The Hollowing

Clara Voss arrived the day after the burial, carrying a suitcase useless against the size of the town's quiet. The bus let her out where the pavement thinned into gravel, and damp brick and wood smoke came up off the road. On the walk to her childhood home the town lay open and unattended, pages of it left that way: the bakery awning hung like a tired mouth, the hardware store’s window displayed an obedient parade of tools and the green at the center where children once played was a patchwork of browned grass and leaning benches. Everything was the same enough to be crushing.

Ten years before she had left with a scholarship and a neat list of reasons to go: a city job, a rented flat with room for a proper desk, shelves that would hold books without complaint. Returning as a messenger had not been among them. Her mother’s death had been precise in its smallness—a collapse in the kitchen between stacking dishes, a call to an ambulance and paperwork that divides a life into tidy boxes. Clara had filed the dates and pills and doctors' names in her head, an exhibition catalogued in a week. The particular cruelty was that grief kept producing shapes she could not classify.

Brick grown soft with time, windows like tired eyes, a porch sagging on one side where the boards had given: the house had been lived in and kept. Clara found herself waiting every few steps for Noah to appear—his gait, his head tilted when he was listening to people in the room and deciding whether they were worth keeping. He had liked small mischiefs that left no real harm; she told herself he might be late, at a friend’s, on the way back from a trip into the market. But the seat at the bus shelter held only a damp newspaper and when she reached the porch the door opened on an air that smelled of lemon oil and forgotten afternoons.