"Breathe, My Darling" by Lori Green — Our March 2025 Silver Medal Winner
Lori is our second place winner from the contest posted in our March 2025 issue!
What the judges had to say:
“...reminiscent of the work of Edgar Allan Poe: truly compelling!”
“...a powerful piece that gripped me from beginning to end.”
“beautiful writing”
Meet Lori
Lori Green has been writing poetry, horror, and dark fiction since she first picked up a pen. Her stories and poems have been published by Quill & Crow Publishing House, Black Hare Press, Love Letters to Poe, Ghost Orchid Press, and more. Her latest poem, “the leaves have much to say” was published by Off Topic Publishing and selected for their October 2024 Poetry Box. She studied English Literature at the University of Western Ontario and now lives along the shores of Lake Erie and Lake Huron. She is an active member of The Horror Writer’s Association and when not writing, she enjoys morning walks through the cemetery and feeding the crows. She is currently working on her first novel.
Breathe, My Darling
the unedited story by Lori Green
“Don’t leave me.”
How those words haunted me over the years, reverberating in my skull until the pain became too much and I took to my bed. I lay there in the darkness and wept. Her voice echoed in my daily thoughts until I thought I would go mad, and perhaps I did. Why else would I have abandoned her to this place? Locked away in a towering pile of grey bricks like a naughty child who refused to listen. At the time, I knew not of any other way than to surrender her care to another.
Clouds hung heavy in a sunless sky as I stepped out of the taxi and wrapped my coat tightly around my body as if it could shield me from the cold March winds and the frosty encounter I was about to have. A light mist covered the front grounds, and the skeletal branches of a rotting maple huddled in close as if protecting the building from outsiders. Even the windows of this cathedral-like tower seemed to issue a warning to me with their bright yellow edging shouting cautionary tales of peril and danger. Initially, I had worried that there were no bars on her windows, lest she succumb again to despair, like many times before.
I thought of the first time I found her on the bedroom floor, her heart broken and bleeding on the hardwood floor. I stared at her unmoving limbs and vacant eyes that refused to look at me. I knew instinctively she didn’t want to face the sadness in my own. I hugged her tightly, ashamed of my disappointment and pain when she was the one on the brink of death. I was a selfish person; I know that now. I wanted her to be like all the other girls with their bouncing curls and baby blue eyes, twirling in pink satin dresses with happy smiles on their made-up faces. I wanted her to be a ballerina when clearly she danced to a different drum. I wanted her to have friendships forged in school with sleepovers and movie nights. Staying up late with the only pain in her belly from uncontrollable laughter.
These are the things I wanted for her.
I tried to mold her into something made of my own unfulfilled dreams, instead of letting her wings unfold as they were always meant to be. A sob caught in my throat as I climbed the first step, and a dizzying wave of guilt overwhelmed me so much so that I clung to the banister in a desperate attempt to get my bearings.
Breathe.
It became the mantra I repeated again and again, throughout our early years together. I could only stand immobile and rigid, watching helplessly as her fists punished her own flesh, and me powerless to stop it. To touch her would only make it worse, take away the only control she felt she had and the animal in her would lash out, biting with words that broke my heart. Tears would stain my face as I waited for the storm to pass.
Breathe, my darling.
Three stages of these emotional outbursts could always be counted upon. The anger first, followed by lashing out, and then ultimately, the crash. She gathered the darkness inside, only to lock them away in a tower of guilt and shame, thinking it was her cross to bear, and hers alone. She never felt I was on her side.
Would she even remember me after all this time? Would she ever forgive me? I longed to hear her laugh again, that sound that could open the gates of heaven before a thick gloom wrapped itself around her throat, choking her and stealing the smile from her face. I think of all the childish games we used to play, just the two of us, and all the places we would travel together. Riding our bikes down dirt roads, picking flowers, and eating wild blueberries until our mouths were stained purple and our bellies were full with the fruits of laughter and childhood innocence. Our skin slick with lotion diving off the dock, hand in hand, into a sea of tranquility that kept us afloat for years to come.
Until one day she was drowning, and I let go of her hand. She washed up later on the beach, gasping like a dying fish, gills desperately trying to draw in life only to be caught in a net of melancholy and sorrow.
Breathe.
I tried, oh how I tried, to fill her lungs with air and chase the shadows away, to give her life purpose and meaning. But it was a fruitless endeavor. Black thoughts and dark voices whispered in her ear until she was deaf to my desperate pleading. I enlisted the help of doctors, yet no amount of therapy or pills helped to bring her back. It was like she was dead to me, and I was mourning for someone who was still alive.
I stood up on shaky legs and slid my key into the lock, opening the door to the past. As I climbed the winding staircase up to the third floor, I felt my heart quicken and when I reached for the doorknob of her room, the blood roared in my ears until a quiet stillness came over me as the door swung open of its own volition.
She turned from the window and smiled at me. “I knew you’d come back someday.”
I took a tentative step forward. Her eyes, as green as my own, beckoned me forward. She opened her arms wide, and I melted into her so that we were no longer two, but one flesh. I gasped at the reflection in the mirror.
It was only me. It had been all along.
I was no longer the girl I used to be, but I accepted that now. I would keep her here, inside me, until we both breathed our last.
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