by William R. Baker
I was ten when my sister disappeared for the first time. She was fourteen. That first time, she was only gone a few days. I don’t remember being woken up—just staring out the window at the city lights as we drove toward the hospital.
I waited. My dad came back first, swung his leg in, then folded in the rest of his lanky frame. “They said she was dumped on a corner. Someone found her,” he said.
When she got in, the air curdled—thick with the stench of honey whiskey and sweat. As if someone had tried brewing mead in a bait bucket. The smell clung to everything, a greasy film of burnt sugar and bile. She barely looked alive—like driftwood after a fire, brittle enough to crumble on contact. Her face was streaked with mascara—storm-cloud smudges rolling down her cheeks.
At home, the night stayed still, heavy. All I heard through the walls were low sobs—hushed voices, my parents crying and trying to comfort each other.
Only one line stuck with me. It’s still there—like a cigarette burn on a dryer. Faded now, but never really gone.
“I am the victim of an abusive child,” my mother said softly from the other room, voice cracking and shaking.
I didn’t really understand it then. Just how it landed—like the only thing we had in common was being hurt. Grief doesn’t always come with a name. It hums low, fills your chest, waits in the walls. Sometimes it smiles at you. Gently, like mercy. Then turns cruel. If you don’t name it, it finds its way back in, wearing something else, asking for the same space.
William R. Baker is a writer based in Altus, Oklahoma. His work often explores themes of mental illness, memory, and survival. When not writing, he enjoys quiet places, reading creative nonfiction, and collecting odd thrift shop finds.
Emerge Literary Journal 