Held

Sunday Scaries #004

The image above is this week’s Sunday Scaries prompt by Labyrinthia Mythweaver , Mat the Horror Poet , and Conor MacCormack and what follows is where it took me.

Nobody ever tells you the strangest part about living alone.

They warn you about the silence. They tell you how long it takes before you stop setting the table for two or instinctively reaching for your phone because something happened and, for just a second, you forgot there wasn’t anyone waiting to hear about it. Friends talk about birthdays, holidays, grocery shopping for one, and the first time you get sick without another person asking if you need anything from the store. They tell you loneliness comes in waves, and they’re right. Some days it barely brushes against you before drifting away again. Other days it settles into the room beside you, quietly reminding you that every sound in the apartment belongs to you alone.

Emily spent almost a year believing that feeling would never leave. By the time the divorce was finalized, there wasn’t much left to grieve except the version of her life she’d imagined she would have. She packed what she wanted, left behind what she didn’t, and rented a modest apartment across town because it was clean, affordable, and far enough away that nothing inside it reminded her of the house she’d walked away from. The kitchen was barely large enough to cook in, the balcony overlooked more asphalt than scenery, and the bedroom only caught direct sunlight for an hour each morning. None of it mattered. After months of living inside memories she couldn’t escape, she discovered that peace didn’t have to be beautiful. It only had to be quiet.

The quiet took time to trust. For weeks she left the television running long after she’d stopped watching it because another human voice, even one drifting through cheap speakers, made the apartment feel occupied. She woke before dawn convinced she’d heard someone unlock the front door, replayed conversations that had ended months before until sunrise, and eventually accepted exhaustion as the cost of sleeping alone. Morning after morning she dragged herself through work believing this was simply what the rest of her life would feel like.

Then one Tuesday she opened her eyes and realized sunlight was already spilling through the blinds.

She lay perfectly still, confused more than anything else. Her alarm hadn’t gone off. Her phone still rested untouched on the nightstand. The apartment was silent except for the distant hum of the refrigerator. It took another few seconds before she understood what had changed. She hadn’t woken once. No nightmare had dragged her back into consciousness. No anxious glance toward the clock had broken the night into restless pieces. Eight uninterrupted hours had simply disappeared, and tears surprised her before she even sat up because she’d forgotten what ordinary sleep was supposed to feel like.

She assumed it had been luck until it happened again the next night, and then the night after that. Within two weeks bedtime had quietly become her favorite part of the day. She started reading before turning out the light because she no longer dreaded the hours ahead. She cooked real meals instead of microwaving frozen dinners because she still had energy after work. The circles beneath her eyes faded, her patience returned, and coworkers began asking whether she’d changed something about herself. One woman smiled as they passed in the hallway and casually remarked that she looked happy. Emily thanked her before realizing she hadn’t forced the smile she was wearing.

There was only one thing she couldn’t explain. Every morning, during those few blurred seconds between sleeping and waking, she felt absolutely certain someone had spent the entire night holding her. The sensation never lasted long enough to examine. It dissolved almost immediately after she opened her eyes, disappearing with the last pieces of whatever dream she’d already forgotten, but it always felt exactly the same. Strong arms rested gently across her shoulders. Warmth lingered against the middle of her back. Somewhere behind her another slow, steady breath seemed to rise and fall before fading into nothing, leaving only the strange certainty that she had not spent the night alone.

At first she blamed memory. After nearly twelve years of sleeping beside another person, maybe her body simply hadn’t accepted that the other half of the bed was empty now. Habits lingered. Muscle memory lingered. It wasn’t difficult to believe the mind might invent one final embrace before surrendering to reality each morning, and the explanation comforted her enough that she stopped questioning it almost as quickly as the feeling itself disappeared.

That changed the morning she reached behind her.

She wasn’t fully awake when she did it. The movement happened without thought, the same way someone reaches for a ringing phone before realizing they’re still dreaming. Her fingers slipped across the sheets expecting nothing, yet for the briefest instant they met resistance. It wasn’t skin. It wasn’t fabric. It wasn’t anything she could describe. It was simply there for a heartbeat before vanishing so completely that she questioned whether it had existed at all.

Emily rolled over so quickly the blankets tangled around her legs. The bedroom stood empty beneath soft morning light, and beyond the open door the apartment remained perfectly still. She searched every corner of the room before finally laughing at herself, embarrassed by how hard her heart was racing. The explanation she’d been leaning on for weeks suddenly felt much smaller than the experience itself, yet she couldn’t think of another one that made any more sense.

She spent the rest of the day trying to forget it. She wandered through a bookstore she hadn’t planned to visit, bought groceries she probably didn’t need, and spent nearly an hour repotting the fern she’d almost forgotten she owned. Every ordinary task eventually circled back to the same impossible moment. She could still remember the feeling with startling clarity, and what unsettled her most wasn’t that she’d touched something impossible. It was that the memory carried the same quiet reassurance she’d been waking with every morning since those peaceful nights had begun.

A reasonable person should have been disturbed. She knew that. Instead, she found herself thinking about bedtime with the same quiet anticipation she’d once reserved for vacations or long weekends. Those fleeting moments before the feeling disappeared had become the happiest part of her day because, for a handful of impossible seconds, she wasn’t waking up in an empty apartment or rebuilding a life she never wanted to lose. She wasn’t lonely. She simply felt safe, and that frightened her far more than anything she couldn’t explain.

That night she climbed into bed earlier than usual without consciously deciding to. Rain tapped softly against the bedroom window while the apartment settled around her with familiar creaks, and sleep found her almost immediately. When she opened her eyes the following morning she didn’t move. She remained beneath the blankets listening to the silence while the familiar warmth rested gently across her shoulders exactly as it had every morning before. She closed her eyes again, hoping against reason that if she stayed perfectly still the feeling might linger just a little longer, but it slipped away as gently as it always had, leaving only the empty room and the growing certainty that she was already beginning to miss it.

Life settled into an almost frightening kind of peace after that. The apartment no longer felt temporary. Another fern appeared on the balcony, then a shelf of books in the living room, then framed photographs she’d finally unpacked from boxes she’d promised herself she’d organize months earlier. She caught herself singing while making dinner one evening and stopped halfway through the chorus because she couldn’t remember the last time happiness had arrived so quietly. There had been no breakthrough, no long conversation, no dramatic moment when everything suddenly became okay. It had happened one peaceful morning after another until she stopped measuring her life by what she’d lost and quietly began noticing what she’d managed to keep.

The mark appeared beneath her left shoulder blade on an ordinary Wednesday morning. It was no larger than the tip of her thumb, tucked just low enough that she only noticed it while drying her hair after a shower. At first she assumed she’d leaned against wet ink or brushed against something that had stained her skin, but the black lines refused to wash away. They weren’t sitting on the surface. They rested beneath it instead, branching outward in delicate patterns that reminded her of tiny roots spreading beneath pale earth. She rubbed at them until the surrounding skin turned pink, studied them from every angle the mirror would allow, then finished getting ready for work convinced she’d think of a reasonable explanation later.

Later never came.

Another mark appeared several mornings afterward, then another a few days after that. Curiosity slowly replaced dismissal, and before long she found herself taking a photograph beneath the same bathroom light every morning before getting dressed. Looking at any single picture accomplished nothing. The branches remained subtle enough that she could almost convince herself they hadn’t changed. Scrolling through the photographs together was different. The black lines crept farther across her shoulder with impossible patience, dividing and reconnecting in patterns that seemed too deliberate to belong to anything natural. They weren’t spreading randomly. They were growing with purpose.

More than once she reached for her phone to schedule a doctor’s appointment, and every time she stopped herself for the same reason. She had never felt better. Her energy had returned. She laughed more easily than she had in years. Sleep came effortlessly, mornings no longer felt heavy, and the quiet sadness she’d carried since the divorce had somehow dissolved without her noticing when it left. Whatever was happening to her body made no sense, yet nothing about it resembled illness. If anything, it felt like healing, and that contradiction lingered in the back of her mind long enough that she eventually stopped trying to solve it.

The realization came one evening while she was brushing her teeth. She caught herself glancing toward the bedroom before looking back at her own reflection, surprised by how eager she suddenly was for the day to end. It wasn’t exhaustion drawing her toward bed. It wasn’t even sleep. It was those impossible few moments before waking, the brief embrace that vanished with the morning light. Somewhere along the way she’d stopped hoping it would happen and quietly started expecting it. The thought unsettled her enough that she laughed at herself in the mirror, but the laugh sounded hollow. She knew what she should have been feeling. Fear would have made sense. Curiosity would have made sense. Instead, all she felt was anticipation.

Then, without warning, the embrace never came.

Emily opened her eyes before sunrise and knew immediately something was wrong. The room looked exactly as it always had. Rain tapped softly against the bedroom window, the apartment creaked with the familiar sounds of settling wood, and pale blue light seeped through the blinds. Everything was ordinary.

Everything except the emptiness.

No warmth rested against her back. No gentle weight crossed her shoulders. No lingering certainty that someone had spent the night holding her. She lay perfectly still for several minutes, waiting for the feeling to arrive, convincing herself she’d simply awakened too quickly.

It never did.

The absence followed her throughout the day like grief she’d already forgotten how to carry. She struggled through conversations at work, reread the same email three times without understanding it, and caught herself checking the clock more often than she cared to admit. By late afternoon she finally understood why the day felt so unbearably long.

She missed it.

The admission horrified her.

Whatever had been happening each morning defied every explanation she could imagine, yet losing it felt strangely similar to the loneliness she’d worked so hard to escape. She should have been relieved. Instead, she spent the drive home hoping the next morning would be different.

Sleep didn’t come easily that night.

When she finally drifted off, it felt less like surrender and more like desperation.

She woke with tears already running down her face.

The embrace had returned.

It rested across her shoulders exactly as it always had, gentle enough that she almost wondered whether she’d imagined its absence the day before. She didn’t move. She couldn’t. Relief flooded through her so completely that it stole every other thought from her mind, and she lay there listening to another slow breath somewhere behind her until the warmth finally slipped away with the morning.

Only then did she realize she was crying because she had been afraid it would never come back.

That frightened her more than the marks ever had.

Days passed before anything changed again. She woke before dawn one quiet morning while the apartment still rested beneath deep blue shadows, expecting the familiar warmth to disappear the instant she opened her eyes.

It didn’t.

She sat up carefully.

It remained.

She slipped her feet onto the floor.

Still there.

She walked into the kitchen while the coffee maker hissed softly to life, expecting movement to break whatever impossible illusion she’d carried from sleep.

It followed her.

The warmth rested lightly across her shoulders while pale morning light slowly filled the apartment. It should have vanished the moment she left the bed. It always had before. Instead it lingered with quiet patience, neither tightening nor fading, as though it had decided morning no longer mattered.

Coffee forgotten on the counter, Emily walked slowly back toward the bathroom.

She gathered her hair over one shoulder and studied the mirror. The black branches had spread again. They crossed the curve of her shoulder, disappeared beneath the collar of her shirt, and reached farther across her back than they had the morning before. She stared at them for a long time, trying to convince herself they had always looked that way. They hadn’t. She photographed them every morning. She would have noticed.

Then one of them moved.

It wasn’t dramatic. Had she blinked, she might have missed it entirely. One slender branch shifted beneath her skin with slow, deliberate purpose before becoming perfectly still again. Emily leaned closer until her breath fogged the mirror, every instinct telling her to step away while another, quieter voice begged her not to.

The reflection changed so gradually that she couldn’t say when it happened.

One moment she was alone.

The next, two black hands rested gently across her shoulders.

They hadn’t appeared.

They hadn’t reached for her.

They were simply there, exactly where she’d felt them every morning since the peaceful nights began. Their fingers curved naturally against her collarbones with impossible tenderness, and for one suspended moment every explanation she’d spent weeks building collapsed beneath its own weight.

She hadn’t imagined the embrace.

She hadn’t dreamed it.

She hadn’t been healing alone.

Emily wanted to run. She wanted to scream. She wanted to turn around and finally see what had been sharing her bed every night.

Instead, she closed her eyes.

The hands never tightened. They never pulled. They simply remained where they had always been, resting across her shoulders with the same impossible gentleness that had carried her through the darkest year of her life. A tear slipped silently down her cheek, and she couldn’t tell whether it came from fear or relief.

Slowly, almost without realizing she had made the decision, Emily leaned back just enough to feel the embrace return.

Emily didn’t know how long she stood there. The apartment remained silent behind her, coffee slowly growing cold on the kitchen counter while morning sunlight crept across the bathroom floor. Every instinct she had begged her to turn around, to run, to scream, to prove there was still a rational explanation waiting somewhere beyond the mirror. Instead she found herself leaning ever so slightly into the touch, her shoulders relaxing beneath those impossible hands as another slow breath settled against the back of her neck. She closed her eyes, and for the first time in nearly a year, the loneliness was gone.