After

This piece requires a little bit of background: My friend, who does screenwriting, wrote a script for a horror movie that we shot by ourselves in our hometown during the fall and winter of 2019, with help from recruited friends and family. The story follows two sisters who moved in with a distant relative after the death of their mother, only to discover that the house is haunted not only by the ghost of a girl named Hazel, but a much darker, ancient force that wants to destroy them. It was never finished due to COVID, but I played the main character, 17 year old Gillian Gerhardt-Woulfe, and in light of never being able to complete the project, I wrote this short story for her taking place in the aftermath of the events of the film.

Gillian once said, in a drunk voicemail to her sister, that she thought she might have died in that house. She’s not sure if she really believes that. The dead are, well, dead. They don’t have anything to think or believe. Marie would say that yes, they really do, and Gillian once would have rolled her eyes and sighed, but at this point, she might be inclined to agree. Death does not guarantee a full stop. She can still remember the cold of Hazel’s hand on her cheek, even though it really felt like nothing at all. But the blood she left behind— that was very real.

Hazel is dead now; full stop. And Gillian thinks, prays— or she would if she believed in that sort of thing— that the others are dead, too.

It’s been five years, Marie left after three— the day after she would have been eighteen. But they stopped counting birthdays. Instead, they count years after. How many years they could live after they were supposed to die. They don’t talk about this: somehow they’ve created a list of unspoken rules. Rule number one is that they never talk about the house. Now, they don’t even talk to each other. Marie says it’s Gillian’s fault that she left: because Gillian is not okay and she should stop pretending that she is. Neither of them is ever going to be okay again. Not even Marie, who is more okay than Gillian— at least for now. Because no matter how long they go without talking about the house, it’s memory won’t fade.

Gillian can still see, clear as day when she closes her eyes, the gun held to her sister’s head, and she watched it go off, every night, into his chin. And she sees him get up with blood pouring all down his front, and when she wakes up there’s another reminder in the mottled scar on her hand that left her fingers stiff and shaky. In the dark sometimes she can still feel that thing holding onto her.

Gillian is not okay. She knows she is not. But she keeps holding out hope that one day she’s going to wake up and she won’t remember the house and the scar on her hand will be gone and Marie will be there, and she won’t be in this stupid falt with her roommates who have too much sex and hate Gillian’s guts— and for good reason, because Gillian is a druggie and an alcoholic and she never makes it through the night without screaming. But she keeps hoping that one day she’ll wake up, and everything will be okay. Or at the very least, Marie will come back, and they can both be not-okay together. That, Gillian thinks, she could live with.