My Mother’s Ghost Lives in My Stomach

I didn’t feel her die — not in the way people expect. No splitting grief, no thunderclap revelation. Just a quiet pressure under my ribs, like something small had curled up there and gone to sleep.

I was in my apartment kitchen on a Thursday morning, slicing a pear I hadn’t wanted. The light from the window stretched thin and white across the tiles. I remember the moment clearly — my knife halfway through the flesh, the fruit already browning, and then... a shudder inside me. Not of fear. Of knowing.

My fingers went numb. The knife clattered against the sink. And somewhere, inside the pit of me, something soured.

I doubled over, pressing my hand to the center of my abdomen.

She’s gone.

The thought didn’t come from me. It wasn’t a thought at all — it was given. A knowledge passed like breath, like inheritance. And it settled deep in my belly, where all forgotten things go to rot or grow.

Three hours later, the phone rang.

“Miss Ward? This is Dr. Lyman from St. Augustine’s. I’m so sorry to inform you… your mother, Eleanor Ward, passed away this morning. It was fast. A stroke. Peaceful.”

Peaceful.

They always say that. As if the body doesn't scream in silence. As if the dead don’t shift.

I hadn’t spoken to my mother in four months.

Not since our last argument, when she accused me of trying to "sterilize" her legacy. I’d offered to help her clean out the house. To sell the taxidermy birds, the wax dolls, the mirror with teeth etched into its silvering. She looked at me with those unblinking, sea-glass eyes and said, “You think if you scrub me out, I won’t come back with more mouths.”

I didn’t understand her then.

Now, I wake up gagging on flower petals.

The funeral was empty. Just me, the priest, and a velvet box of her ashes. There was no body — too damaged, they said, by the burst vessel in her brain. She’d left behind a will written in blood (or something that looked like it), requesting no photographs, no flowers, no mourning clothes. Only one demand:

"Return me to the girl."

No one knew what she meant. Not even the lawyer. But I did. The moment I heard those words, something in my stomach turned.

The girl was me.

That night, I returned to my apartment and lay in bed with the urn on my chest. I didn’t cry. I didn’t move. I just stared at the ceiling while something warm and humming curled in my gut like a fetus, like a sickness, like something growing.

At 3:23 a.m., I woke up with the taste of lavender soap in my mouth.

I hadn’t touched the stuff in years — she used to bathe in it, swearing it was made from “the salt of ghosts.”

My stomach gurgled. Deep. Slow. As if a voice was trying to claw its way up my throat.

The next morning, I ate a bar of soap.

Not by accident. Not in a haze. I unwrapped the paper gently, cradled the soft violet bar like fruit, and bit into it.

It melted across my tongue with the exact taste of her bathroom. Her skin. Her breath when she leaned too close.

And for the first time since she died, I felt full.

Not content. Not sated. Just... filled. Like something had taken root in me. Like something was waiting.

I am Camille Ward. Thirty-two. An archivist of dead voices and forgotten names. But now, I carry one inside me — alive, angry, and starving.

My mother’s ghost lives in my stomach.

And she is not quiet.

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