Fragile But Not Broken By Calla Smith

My house is a mausoleum no living person should ever have to survive in, but I do, hour after hour and year after year. Every day is always the same. I wake up, have a cup of coffee, and place whatever small glass trinket that caught my fancy the evening before on the shelves that line the walls. I do this with the same consistency that other people send good morning texts to someone they love.

When it all started, I had been spending my evenings immersed in the small things my mother had left behind, in particular her collection of perfume bottles, whimsical animals, and antique glasses. Every day, I would choose one and think that I could start a collection of my own, so I had the shelves installed. Over time, there was nothing left of my mother’s possessions, so I found new and beautiful things to add from small stores, art galleries, or trash bins throughout each day.

Eventually, there was no room for other decorations in my apartment. There were no books or photos, only small objects that were so beautiful to me that they seemed to come from another world. They all sat there collecting dust as I did on the subway when I went to work and came back every day without even the slightest variation.

Over time, I had grown accustomed to the screech of the tracks and the people selling sweets or asking for money, just as I had learned to tolerate the phones and endless chatting of my coworkers in the office. But in my house, there was nothing but the sound of silence and the strains of the world outside in the background. That was the way things were supposed to be: just me and everything breakable.

Sometimes people world try to get it, but I knew better than to let them. My door was padlocked, and the blackout curtains on my windows always stayed down. My home was everything I needed. It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. It was the only place I could take my shoes off and feel my bare feet on the floor, the only place I could hear myself breathe. I always thought that I would stay there forever, as my mother had done before, until I, too, faded away into some final illness and turned into nothing.

But the city had other plans for me. I had become comfortable with my routines, and I never expected the change that came to be so brutal and sudden. It was my own fault. It was the middle of summer, and I had opened my bedroom window to let in some breeze, and I hadn’t closed it before leaving.

A storm started brewing during the day, and I watched it from the office without suspecting what it would mean for me. The winds were strong when I left for home, and by the time I opened the front door, the rain had started. I stepped inside and could immediately feel that something was different. Something was wrong.

A gust of air hit me hard in the chest, and I flicked on the light only to find all of the glass shelves and all of my precious collection shattered and broken on the floor. It didn’t matter anymore if the outside world got in, so I let the rain pelt in onto the rug and left the door open as I sank to my knees and clutched the broken shards to me even as they punctured my skin and I started to bleed. I heard myself breathe out in what was left of the silence, and then the tears I had never been able to shed came.

I lay on the ground with the destruction all around me and sobbed with every ounce of my being. I cried for my mother and the shadow of a person she had become. I cried for myself and the ghost I had turned into all those years I had closed myself away into a place only fit for mourning the dead.

Calla Smith

Calla Smith grew up in rural Colorado but now lives and writes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She enjoys continuing to discover all the forgotten corners of the city she has come to call home and dreaming up new things to try. Her work can be found in The Madrid Review, Livina Press, Pulp, and more.