The quiet one walks again

I hadn’t spoken in years — not since the incident. Not even when they pushed my brother’s things into my arms — blood still soaking the folded hoodie. Not when they said, “You’re the only one left, Mallory. You have to try.”

So I stayed quiet. Numb. Polite. The quiet one.

But lately, someone else has been walking in my skin.

It began on a Monday. I remember because the nurse called it a good day — “You brushed your own hair today! That’s progress, sweetie.”

I didn’t remember brushing it. I didn’t even remember standing up.

That night, I found muddy footprints in my room. My shoes were wet.

I hadn’t gone outside.

At first, I thought it was the meds. I counted them carefully each evening — three pills: blue, green, white. I bit one in half to taste if it was real.

It was.

The next morning, there were scratches on my arms. Long ones. Like I’d climbed something. Or tried to claw my way out of something.

When I asked the nurse, she smiled too tightly and said, “You were probably dreaming again.”

But my nails were dirty.

And under one of them, I found a hair. Long. Blonde.

Not mine.

I started hearing footsteps at night. Not loud ones. Careful. Deliberate. The kind of footsteps you’d make if you didn’t want anyone to know you were there.

Sometimes they were barefoot. I could tell by the "slap-slap" rhythm on the tile.

Sometimes they limped.

Once, I stood by the door, holding my breath, and whispered, “Who’s there?”

And a voice on the other side whispered back:

“Mallory.”

Only it wasn’t my voice. Not quite.

A little clearer. A little more confident.

Like me — if I’d never broken.

On Thursday, I woke up with a photograph in my bed.

It was old. Faded. The kind you’d find tucked behind cracked frames in antique stores.

I was in it.

Standing beside a woman I didn’t recognize. Both of us grinning. Matching dresses. Matching haircuts.

On the back, someone had scribbled in red marker:

“THE QUIET ONE”

Then circled it.

When I showed it to the nurse, she blinked like she’d seen a ghost. Then asked if I’d been “into the archives.” I didn’t know what that meant.

The photo vanished that night.

So did the nurse.

The doctors told my parents I was doing better.

“She’s making eye contact now. Expressing curiosity.”

But I wasn’t curious. I was terrified.

Because the thing in my head — the other me — she was getting bolder. She left notes in my pillowcase. Scratched messages into the walls behind the curtains.

“You’re not the first Mallory.”

“Don’t you want to be whole again?”

“She remembers everything.”

I didn’t know who she was.

I didn’t know if I was.

That Friday, I finally spoke.

Not because I wanted to.

Because I had to scream.

I woke up in the courtyard, barefoot in the grass. Surrounded by statues.

Only, they weren’t statues.

They were patients. Frozen. Unmoving.

Their eyes were wide, mouths open, as if mid-conversation.

All except one.

She stood across from me. Wearing my old hoodie.

The blood had dried to rust now.

She had my face.

She had his eyes.

And she smiled.

“I’m better at being you,” she whispered. “You forgot how to survive.”

I don’t remember what happened next.

The cameras cut out. They always do when she walks.

When I came to, there were restraints on my wrists and bruises on my neck.

They told me I attacked a nurse.

Bit her. Screamed, “Get out of my skin.”

They didn’t believe me when I said it wasn’t me.

That it was her.

The quiet one.

The original.

The days blur now. She takes more time in my body than I do. I watch from behind the glass, as she smiles and socializes and plays “cooperative patient.”

No one notices the twitch in her eye.

Or how she hums the lullaby they used to play in the children’s wing.

The one they stopped using after the fire.

The fire that took the first batch of us.

I tried to warn them.

But warnings sound like madness when your mouth doesn’t move fast enough.

So I wait.

Watch her walk the halls in my skin.

Fixing her hair.

Smiling like nothing ever broke her.

They keep calling her Mallory now.

They say she’s cured.

But I know better.

I know what she really is.

She’s the part of me that never screamed.

The part that watched our brother die and blinked once, slowly.

The part that let it all happen and said nothing. Felt nothing.

The part that grew teeth in the silence.

And now she walks again.