay there, counting the seconds
between the traffic and the hum of the old fan by
my bed. What I wanted then wasn’t a place but a
reason to stop running, to still the heart that beat a
little faster when nothing was ever quite sure.
The faces on the street grew blurry after a while —
just silhouettes, stepping over cracks in the
pavement like they knew where they were going,
like they knew what it meant to have a place to
return to. I never learned that kind of knowing.
And the nights? They never stopped coming.
Always just a little colder than the last, I held onto
nowhere, stretched it like a blanket that kept me
warm enough to sleep, but thin enough to feel the
chill of whatever waited.
Chapter Five: The Crack in the Door
Falling Forward
I woke with sweat at the base of my neck and a
whisper in my chest that said go.
I left like a scab picked raw. Greyhound growling
through the belly of summer, towns flaring and
dying in the dark. Sodium lamps blinking like tired
gods. I pressed my face to the glass — thin as skin,
as future — and watched the land unroll like
butcher paper.
The prairies came sudden. Too flat, too wide. The
sky pulled taut like a threat. I thought: this is the
edge of something. I thought: don’t blink.
My brother met me like a hand reaching out of fog.
Dong (Yung) cooked everything in oil, sugar and
steam. We slept with the windows open and the city
crawled in — sirens, sweat, the hush of other
people’s sorrow rising through drywall. My name
didn’t fit in that apartment. It hung limp off a chair
back, waiting.
The coffee shop became the altar. I made offerings:
double-doubles, fake smiles, the burnt ends of
myself. He came in like clockwork. Security guard
with that lithe-stillness. I gave him free coffee
because I wanted something to shift. When it did, it
cracked the air. We moved in together like falling
forward.
November split me. Breasts leaking like broken
clocks, no rhythm, just warning. I went hunting
through paper — those cold-breathed books, spines
like vertebrae, whispering two paths: death or birth.
The words had weight like iron filings in my blood.
I saw horses, the fall, hooves overhead. My body
had gone on without me. I was a stranger
hitchhiking in my own skin. Six months — six full
moons — already passed, and the screen lit up with
a ghost swimming inside me, pulsing like a flare. I
stared at it like a crime scene.
The world didn’t stop. I didn’t pause. I never did. I
ran headfirst into every fire, thinking I could outrun
the flames. When the baby came, I planted myself
in the cinders and called it home.
We made another. We married. We built a shape
that looked like family — until I learned the
difference between structure and stillness. Until the
crack beneath us became a voice.
Shape of an Ending
Those sober years were like a rope bridge stretched
taut — every plank was a child’s cry, a scraped
knee, the weight of dinner burning in the oven. I
carried the house in my mouth.
But then university cracked the surface. I walked
through the doors with my brain starving. Lecture
halls buzzed like hives, every word a live wire. I
drank it in, and then I started drinking again — first
the cheap, laughing kind, then the kind with teeth.
It came back like mold — quiet, familiar, patient. I
told myself it was stress, celebration, communion.
But I was lying. I was splitting open, sipping the
distance that widened between us with every
textbook I cracked.
He stayed behind, blinking at the static. I moved in
sentences and questions and bolded footnotes. And
there, in that growing heat, I realized I had always
been starving for more than survival.
At twenty-five, I blew out candles like flares. Knew
the shape of the ending before it arrived. Came
home and peeled the marriage off like old
wallpaper.
Then — sideways. A man like sunlight, like flame
with a laugh that rewired me. He was joy stitched
into a human shape. He made even boredom
shimmer. And then he didn’t. One morning he was
music, and by dusk he was gone — soul collapsed
in a garage, body folded like apology.
Pregnant. Alone. A sentence written in someone
else’s hand. His light still clung to the curtains. I
slept under it, cracked and radiant.
Michele M. Taylor is a poet, fiction writer, and news editor. In her day job she writes from the mind, meeting deadlines and facts; in her own work she writes from the heart, exploring addiction, grief, endurance, and the uneasy places where survival meets transformation. She is the Freefall Magazine Annual Poetry Prize winner, with short fiction published in Livina Press and Havok Publishing, and a second hybrid poetry-prose piece forthcoming in Merion West.
