Inheritance

I don't understand how a mom whose mom

just watched her go through painful wifehood

and bruised, thankless motherhood

would do the same to her daughter.

How does sorrow not become warning?

How does the hurt not sharpen into refusal?

How does she sit still,

while her child drowns in the same silence

she once choked on?

They say pain teaches.

But some just learn how to pass it down—

with folded towels, tight smiles,

and casseroles that taste like surrender.

She hands over the burden like it's heirloom.

As if love means letting it happen again,

but quieter this time.

I set the table, like she taught me.

Bite back the scream, like she showed me.

And every time I bleed from biting,

I wonder if she ever sees

how familiar I must look.

Like looking in a mirror,

but choosing to blink.

The 2 PM Cakery #1

There was a ritual to it. Every day at exactly two in the afternoon, the girl behind the lace curtain would unlock the front door, reach one arm out—always just one—without showing her face and pull in the brown paper bag that someone had left on the porch. Sometimes it was soup in a thermos. Sometimes a sandwich with too many pickles. Once, it was a single cupcake with lavender frosting and too much vanilla essence. She never asked who sent them, and they never rang the bell. That was the arrangement.

The neighbors called her that sweet girl from the end of the street, though none of them had seen her face in months. Not since That Night. 

That girl—the one people whispered about when they thought she couldn't hear—sometimes she wondered if they thought she'd disappeared entirely. If the girl in the house with the shut blinds and dying mailbox was just a ghost now. She surely felt like one.

Today, she stared blankly at the paper bag as usual. Still warm. There was something wrapped in foil inside and something else beneath it—a folded note. That was new. She hadn’t gotten a note since the last time she opened her mouth to speak and found that the words stuck like dried honey on the roof of her mouth.

Her fingers hovered over the note like it might bite. It was written on lined paper, the kind that came from spiral-bound notebooks, and folded once, then again. She opened it slowly, the edges soft with smudged graphite and the faint scent of cinnamon. Just five words, scrawled in a handwriting she didn’t recognize:

You still love baking, right?

She didn’t answer. Not out loud. But her gaze flicked toward the kitchen—toward the flour-caked countertops and the half-used bag of chocolate chips that hadn't moved in weeks. Baking used to be the only thing that made the silence in her chest feel less suffocating. That was before. Now, the mixing bowls sat like fossils, frozen in time. 

She closed her eyes and let the question from the note hang in the air like it deserved no answer.

Outside, the world was moving—cars passing, children yelling from two houses down, someone mowing the lawn too early in the season. Inside her house, it was all stillness. She wondered, not for the first time, if maybe the world had split in two That Night. The normal one kept spinning, and she’d been left behind in the other.

She folded the note back up and placed it carefully on the counter, like it was something contagious. The bag of food sat untouched beside it. For a moment, she just stood there, barefoot on cold tile, the clock ticking loudly above the sink. Two o’clock. The time she used to pull fresh scones from the oven and hum along to old playlists, back when people came over without knocking. Back when her life didn’t feel like something she was borrowing, day by day.

Then came the knock.

Not the gentle kind, not the neighborly kind.

Three sharp raps. Precise. Like someone who knew exactly where she lived—and why she hadn’t left.

*to be continued*

I plan to make this a serialized story if this gets a lot of readers. Let me know if it's an interesting potential-series!

Let Me Escape to The Godly Realm For One Second

If I were God, I’d never create people like you or me.
Too fragile for the storms, too proud to ask for shelter.
We bruise each other by accident and call it fate.
We mistake silence for peace, distance for dignity.

If I were God, I’d skip the part
where we learn to love through loss,
where we taste sweetness only after we’ve
swallowed salt.

I’d never design walking contradictions,
I wouldn’t give us mouths that lie kindly,
or eyes that see the best in those
who leave.

Saying “I’m fine” while quietly drowning.

We apologize for crying,
laugh when we’re anxious,
hug people who don’t know
how much they’ve broken us.
Isn’t it funny? The way we keep going?

If I were God, I’d make simpler beings—
not ones who write poems about pain.

But maybe that’s the point.
Maybe there’s a strange kind of grace
in being this messy.
Maybe there's beauty in the breaking.

Maybe if I were God,
I'd still make people like you and me—
just not so good at pretending.

original poetry by:

-Qintha Djais-

Some Last Words

Cassian Vale didn’t cry at the funeral. Not when the priest said her name. Not when they lowered the casket. Not even when the wind carried the scent of her favorite flowers—white hyacinths, sharp and too sweet for July.

But now, three weeks later, standing in her tiny attic with a box of half-finished manuscripts in one hand and a faded Polaroid in the other, he could feel it—something shifting, cracking open. 

The attic was warm. Dusty. Uncomfortable.

She’d only been gone for twenty-two days, and already the house felt like a museum: curated, preserved, and completely abandoned. He was the only one who cared enough to pack up her things. His uncles had barely shown up for the service. His cousins treated grief like an old suit. And his father? His father had been a ghost long before his mother ever became one.

He crouched by an old trunk, running his fingers over the cracked leather lid. That was when the memory hit him.

Easter.

The last time he’d seen her alive. The last time they’d been just the two of them. No noise. No sharp words from sharp-tongued relatives. Just them and a pot of tea.

She had looked at him over the rim of her mug and said, with that sly smile of hers, “Why haven’t you settled down yet, Cass?”

He’d shrugged. Said something lazy. “Still enjoying my freedom.”

But that wasn’t the truth.

The truth was uglier. Deeper. The kind of truth that lived in the closet full of skeletons.

He was afraid.

Afraid of being like him.

Before marriage, his mother had been a rising star. Quantum physicist. Published author. A mind that bent reality and made it beg for answers. And beautiful—so beautiful it almost hurt to look at her in those old photos. Hair like sunlight. Eyes that laughed before her mouth caught up.

And then she married his father.

The sparkle dimmed. The laughter cracked. She stopped wearing mascara because she cried too often. Her shirts were always wrinkled. Her voice quieter. Her back a little more hunched each year.

Love, it turned out, could be a cage.

And he was terrified he’d become the jailer.

Cassian sat on the floor now, cross-legged like a boy again, the Polaroid in his hand. It was one of the rare ones—a picture of his parents together. Younger. Smiling. Back when she still glowed.

He turned it over.

There was writing on the back. Slanted. Faint.

It was hers.

 

Cassian,

If you’re reading this, it means I’m gone. I knew the end was coming—I just didn’t want to dim your world with my shadow while I was still here.

I saw it in your eyes that day at Easter. That fear. That belief that you’re cursed to repeat your father’s sins.

You’re not.

Do you know how I know?

Because I raised you. I taught you how to be kind and how to be strong. I taught you how to walk away when the room turns toxic and how to listen when someone’s voice shakes.

I didn’t raise a monster, Cassian. I didn’t raise a mistake.

I raised a man. A good one.

You will not dim her light. You will love her. And that will be enough.

 

—Mom

 

The grief didn’t come all at once. They didn’t flood. Didn’t crash.

They came like her voice. Soft. Steady. Certain.

Cassian Vale sat in the attic, surrounded by the remnants of the woman who had given him life—and, with one letter, had just handed it back to him.