🍂The Shepherd of Lost Women

 Before The Reckoning

🍂Blackwater’s a small town, but living here makes it feel so big. The long gravel roads, the stretched-out land that expands as wide as the sky ‘bove it. My home sits in the far corner of Blackwater Road. My long gravel driveway disappears between two walls of pine and oak. Not easily seen, secluded from neighbors and peaceful enough to walk bare naked in your yard. A two-story blue home with lavender ridges, and other hues of purple on the edges of the house. A wide, light-blue porch, a nice size garage and a shed separated from my home. It’s lavender, like the ridges. Girly, I guess but my dad allowed my mom to do what she wanted with the place. He was sweet like that. 🍂

🖤Their passing tore each of my limbs into jelly and my heart into snow. Thinking about them in the moments when I need them the most is like drowning, but you never die. You just keep repeating the agonizing process over and over again. 🖤

My sister, Nephele, on the other hand, has always been absent-minded. Even now, after losing both of our parents, she moves through life as though grief is simply another experience she was meant to have. It isn’t that she doesn’t hurt. I know she does. I see it in the quiet moments; in the way her eyes wander when she thinks no one is watching. But somehow, she has already begun placing their deaths among the things she must simply endure. As if life has handed her another strange chapter and she’s decided to read it instead of tearing out the pages. 

Nephele forgets things. Nephele stares into space. She loses herself in little thoughts while the rest of us are trying to understand what happened. Sometimes I think she processes things sideways. She doesn’t deny the pain; Nephele just keeps moving through it. In many ways I'm envious of her because of this. You may be thinking “Alethea, jealous?” I’m the top of my class; Class of 2025, Ocean Lakes Highschool. Home of the mathematics and science academy. I’ve been told my golden-brown skin can make a man say and do anything. My lips are full, and pink; my body can stop a truck (I work out constantly). But my sister… Nephele is emotionally mature, levelheaded, fun and exciting to be around. I’m just a gorgeous smart ass; that can put herself into a lot of trouble. 

I used to worry about Nephele; I used to call her naive. Now I know I’m the naive one because somewhere between the life I thought I knew and the life I am living now, everything became a before and after. 

I am in my own head. Thinking about why I’m here, at a place without daylight. A dark lair hidden somewhere beyond the reach of familiar roads, where the walls swallow sound and the air feels heavy with the fear of women who, like me, have become someone’s secret. 

There are others here… Women I don’t know, women whose names I may never learn. Sometimes I hear a quiet sob quickly swallowed behind a hand. Sometimes there is nothing but silence, and somehow the silence is worse… I keep thinking about home. I think about the girl I was before this place. It all seems so long ago, but wasn’t it just yesterday?

Think back, Alethea.

🍂I could tell October was creeping in because it was constantly raining and the air had gotten cool. Grass gives way to reeds; the reeds give way to wet earth. I went to Sandbridge beach on a night it was storming/thundering. 

Rain falls across the endless body of the ocean. It’s like silver threads, blurring the horizon until the sky and sea become one enormous, breathing thing. Thunder rolls above it, deep and ancient, and the ocean answers with the waves that rise like mountains before collapsing into white lace upon the shore. The water turns dark-slate, steel, and midnight green- reflecting the storm clouds above. Then lightning flashes, illuminating the waves for a heartbeat before darkness takes them again. Somehow, it doesn't look angry; it looks powerful. The ocean has nothing to prove. It simply moves wild and endless. Receiving every drop of rain without complaint. Standing before it, you feel small and strangely safe because the storm isn’t destroying the ocean. It’s merely revealing it. 🍂

It’s depth,

It’s darkness, 

It’s beautiful. 

And for a moment I simply stand here and watch it breathe. I remember the beach disappearing beneath me before I understood I was leaving it. The rain had soaked through my clothes, and the storm blurred everything into shadows. I remember struggling, then the sharp sting of something against my skin, and the world becoming heavy.

When I opened my eyes again, I was moving.

Not walking—being carried.

The ocean was gone. So was the sound of thunder.

There were trees now. Wet leaves beneath hurried footsteps. A vehicle door. Darkness. Then the smell of damp earth.

When the blindfold finally came off, I was underground.

And I wasn’t alone.

TO BE CONTINUED…🍁