breathe

The blue painted mug slipped from Maya's fingers as the first cool breeze of autumn swept through her open kitchen window. It landed with a crash and shattered against the tiled kitchen floor in a spray of crystalline fragments that caught the amber light of the season's dying sun.

Glorious, fading autumn. A season Maya had been longing to embrace for a very long time now. But with shards of porcelain at her feet, with the hot, black coffee that had spilled out when the mug shattered, soaking into the grout beneath her feet? She could feel nothing but the desire to collapse in on herself. It was just a mug and to some extent she knew that, but the fear felt heavy, so impossibly heavy against her chest. Her eyes stung.

The silence mixed with her heavy breaths stretched for a while afterward like pulled taffy, thick and suffocating. Maya stared at the broken pieces, each one reflecting a different angle of the kitchen, fragmented mirrors of the same reality. Her hands trembled as she knelt to collect them, but something made her pause. In one of the larger shards, she glimpsed a shadow that shouldn't have been there. She was sure there was a figure standing behind her, though she knew she was alone in the house.

Maya’s head whipped around, heart hammering harder than before. The sight of an empty kitchen met her eyes. It was just the dying light and the whisper of autumn air through the window surrounding her now. But when she looked back at the broken mug, the shadow remained, clearer now. It wore her face, but the eyes were wrong - too wide… too knowing? The reflection smiled and raised a finger to her lips in a gesture of silence.

Maya's breath came in short, sharp bursts. She quickly swept the pieces into her palm, cutting herself on several different jagged edges, but the pain was the last thing on her mind. As blood mixed with the specks of undissolved coffee grounds on her skin, she noticed how the stain on the floor had begun to spread in patterns that looked almost deliberate. Almost like words.

She couldn’t take it anymore. Maya turned away from the remaining shards and spilt drink and fled down the hallway of the apartment, pushing open the door to the next nearest room. The familiar wooden floors of her bedroom creaked to the tune of a “welcome” to her bare feet as she sank to her knees, cradling the pieces close to her chest. “Sorry, mom.” She spoke it to herself, not because she was the type to speak to hersef when she was alone, rather just to hear the words.

She closed her eyes and counted to ten, then back down to one, repeating it again and again just the way Dr. Henley had taught her.

When she opened them, she reconvened. The stain was just a stain, the blood was just blood, the broken mug was just ceramic.

She took a deep breath, and relaxed her hands, letting the mug fragments fall with a clink sound as each piece landed to the floor. She laughed lightly, artificially to herself, as if to convince herself she truly did feel foolish as she got up to wash her cut palm.

The autumn breeze had stopped. The kitchen felt too warm now, too close. And somewhere in the house, though she couldn't say where, she could hear the soft sound of someone else breathing. But her mom would be back from the store soon anyway - and breakfast doesn’t wait.