“How long are you going to keep doing that?” her mother asks her with a fond look in her eye.

She ignores her in favor of taping another onto the thick yellowing paper. The red stands out against the sickly colored paper.

Her mother sighs, “make sure you clean up after yourself. I don’t want to find any pieces later.”

There’s a silence that stretches out like the ribbon she holds up before slicing through it with the scissors. Her mother carelessly places her mug on the kitchen counter before walking away.

The coffee jumps at the aftershocks.

She fixes the ribbon into a bow before gluing it down along the green of the stem.

The pale white hides the place where the coffee splashed just moments earlier.

She props the page up in her hardbound book before gently blowing on it. She hopes it dries quickly as flecks of pollen fly from the page.

The front door creaks open as her mother shouts she’ll be back by the time the sun goes down, but the whole world goes dark.

Which means she just needs to make it past twilight.

She puts her book down, but still opened to her drying page. Her hands release the book slowly; she can feel the cover slide under her fingertips. The cover is plain, brown, and bare. Yet the material has stood the test of time. Not a single crack, tears, or wears on the surface.

The sound of the car driving off tells her it’s okay to breathe now. She imagines the tires spinning. The house grows quiet. For once, there’s no echoing of the doors when they slam. There’s no reverberation of a glass mug breaking against the wall. No vibration of a cell phone signaling someone upstairs demands her presence. She sits with her eyes shut and her head tilted back as she lets the silence wash over her.

When it feels like enough, she lets herself move. Slowly. The way they tell you to do it when you get sleep paralysis. Start at your fingertips. Start at your toes. Let yourself feel them. When you’re certain about your existence, then let yourself move them. Not too much at once. There’s plenty of time to work up to that, just a twitch at first.

She lets herself adjust until she’s able to feel like herself again.

Then she dusts the counter with her hands, gathering up the scraps of paper or pollen. She feels the dust from the counter stick to her hands. Some glue that had accidentally dripped onto the table, she scrubs away with paper towel. Sunlight filters into the kitchen from between the blinds.

The world is warm and she knows it. Here, in this kitchen that never belonged to her until now; a kitchen that meant dirty mop water and blood. She looks around and the tiny flecks of pollen and dust floating on the air remind her these old things can’t hurt her. They exist, but they won’t pass through her airways the way they once did. So she gulps in air without hesitations.

The sun is setting now and she can feel the past creep up inside her. She can feel his presence walking through her heart. So she takes her open book in her hands and she stares at the small flower pressed onto the page. She stares at it, watching the flower wilt and the glue dry.