By Kate Maxlow

She counts the darkness in you, glass by glass. She scrawls it on invisible calendars and draws crimson circles around the day she can finally ask you: Are you okay?

She knows you are going to fail, so she measures your week in days of glass. Day one, day two. Nothing. Nothing. Day one, day two, day three—time to intervene!

The number of “nothing” days mean exactly that—you get no points for their emptiness. Their weight equals zero, and you cannot divide by zero. You once read that ancient civilizations used “zero” to represent the void—the absence of value. Before that, ancient bookkeepers simply left a blank spot where Something politely excused itself from existence. One day, some clever soul drew a circle around the nothingness. A circle, a cycle, like life and death, birth and rebirth.

What she doesn’t know is that each glass dances through your veins like light. The hexagonal glasses and glinting rainbow prisms pour liquid light to drown the whispers: Your parents never talk about you to their church friends. She wishes you still wore makeup. This democracy smells like wilted flowers. Your body is a size too small for your soul.

The whispers shriek like banshees at a bottomless mimosa brunch.

Like the brunch where you met, where you stared at her until the liquid light replaced enough fear in your blood and you could finally speak. Where you laughed and blushed and said you were a writer who builds sky castles made of glass, esoterica, and moonbeams. She asked what you’d written and you sent her a link, which she read while you casually counted the total number of forks on the table (fourteen), and when she finished reading, she looked at you and that was that.

Now she just looks away as you fill another glass.

There’s nothing she can do. The same fire in you that rages at injustice burns anyone who tries to help. The oxygen from her words only feeds the flames as they dance higher and higher and scream, “Do you dare me to see how high I can reach?” She watches as you grasp at the sun, your waxy limbs dripping onto the scorched earth below, and all she can ask is, “Are you okay?”

But you know you’re fine: last night at the Mexican place, when the waiter asked if you wanted a third glass, you laughed like a responsible adult who makes good choices. 

“Oh, definitely not! Early day tomorrow!”

She does not applaud your restraint. She does not comment at all. She is playing tic-tac-toe on the paper tablecloth with your daughter—the woodland nymph you sculpted together from the moonbeams in better days. Your daughter’s laugh as she wins is a silver charm, a promise that you keep making to yourself. This beautiful girl has existed for nine years and loves how the light dances off the prism glasses you drink from in the evenings. You wonder if one day, she’ll build a tower from those glasses, chasing the light that will turn her to ash. You close your eyes against the image—her body burnt, broken into a thousand shards.

You tell the server you need another glass after all.

Later that night, you build another castle in the sky. Unlike the ones before, woven from linear storylines and future hopes, these castles shine like light and metaphors bent in a thousand aimless angles, infinitely directionless. Where the neat and tidy castles crumbled under the heaviness of the dark, these new castles will surely stand forever.

*   *   *

Kate Maxlow is a recovering school district administrator and former nonfiction writer who now explores the truths only fiction can reveal, often interrogating the systems we’ve been taught not to question. Her stories appear or are forthcoming in Maudlin House, BULL, and elsewhere. She lives in Virginia with her family. She can be found on Blue Sky @katemaxlow.bsky.social or at https://katemaxlow.my.canva.site/kate-maxlow.