Well, please come home. I’m dying over here. I hope you’ve enjoyed your sabbatical at the castle and whatever you’ve hoped to find there. But you really need to come home. Everything, since you left, is a touch off. These discrepancies are accruing. I wish I could write hundreds of pages describing them, but I only have the energy for one or two, if I’m lucky.

It’s like I’m this round peg and everything is a square hole and I need you to hammer the squares into circles. It sounds impossible, but it’s not. 

Now as you know it can be difficult for me to keep house. But it’s been getting worse. When I get the mail, I don’t have any place to put it. A bin or basket embroidered with the word “mail,” say. So I mostly throw it on the ledge at the front door. It’s a high ledge, now almost to the ceiling. Who built this? No, it’s been climbing higher since you left. Now I really have to jam my bills in there. At some point there’s not going to be any room left at all. As a backup I also have been stacking them on the backdoor table, with my little Buddha statue and the geode. They are supposed to bring me calm as I walk in through the back door. But, well, they’re piled high with junk mail and bills too, all indistinguishable, obscured. Mindfulness is obscured. Debt collectors disguise themselves in the sheepskins of credit card offers. The credit score was invented less than 40 years ago. I think you know that. 

Buddha, a white woman’s Buddha, grows angry at me. 

Also, the plants are dying. My bed sags. The boards underneath the bedframe are rotting suddenly. Do you remember when we got the boards? We went to the lumberyard in the winter, and you told me that this place was a front for the Russian mob. That’s what you’d heard, at least. And you laughed. There was one worker in the – barn? – where they kept all the odds and ends. One man was there. He cut our boards. He wore a heavy white overcoat with skulls embroidered on it. Six feet five and seven-eighths of an inch. He did this without a word. 

You laughed easily about it. Now the boards are rotting. The mattress is going to fall out completely soon. Fresh-fallen pine needles are under the bed with dust and lost socks. It smells like winter under there. There’s been another shooting, ten miles from our house. Please, come home. I’m cold when I sleep. 

I know I have to take care of myself. This was, after all, the plan. When you went away you assured me that this would be an excellent “test case” to see whether I could survive on my own. You just needed a break. You would come back stronger than ever. You showed me the brochure of the place where you would have your sabbatical, to “find your Inner Grail,” as the copy said. A castle deep in the woods. Parapets gleaming with candles. You would be able to take a boat made out of a giant glass leaf into the moat and be peaceful. You would take fencing lessons, you would go to workshops in the inner sanctum and eat rich, startling meals in the twilight in the great hall. I said, Yes, go, go, come back stronger. But you haven’t written me. 

I lasted for about a half day, drinking tea from ALDI and listening to the birds over the din of the road construction until I heard the screaming inside of me start up. I wondered immediately if you could hear it too, or at least an echo of it. We are the same person after all. The screaming hasn’t stopped for three months. Sometimes it’s quieter and sometimes it’s louder but it’s always there. And the house is falling apart. I love you but I hate myself. I love you. The house is soon going to grow legs and walk away from me. I keep writing. I stare at the dishwasher and wonder why all of my cups have a reddish sediment at the bottom of them, even when I’ve used the power wash. Please help me. I can’t breathe through this. I got the Buddha at Target on a whim and it’s not going to help me. It’s an empty symbol. But you are not empty. I love you and I hate myself. I wish I could just get my act together. If I could get stronger I could survive until you come back from sabbatical.

But here’s the thing: even though you said that your sabbatical has nothing to do with me, in fact it has everything to do with me. That is the fear. That you can’t achieve what you want when you are stuck with me in this house, sitting at our kitchen table with risotto that I burnt. In the castle, you have your fill. You learn the white magic of actualization. You walk on hot coals in the courtyard to gain sudden insights about the interconnectedness between flowers and rivers and human beings. 

Look, I have skills too. I can be hard on myself, but I can also be tender. I work at it. Instead of firewalking, I can hold a lit match close to my palm and see how long I can hold it there. I can go through a whole book of matches. It’s not so bad. The pain keeps me calm. Please come home though. You can teach me what you’ve learned. You can instruct me in deep breathing, one on one. I will hold fast. I promise.

I know you have always wanted a grail to hold on your own, to put on the mantle. To be worthy of it. To put upon yourself the suffering that I face every day, wear it like a cloak. And then you could become everlasting.

But we can do this together. I am part of you, and you are part of me. I can suffer enough for the both of us. I have a grail already. See this cup with the rainbow on it, slightly faded from the dishwasher? The one that does not get clean, no matter how many times I wash it? Can you see it in your heart? This is my grail. I don’t dirty it any more than I have to. I’m trying my best. I cut my finger while chopping tomatoes. I swear I didn’t do this on purpose.

Rather than fill my rainbow cup, I let the blood and pulp run into the snake plant you gave me before you left, which you said was impossible to kill.

About the Author:

Anya Johanna DeNiro lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. She is the author of the short novel OKPsyche from Small Beer Press. Her short fiction has also appeared in One Story, Catapult, Strange Horizons, and many other places. Twitter: adeniro, Bluesky: adeniro.bsky.social

*Featured image by Szabolcs Molnar from Pixabay