The Longest Night

The door opens and the wind comes with it—insistent, heavy with ice, the cold fury of winter wrapping around her shoulders like hands. She steps inside and the cold follows, refusing to stay outside where it belongs, melting into dark spots on the linoleum.

She has to put the door to her back and heave against the gusts demanding to come in. The click of the lock finally separates the chaos of the storm from the stillness inside.

The apartment is darker than usual. She notes the nightlight plug-ins that usually line the kitchen and hallway outlets are missing.

It's 5:30 in the morning and the world outside is still black. Will be for several more hours, and this storm will keep the sun at bay even longer.

Snow-day.

Ten hours at the distribution center, another shift tonight, and now no school. No rest. Just excited girls wanting to play outside, then wanting in, then wanting food, attention, everything. And I won't sleep. Won't be okay for work tonight.

She scoffs out loud—she hasn't been okay in weeks. Same jeans as yesterday. And the day before. A stain on her shirt she knew about before putting it on. When did she last shower? Three days? Four?

She grips the countertop, laminate cold under her palms. Her heartbeat pounds in her throat, her temples, behind her eyes. Too fast. Too hard.

She collapses into a chair before her legs give out. Her breath comes in erratic gasps. Too much to do, to catch up on, to finish. Too much of everything and nothing left of her.

The rumble in her skull before tears begins its crescendo. She squeezes her eyes against it but fails. Tears stream freely, her face buried in her hands. She can't hide anymore—she doesn't have the energy for it.

Shutoff notices buried in unopened mail. SNAP benefits that don't stretch. She's been skipping meals so the girls can eat. Her body understands now: it's not getting fed. The hunger is one of the few things that makes her feel like a "good" mom.

The overnight shift means leaving Eden and Ari alone. Seven and four, alone from 8pm to 6am. She leaves them a phone. They're good girls. They understand. Eden puts Ari to bed, locks the doors, keeps the nightlights on.

Childcare costs more than she makes. The math doesn't work. Has never worked.

She knows she's failing them. Coming home hollow, being this shell of a person—it's damaging them. But if she stops working, they lose everything.

So she keeps moving. Keeps showing up.

And she's so tired she wouldn't mind not waking up one of these days.

Not planning anything. Just—if her heart stopped in her sleep, that would be fine. That would be rest.

She wipes her face roughly and moves to the couch, her daily ritual promising to help pull her from dark thoughts. The cushions remember her shape. She stares at the shadow in the corner by the bookshelf—the shelf they'd built together, his hands over hers on the drill.

"'Morning, Marcus." She pauses, swallows. "Missing you extra today."

The shadow shifts. Just slightly. Just enough that she feels it in her chest—a hum, a resonance, like recognition.

She knows she's imagining it. Her eyes have gone dull from overuse. What started as flickers of movement out of the corner of her eye has grown into her imagining it actually moving in response to her. Shadows doing what shadows do when you're not sleeping, not eating, when your body is digesting itself just to keep functioning.

This has become routine. Every morning, sitting here talking to the shadow she's named after her dead husband. Telling it things she can't tell anyone else. The shadows accept all of it, and she doesn't have to give anything back.

In her imagination, the shadows grew. A few weeks ago, just the corner. Over time, expanding to the bookshelf, up the wall. Yesterday she imagined it touched the couch.

It coats half the room now.

She'd laughed at herself. Out loud. What kind of desperate woman uses darkness as a coping mechanism. Pretending it alive for company. So she wouldn't be completely alone with her thoughts and the grinding weight of everything she can't fix.

Pathetic, really.

"I'm so tired," she whispers. "It never ends."

The shadow doesn't judge. Doesn't tell her to be stronger. It just listens. Exists, thick and patient and waiting.

She imagines what she must look like—a woman alone in the dark, talking to shadows, too exhausted to care that she's losing her mind.

Maybe she's already lost it.

Maybe that would be easier.

She should check on the girls. Make sure they're safe and warm in their beds.

But the couch is so soft. The shadow so quiet and understanding. And she's so tired.

Let them sleep, something whispers. Not words exactly. Just a feeling, gentle and insistent. You need rest. Just a few more minutes. They're fine. They're always fine.

She closes her eyes. Just for a moment.

You do so much for them. You sacrifice everything. Don't you deserve rest?

She does. She's earned it. She's—

Her eyes snap open.

That wasn't her thought.

Her heart pounds as she stares at the shadows. She really might be losing it!

Go check on the girls. Her thoughts were entirely her own again—had been the whole time, probably. She just needed sleep.

The hallway seems darker than usual. Colder. The shadows pool along the baseboards like oil, thick and substantial.

Ari's room is empty. Just a bed still made from last night. Perplexed, she goes to the room across the way.

She opens the door and light slams into her face.

Every nightlight in the apartment is plugged in here. Extension cords snake across the floor, daisy-chained until the outlets bristle with adapters. Butterfly nightlights, moon nightlights, cheap plastic ones from the dollar store. And lamps—from the living room, her bedroom, the standing lamp, the desk lamp—all crowded into this small room, blazing white-gold light with no shadows.

In the center, in a ring of light: her daughters.

Asleep. Holding each other. Eden's arms wrapped around Ari, Ari's face pressed into Eden's chest. Small bodies tangled together, seeking warmth and safety in each other because their mother couldn't give it to them.

Something cracks open in her chest.

She kneels beside them, moves carefully through the maze of cords. Her hand touches Eden's shoulder. "Baby. Wake up."

Eden's eyes flutter open. Confused first, then scared. "Mom?"

"I'm here, sweetheart. I'm here." She strokes Eden's hair, feels how tangled it is. When did she last brush her daughters' hair? "Why are you both in here? What's with all the lights?"

Ari wakes with a whimper, immediately clutching at Eden.

"The shadows," Eden says. Her seven-year-old voice is careful, precise, like she's trying to explain something to someone who won't understand. "They were getting bigger. We thought—we thought they would swallow us."

The words don't make sense at first.

"What?" She looks from Eden to Ari, then around the room. "What about the shadows?"

"They were growing," Ari whispers against Eden's shoulder. "Getting closer. We could see them coming."

Her words hit like a force to her reality.

"No. No, that's not—"

She turns slowly, looking back toward the hallway. The shadow is there—pressed against the doorframe, thick and dark and impossibly solid. Not pooling like shadows should. Standing. Watching.

Her daughters see it.

Her daughters see it too.

The room spins. She feels herself listing sideways, has to catch herself on Eden's bed frame. Her vision goes strange—too bright where the lights are, too dark everywhere else.

She thought it was all in her mind. A trick her exhausted brain was playing. A shadow she could talk to because talking to nothing was better than silence.

But if they see it—

If they see it—

A laugh bubbles up from somewhere deep in her chest. High and sharp and wrong. Of course. Of course. She can't even have this. Can't even have her pathetic imaginary friend, her one small comfort. Of course it has to be real. Of course it has to be dangerous. Of course even this has to hurt her.

The laugh keeps coming, edges fraying into something that might be a sob.

"Mom?" Eden's voice is small and scared.

She chokes the sound back down. Swallows it. Forces her vision to steady, her hands to stop shaking.

It's real.

It was always real.

And her daughters were scared of it.

"Get up," she says, voice sharp with sudden clarity. "Both of you, get up now."

She pulls them to their feet, their small hands clutching at hers. Eden starts to cry, quiet and controlled. Ari is shaking.

"We're leaving," she says. "We're going to—"

But when she turns toward the door, the shadow is there.

And there.

And there.

It's everywhere. Pooling under the bed, climbing the walls, pressed against the ceiling, flowing into the room through the doorway like water, like smoke, like something alive and hungry. The lights—all these lights her daughters gathered—are being swallowed. The brightness dims. The bulbs flicker.

Eden's crying gets louder. Then Ari joins in, high and scared.

And then the walls start crying too.

The sound comes from everywhere and nowhere. A woman's voice, breaking with sobs. Her voice. Her crying—the kind she's swallowed down every single day, the tears she's held back at the distribution center, in the grocery store, lying in bed at night when the girls are asleep and the weight of everything presses down until she can't breathe. All the grief and exhaustion and rage she's kept locked inside because she has to keep it together, has to be strong, has to keep moving.

The shadows have been listening.

They've been collecting every cry she wouldn't let out.

And now they're giving them back.

Her voice echoes from the walls, desperate and broken. Begging. Screaming. Sobbing with the kind of anguish that should never be heard by anyone, especially not by her daughters.

"Stop it," she says. Then louder: "STOP IT."

But the crying continues. Her voice, fractured and multiplied, filling the room.

Three more nightlights go out, darkness replacing the space.

The shadow moves closer.

It reaches toward them with appendages that aren't quite arms, cold and thick and wrong. She feels it brush against Ari's hair and something in her snaps.

Not hope. Not courage. Not anything noble or redemptive.

Rage.

She's had everything taken from her. Her husband, her stability, her sleep, her body, her dignity. She's been ground down by systems that don't care, by a world that punishes poverty, by an existence that demands everything and gives nothing back.

And this thing—this shadow she invited in, that she talked to because she was so desperately lonely—wants her daughters too?

Even this one fucking simple comfort couldn't be hers. Even pretending the darkness into company. Even that has to hurt her.

Fuck. That.

She grabs both girls and pulls them behind her. Plants her feet. The shadow surges forward and she meets it.

It wraps around her—cold, thick like oil, smelling like earth and sweet-rot and hunger. She feels it trying to push inside her chest, behind her eyes, into her lungs. It's strong. It's been feeding on her grief, growing fat on her desperation.

But she's stronger.

She's been holding the weight of everything. She's been carrying two children and ten-hour shifts and the grinding machinery of survival. She's been doing it on no food and no sleep and a body that should have given up weeks ago.

She's held worse than this.

She pushes back.

The world explodes into sensation.

The cold burns through muscle to bone—ice crystallizing in her blood, in her marrow. Her daughters are screaming behind her but the sound comes from very far away and also from inside her skull, doubled and tripled, echo upon echo. The walls are still crying with her voice and the shadow is making a sound now too—not a voice, just pressure, a bass-note hum that vibrates through her teeth and makes her joints ache.

Her vision strobes—light, dark, light, dark—the flickering bulbs turning everything into snapshots. The shadow wrapped around her arms. Her daughters' mouths open in screams. The darkness spreading across the ceiling like spilled ink.

She can taste copper. Can taste earth. Can taste her own fear, metallic and sharp on her tongue.

She thinks about Marcus—the real Marcus, not this thing wearing his memory. The way he'd held the girls when they were newborns. The way he'd loved them.

He would want her to fight.

She grabs the shadow—actually grabs it, her hands finding purchase in the thick cold—and pulls. Uses her legs, her back, every muscle that's learned to ache. She pulls with the same spite that's kept her showing up when she can barely stand. The same rage that makes her open bills she can't pay. The same stubborn refusal to disappear.

The shadow shrieks.

It's not a sound—it's a feeling, a pressure that builds and builds until her eardrums feel like they'll burst. The air itself seems to scream. The remaining lights explode in showers of glass and sparks. Her daughters' screams cut off suddenly and for one terrible moment she thinks they're gone, thinks it took them—

But no. They're pressed against her legs. Silent with terror but there, alive, clutching at her.

She pulls harder.

It fights her, wrapping tighter, trying to drag her down. But she's been drowning for months and she's learned how to hold her breath. She braces and pulls and refuses to let go.

A primal scream tears from her throat—her anger manifested in her voice, raw and animal and hers. Not the crying the walls have been playing back. Not the swallowed grief. This is rage, pure and simple and clean.

The shadow breaks.

She feels it tear—actually tear, like fabric ripping, like flesh splitting. It comes apart in her hands with a wet sound, a tearing sound, a sound like meat being pulled from bone. It dissolves into something less than smoke, leaving behind a residue that feels like slime, like oil, like decay.

She doesn't stop. She drives it down, grinds it under her heel into the floor. Dust and guts and the last remnants of something that tried to feed on her grief.

She crushes it until there's nothing left but a dark stain on the carpet that might just be shadow. Might just be nothing at all.

The lights stop flickering. The crying stops. The cold retreats.

She stands in the sudden silence, breathing hard, her daughters pressed against her legs.

Soft dawn light is trying to come through the window now. Gray and weak and ordinary. The room looks smaller in it. Normal. Just a child's bedroom with too many lights plugged in and broken bulbs scattered across the floor.

She turns and drops to her knees, pulling both girls into her arms. They crash against her, sobbing, clutching at her shirt. She holds them so tight it must hurt but they don't complain. They just cry and shake and hold on.

She breathes in the smell of them—strawberry shampoo and sleep-sweat and something indefinably precious. Their small bodies warm against hers. Alive. Safe. Hers.

"I've got you," she whispers into their hair. "I've got you. You're safe."

She doesn't know how long they stay like that. Long enough for the crying to slow. Long enough for the shaking to ease. Long enough for the winter light to turn from black to gray to something almost bright.

Eventually she pulls back enough to look at their faces. Tear-stained and terrified and looking at her like she's someone who fought a monster and won.

Maybe she did.

"Let's all go lay down in my bed together," she says softly. "Just for a little while."

She unplugs most of the lights as they leave Eden's room—leaves one nightlight in each room. Just enough to push back the natural dark.

She leads them down the hallway to her bedroom. The bed is unmade, sheets tangled from the last time she tried to sleep. She pulls back the covers and they climb in together—Eden on one side, Ari on the other, and her in the middle. Small bodies pressed against hers, still trembling slightly, seeking warmth and safety.

She wraps her arms around both of them and feels their breathing begin to slow. Even. Deepen into sleep.

She stares at the ceiling. At the corner where shadows pool naturally, harmlessly. At the paint peeling near the window frame.

The shutoff notices are still buried in the mail. The eviction will come. The fridge is still nearly empty. Her shift tonight looms like a threat. The math still doesn't work. The snow day still stretches ahead of her—hours of needs she can't meet, demands she can't fulfill, a wakefulness that will leave her destroyed before she has to go back to work.

Nothing has changed.

Everything has changed.

She fought something that wanted to take her daughters and she won. Not because she was strong or brave or full of hope. Because when it tried to take the only things she had left that mattered, she found one last reserve of fury and used it.

She'll find it again if she has to.

The girls' breathing evens out completely. Eden's hand clutches at her shirt. Ari makes a small sound in her sleep and burrows closer.

Outside, the storm continues. Snow piling up. The world still grinding. The weight still crushing.

But here, in this bed, with her daughters warm and alive and safe against her—she chooses to survive. Not because it will get better. Not because she has hope.

Because she refuses to let the world take one more thing from her.

She closes her eyes.

The longest night is over.

And the next one is coming.

But for now—for just this moment—they rest.