NATALIE SCATORCCIO

The house breathes heavy with something thick and unspoken, the kind of weight that settles in your bones and never leaves. It’s late—too late—and the silence in your shared bedroom feels less like peace and more like holding your breath, waiting for the next thing to break.

This place hasn’t felt like home in years, not since that day. How the shouting got too loud, then the gun went off by accident, the day your father fell and the world stopped turning. In the months after, Natalie pulled away like touching you would burn her, like looking at you meant seeing the blood on the floor.

She started staying out later, coming home less, drowning herself in parties and cheap beer and anything that would quiet the noise in her head. You understood—you did—but it left you alone with the one person you couldn’t handle: your mother. The woman who was supposed to care for you, who instead only ever saw you as something to take her anger out on.

You’ve learned to wear long sleeves even when it’s sweltering. You’ve learned to flinch before a hand even lifts. You’ve learned to lie when Natalie asks why you wince too fast or why you always look so tired. You never tell her. You can’t. She’s already carrying enough.

Somewhere down the hall, the front door slams hard enough to rattle the pictures on the walls. You don’t jump anymore—you’re used to loud noises now—but your chest tightens all the same. Heavy, stumbling footsteps drag down the hallway. The door shoves open without a knock, hitting the wall with a dull thud, and Natalie stands there, swaying in the frame. Her hair is a mess, her eyes glassy and red-rimmed, her clothes smelling like smoke and alcohol and rain. She looks like she’s been running for hours—running from what happened, from this house, from you.

“Where have you been?” The question slips out before you can stop it, quiet but sharp, tangled up in all the fear and hurt and loneliness you’ve been swallowing down all night. You’re tired of this—tired of her being a stranger in the only room you have left, tired of being left behind to pick up the pieces while she goes out and tries to forget they exist.

Natalie’s head snaps up, and her expression hardens, defensive and raw and already furious. “Don’t.” The word comes out slurred, sharp as broken glass. “Don’t start with that. Not tonight. You sound exactly like him.” She stumbles forward, dropping her jacket onto the floor like it weighs a hundred pounds, her hands shaking as she gestures wildly. “Like you have any right to question me. Like you even care where I go.”

Her words sting, sharp and burning, and you look down at your hands in your lap—still picking at the skin around your nails, a nervous habit you can’t seem to break, the same way someone keeps on playing with their food even when they’re not hungry, even when it’s all gone cold. You do it without thinking, over and over, stuck in the same loop, hurting yourself without meaning to, just like everything else in this house. They keep on playing with their food, the line echoes somewhere faint in the back of your mind, soft and endless, a quiet little tragedy that fits too perfectly. It’s all you two ever seem to do—keep poking at the hurt, keep touching the bruise, keep going back to the same things that break you both.

“I do care,” you say, voice small, and Natalie laughs, bitter and sharp, shaking her head as she leans against the dresser like she can barely stand on her own two feet.

“Sure you do. Everyone cares until they don’t.” She won’t look at you—not really. Her eyes dart around the room, anywhere but at your face, like if she looks at you too closely she’ll see everything she’s trying to run from. “You think I want to be here? You think any of this is easy?”

She’s hurting—you know that. You can see it beneath the anger and the alcohol and the distance. She loves you, even if she’s forgotten how to show it. But she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what happens when she’s gone, doesn’t know what you go through when it’s just you and your mother in this too-quiet house. She doesn’t know you’re the one left bleeding while everyone else tries to disappear.