by Matt Hollingsworth
CONTENT ADVISORY for suicide.
Sunset. Far below, waves crash, and I’m talking to my wife Melissa, who’s dead and gone because a year ago, she jumped off this sea cliff.
A clinking sound, and a little girl in a nighty emerges from the woods, same strawberry-blond hair as Melissa, flowing in the air as if she were underwater, weightless. She’s hugging a cinder block, bent over by the weight. From the block hangs a chain, down to an ankle shackle, her feet bare, blistered, bloody, and on her neck, she has the same heart-shaped birthmark as Melissa. Before I can stop her, she lumbers past—click clack—and straight off the cliff.
She plummets.
Hits the waves like a bullet.
I can’t let anyone else kill themselves in this cursed place. So I jump after her.
Down. Down. Down. The moment lasts a million heartbeats, and I remember Melissa, the pair of us be-bopping around on Eurail passes, pedaling past Holland’s canals and tulip fields, tidy rows—gold, white, pink—the sky a deep azure; Melissa, radiant in her wedding gown, feeding me cake, and the sugar melts in my mouth, then it’s gone; Melissa, organizing her pills into tidy rows—gold, white, pink—the look on her face broken. Was her final moment like this, containing a lifetime? In that other life, did she find happiness?
When I hit, the water is concrete, breaks me. I sink. Hold my breath. Ribs ache. Frigid saltwater burns my eyes. Vertical tangles of kelp surround me, sunlight cutting through the underwater forest, sea motes aglitter like gold dust, and there’s the girl, swaying in the current like more kelp, a serene look on her face. I pump my legs, swim to her.
Behind her, a man giggles bubbles. Also weighed down by a cinder block. Next to him, a woman, a crab claw jutting out of her mouth. And more people. The entire kelp forest is people, all anchored to the bottom, all smiling, clothes billowing off their barnacle-encrusted bodies, fish nibbling at their eyeballs.
And here beside me—the girl, she’s my Melissa, all grown up, and she whispers my name clear as an echo in a conch shell, and I kiss her, and my ribs don’t ache anymore, and the saltwater doesn’t burn my eyes, and she sucks the breath from my lips and hugs me and never lets go.
Matt Hollingsworth is a neurodivergent human and award-winning color artist for Marvel, DC, and Image Comics. His prose has been nominated for Best of the Net and Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year and has appeared or is forthcoming in Interzone, Tales to Terrify, Uncharted, and Bourbon Penn.
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