The Book of Sara: Mark V - The Walk
Lunch under the dead white light. The table in its usual countries. Jared with the tray. Tim hunting a joke that died in his mouth. Lisa already drawing the room. Deanna at the head, the blade across her knees.
Abigail sat beside Sara, not across. A small change. A door.
She spoke into the clatter as if it were a chapel. You did not deserve the song. Sara’s fork stopped. Fear first, then the old lie. Abigail didn’t claim the house from the inside. She said she knew a body used as a grave, and that Sara was not the grave. The nothing was his name for her. It was not hers.
Sara almost pulled away. She didn’t. That was the moment Deanna could not bear.
Chair scrape. Blade up. You barely even know her. Abigail did not rise to it, “I am not prying. I am naming.” Sara’s face went hot. She told Deanna to stop, left the tray, and took the exit. Deanna followed.
Autumn on the steps. Deanna caught her arm the way a country catches a border, “I’m just trying to help.” “Then stop,” Sara said. “Stop protecting me from everything.” Deanna asked why not her. Because it is not simple. Because Abigail gets the house without Sara having to build it again in the air between them. She was not asking Deanna to love her.
The throne cracked and did not fall. “I don’t trust her. If she is actually helping you, I will try. For you. That’s all I’m asking. Alright. But I’m watching her.”
They walked back in. The tension did not die. It changed key.
That night Sara opened the leather book. The first page did not call her a light in the dark. It said the flesh they named empty is still an altar. No house owns it. No song owns it. Find the name that is yours and keep it. She slept with the book open. The record in the other room stayed on the shelf.
This is the morning after.
1. Morning after the naming. Gray over the stopped house. The leather book was still open until the kitchen sounds started. Then it went under the pillow. Hoodie on. Bruises answering the sleeves. Survival is a burial you do with cloth.
2. She moved through the house of bells like a ghost who had paid tuition. Head down. Soft step. She felt Abigail before she saw her: warmth that was not the fluorescent kind.
3. Bare feet at her locker. Dress like smoke against the metal.
4. “Good morning, Sara.”
5. “Morning.” The lock fought her fingers. Eyes in the hall doing what eyes do
6. Softer, for her only: “Did you read it?”
7. “Some of it. It’s strange. It felt…right. I don’t know.”
8. “It is meant for the name that’s yours. Let it work. Do not let the house interpret it for you.”
9. Deanna’s voice cut the linoleum. “Hey, Sara. Abigail.”
10. She came on purpose. Jared and Tim in her wake, curiosity and unease. Lisa at the edge, pad to her chest like a shield that had learned to be a mouth.
11. “What are you two whispering about? Planning another secret?”
12. Sara flushed. “We weren’t-”
13. “We were talking about the truth,” Abigail said. “It is not a hallway truth.”
14. Deanna’s jaw set. “Try me.”
15. “The truth is not for every mouth at once. Sara is ready for hers.”
16. The blade shook with the effort of staying a blade. “I am done with the cryptic shit. Leave her alone. She does not need your games.”
17. Sara stepped between them. Hands trembling. Voice not.
18. “Deanna, stop. She is not playing games. She’s helping me.”
19. Stunned. The throne heard the border close from the inside. “Helping you. We have been friends forever. You never needed her. Why now?”
20. “Because I do now.” Soft. No apology in it. “You don’t have to understand. Trust me.”
21. Hurt and anger changing places on Deanna’s face, she stepped back. “Fine. Don’t come crying when this falls apart.”
22. She walked. Jared and Tim followed because that is what the old country does when the leader leaves. Lisa lingered.
23. One look at Sara. One look at Abigail. The pencil would get this later: two girls at a locker and a third walking away with a crown that no longer fit. Then Lisa slipped after the others. Follower, still. The choice not yet.
24. The hall returned to its noise. Sara stood in the space Deanna had vacated and did not go after her.
25. After the last bell the woods at the edge of town pulled like a second locker. She did not go in yet. She only knew the book wanted trees.
26. Praise be to the sovereign flesh.
27. Let the hunger go unfarmed.
End of Mark V.
