Revenge15 min read
The Woman Built Into the Wall
ButterPicks16 views
I learned to keep my breath quiet the way someone practises a secret. If I sighed too loudly it rattled the plaster around my bone urn and the dust in my lungs would taste like old grief.
"Who's stirring the pots?" someone sang, a soft voice like wind through tea leaves.
"Coraline, stop humming," Greyson said. "Don't tire yourself."
I could see them, though I could not cross the last inch of room. Coraline Crawford moved like she belonged to sunlight: small steps, hands that fluttered over bowls, dimples that opened and closed on her cheeks. Greyson Atkins came home with his briefcase with a gait I knew as well as the beat of my own heart. He unbuttoned his coat and hugged Coraline from behind; his face tilted into her hair.
"Grey," she breathed. "You worked so hard again."
"Everything I do," he said, "I do for us." He kissed the crown of her head.
I kept my hands against the wall and pressed until my fingers found the lines of wood, until my touch was only echo. The wood tasted like the last meal I had cooked for him. The house was mine in the way shadows are yours at dusk, familiar in shape, strange in light. The tiles, the sink, the spot on the sofa where the cushion buckled—each thing I had touched a thousand times.
"You're early tonight," I said, a voice with no air.
Coraline tilted. "Who's there?"
"Someone else?" Greyson called. He laughed the small, false laugh he saved for public spaces. "Must be the wind."
"Greyson." Coraline lowered her voice. "Don't be cruel."
I watched them set plates. Greyson uncorked wine with hands I found both tender and traitorous. Coraline leaned against him, and when she did, the space where my body had been found emptier and emptier until only a photograph sat on the lacquered table: me in black-and-white, smiling a smile that did not know how the rest of the story would be written.
I remember the sharp sound of brakes, the hot sting of metal, the way the night smelled of spilled gasoline. I remember calling his name and the way Greyson's silhouette ran toward me in the smear of headlights. He had not saved me. He had closed the door and watched me become a thing he could lock away.
"Greyson," I whispered. "You left me in the road."
He didn't look that way. He bent to Coraline and pressed a kiss on her mouth. "We should eat," he said, as if our house had not once been my house.
Days moved like a procession of moths—soft, blind, buzzing around Coraline's light. I learned the times Greyson carried strange things home: a box wrapped in paper, a blackened bronze mirror with a swirl like two tiny fish chasing each other's tails, needles that flashed like teeth. I learned the way he called Coraline "baby" and the way he called me "there" with pity at my photograph.
One midnight, when the clock stuck to the small hand like a nail, Greyson reached between the cushions and drew out something thin and silver. He touched Coraline's knuckle and pricked her finger.
"Greyson—" Coraline started, startled into dimness.
"Don't make a fuss," he whispered, as if he had not driven me into a road three years ago. He tipped her blood onto a disc of metal: black on white, white on black. Then he pierced himself and let his drop fall beside hers.
"What's that for?" I asked the plaster.
Greyson tapped the disc with a thumb. "Protection," he said. "For the home."
"Protection for who?" Coraline glanced around the room, blank as a child who had been promised candy but found only glass.
Greyson's face, half in shadow, showed me something I had not seen in years: he had not aged kindly. The ambition that had once been a crooked bloom in his chest had hardened into something like a blade. It smiled when he was pleased.
The old man—Edwin Moretti—arrived some nights later with a cane and a laugh like a jar opening. He sat on the windowsill and listened to my complaint.
"You're pinned behind a wooden shrine," he said as if reading a recipe. "Gold nails. Kept like that to hold a body still."
"Who did this?" I banged the wall with a desperation that made the plaster weep dust.
"Someone who wanted to keep more than a house," Edwin said. "Someone who wanted blood in the well."
"It was Greyson," I said. "He—"
"He used an old trick," Edwin murmured. "A mirror for the balance of fate, needles to draw blood, names written at midnight. He wanted your luck, Livia. He wanted it like a farmer wants rain."
"Livia?" I blinked. "That name was mine?"
"Your name is Livia Peters," Edwin said, like a man listing the spices of a stew. "Don't glare at me, girl. I can smell the tether. You died when the year bowed to heat. He did the swap, but he didn't finish."
"Swap?" Coraline heard him and came to the doorway. "What do you mean, swap?"
Edwin looked at Coraline for the first time. "You have a complexion made for shade, child. Your balance matches her." He tapped the air between the photograph and the sofa as if drawing a line I could not see.
"Why would Greyson—" Coraline stopped. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again like a hinge. "Greyson? No. Greyson would never..."
"Would he?" I asked. "He wrote my death time like a calendar and placed me in the wall like a relic."
Coraline's small hands went white. "You're saying he—"
"Made you a charm," Edwin said. "Made you a fixture to sit on his luck and give him heirs. He drew on your blood, he sealed you in with gold teeth, and he buried the way back to wandering."
"I thought," Coraline whispered, "that he—"
"Beloved men sometimes become monsters when given choices," I said. "His choice was a blade that cut me out of a life."
"She says he did it to her," Coraline said to the old man. "What proof would we have?"
I pushed, and Coraline listened. She reached between cushions and found what I had seen: a copper mirror with the black-and-white swirl, a faint crust of dried blood on its face, two hair strands like dark threads. She held them like she held secrets that were trying to survive.
"Take them to a priest," Edwin said.
"I will," Coraline answered.
"Do not trust him in the dark," I said.
"He would never." Coraline's voice turned fierce. "He would never hurt you."
"He did," I said. "He wouldn't let me speak or mean the last things I said. He set the hour, the chance, the road."
Coraline knelt, fumbled with the copper, and looked at the photograph of me again—my eyes bright in the black-and-white frame. Her fingers trembled.
"Who did this?" she asked of the photograph as if asking me.
"You did a good job," I told her. "You fooled him when you smiled. You made him forget the parts of himself that were..." I tasted the old shame. "Better."
"Greyson is not that man," Coraline said, but her voice shook. She laid the mirror onto the table with hands that tried to be steady.
Days passed in a thin timing. Coraline began to move like someone who had swallowed a cold stone. She went out early and came home late. She would place the mirror on the altar and bang nails into soft wood as if her hands could unweave all the things. She muttered at the shadows and called the old man at odd hours.
"Where do you sleep?" I asked once, because I wanted to know if she had decided to choose me over the man she loved.
"On the floor sometimes," she said. "The bed is soft and the guilt is sticky. I keep finding things in the cushions. A needle. A hair. It's like he never threw anything away."
"He's not done," I said. "He keeps collecting."
"Then we'll collect too," she whispered.
I should have been the one to strike. I should have been the living blade that broke his neck and sent his bones to a quicker end. But ghosts cannot do such things without a road. I had been sealed away, my name inked with gold that spelled a cage. All I had was small sharpness: the voice, the story, the things I could sometimes make them reach for when the house wanted them to.
Coraline started to change. She learned to make poison in a spoon; she learned to test the taste of a man's fears. She watched Greyson with eyes that saw bones beneath and fools above. One morning she brought home a cat in a wire cage.
"Look at that poor creature," she said. "It limps. Its name is not important. It is ugly and sick and needs a home."
"Why a cat?" I asked.
"Because the world is made of small exchanges," she said, and her hands were steady. "Because sometimes luck is a currency you can trade in."
Greyson came home early that night and found the cat. He laughed with a loose, worn sound. "You always bring in some stray," he said. Coraline smiled.
"Greyson," she said softly, "will you hold it?"
He picked up the cage and laughed at the way the cat hissed and bared its few teeth. Coraline filmed him with a quiet camera on the shelf, a little smile captured like evidence.
"I will always protect you," he told her, and his voice was practiced.
Coraline pricked his finger beside the cage.
"Oh, what now?" he groaned when the sharpness stung.
"Just checking the cat's name is sweet," she said. "It's silly, but I wrote down the cat's birth time once because the finder wanted to know any detail for a vet's form. I thought it might help. Nothing else."
She spread a small black mirror like the one he used onto the table and got the cat's blood onto the metal. Then—she did something brave or foolish—she did to him what he had tried to do to me. She let the cat and Greyson exchange a thread of fate with the same copper piece. She murmured something old and small. She let the cat and him have a night in which luck trespassed.
He awoke the next day duller, as if the edges of his intelligence had been sanded. He forgot numbers, names, the way to sign papers. He sat with a look like a child who has fallen off a bike and does not know why the knees bleed.
"Greyson," Coraline said. "How do you feel?"
"I'm... I can't tell," he said. He couldn't remember which of his shirts went with which office. He asked the house where the keys were and then laughed at himself when he could not remember where he lived.
"You're being punished for stealing what is not yours," I said, and the sound of my voice made the plaster prickle.
The revenge I had imagined—torn cloth, public trials, bone-splintering retribution—was what men wrote about in taverns. The only vengeance for a woman trapped in plaster was slow corrosion, the rot of reputation, the grind of mind loss. Coraline was not cruel like Greyson: she wanted him to feel small and foolish, to have his pillars crumble. She wanted him to taste what happens when a man gives up his honor for a trick.
He tried to hurt himself once, reaching for the stove like a man who forgot flame and fire. Coraline stopped him and laughed, if a laugh can be surgical.
"You don't get to die," she told him. "I don't want you dead. I want you useless."
"Please," he sobbed once in the middle of the night. "Please, Livia... don't—"
His mouth made the shape of my name and filled it with pleading. It was the sound of a man who could write apologies in a ledger and forget the ink when later. It stung like salt.
Then one afternoon, a crowd gathered that would finally make his cowardice visible like a photograph blown up and pinned to a wall.
Edwin found a way to move my sealed bones to a public place where the town's people came for a ceremony. "For memory," he called it. "For the living to lay the dead to rest."
Greyson arranged it: his family would be there. My parents. The neighbors I had waved to across hedges when life was wide and easy. The event was polite and small; there was a wooden table, bowls of tea, the priest in a plain robe. The wall where my box had been was part of a brick facade that Greyson insisted remained as a memorial to me, the "wife so loved." He wanted to make a show of devotion.
"She was everything to me," he told the priest, squeezing a handkerchief. "Livia was..." His voice broke in the memorized places. He wore a black suit that hugged the wrong place and slippers that were too soft for the ground.
I, behind my brick prison, felt the house vibrate with the crowd. Voices bubbled like hot water. Cameras clicked. Coraline stood in the back with small shoulders straight. Edwin sat near the priest like someone who had planted a grenade in the middle of a picnic and now waited to watch it bloom.
"Why are there so many—" my mother, Veronika Burns, said, confusion thick like stew. Her hands were folded as if someone had taught her how to fold grief in the years since I died.
"Because he loved her," Greyson said. He led the procession, hands clasped like a man who had practiced sorrow. He held my urn and said words that had been polished to opacity.
"Lights," someone whispered. "Is he going to light the incense?"
He bowed, and then he did what he had done so many nights alone: he took out the old copper mirror, the needled tools, and set them on the colors of the altar. The priest spoke for a long minute about devotion and regret.
"Let us pray," Greyson said. Then he uncovered the urn and set it before him, like a jewel. He opened the copper disc.
"Greyson," my father—Amir Spencer—asked. "What is that?"
"It's just a relic of mine," Greyson stammered. His face had become a map of small betrayals. "A family thing. I thought—"
"You thought to show it at your wife's memorial?" Amir's voice was small, but it struck like a bell. People stilled.
Coraline stepped forward. "We found these," she said, holding up the mirror and the clip of hair like proof. "We found them in the cushions, in the sofa, under the planks."
"Impossible," Greyson called. "Those are—"
"Her hair," my mother whispered. She reached for the mirror and found the dried blood and the hair and gagged against the salt of it. "This is Livia's writing."
Greyson's face crumpled. For the first time the words left his lips without the smoothness of practice. "I—" He couldn't find his sentence.
"You did this," I said, and though my voice came through plaster, it was heard by the people who had come for testimony. Coraline's fingers trembled and she stepped back.
Greyson had a kind of knack for being small in public: a man whose courage lived only in dark rooms. The priest's eyes were wet and furious. "Say it," the priest said. "Tell them."
In that place, under the polite sunlight that had come to witness a closure, Greyson's mask cracked.
"It wasn't meant to—" he began. He tried the old line of love, the hallucinated grief he had fed himself in the dark. "I wanted to protect her. I wanted us to—I didn't mean—"
"To murder her," someone outside called.
"To steal her life," another voice said, louder than I had imagined.
People gathered outside the little yard formed a crescent of cruel interest. A neighbor I had smiled to over the fence leaned on his cane and spit into the grass. Children clutched at their fathers' legs and stared with eyes that would stay open long after that afternoon. A woman snapped photographs with a phone, the screen catching Greyson's face as his story fell away.
"Why would you do such a thing?" my father said, and the hands he folded had all the weight of a man who had just been made old.
"She was going to get in our way," Greyson said then, with the small nakedness of a man who had been found in the act. "She was going to—she had a luck that—"
"That you needed," Coraline said, voice steel. "That you wanted to sell your soul for."
"Don't," Greyson pleaded. "I can—"
"You sold her," my mother snapped. Her face was the color of paper, her hands trembling. "You sold my daughter's life and bought your new wife!"
A hiss went through the crowd. Someone shouted "Shame!" and then "Arrest him!" like the town was deciding its punishment on the spot. Greyson's knees went weak. He slid to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"Please," he said to anyone who could hear him. "Please, it's not like that. I—"
"You drove a woman into the street," a man said. "You watched her die." The words grew larger. Children wept; old women glared; men folded their arms into a judge's rod.
Greyson's face changed then in a way I had waited to see for years. Panic wasted into denial; denial browned into a cry that tried to find grace. He looked to my photograph—he looked up at me—and the sound that came from him was small and wet.
"I'm sorry," he said. He said it too many times. "I didn't mean—"
"Say it," my father raged. "Tell us how you stole her life."
He told it. He told the story of the mirror that promised fortune, of the needles that made a bargain of blood, of how a man can be greedy like a hole and think it will not fill with him. He told it and the crowd heard, and when he named the hour he put his fingers in his mouth like a child.
"Why did you pin her bones fest to your house?" Edwin asked, voice loud as the bell. "Why did you plant iron nails into a woman's memory to keep her here?"
"Because—" Greyson's voice was gone. His new wife, Coraline, answered for him with the clear, cold voice of someone who had stepped through a door she locked behind.
"Because he wanted his family to be blessed," Coraline said. "Because he wanted a lineage that would not be poor. Because he wanted the red to follow him."
In that moment Greyson looked like a man whose last reserve of cunning had been taken as if by a thief. He got to his feet and tried to step toward the crowd as if to plead, but the pushback was immediate.
"You ruined a life!" someone cried.
"You ruined two!" someone else said. "Do you know what this does to parents?"
Greyson's face then showed every small movement; he begged with his eyes, and people who had once nodded to him on the street now spat on the ground. Neighbors recorded the scene with phones, their faces like judge and jury and gossips in one.
"You're going to suffer," my father said. "We will see you suffer."
They did not need to turn him over to the law to make him small. They made him public property—every glare a new stone in his pockets. The priest demanded he confess, and Greyson did, in fits that sounded like the breaking of brittle wood. People laughed and cried and called for him to leave and never return.
At the end, when the crowd thinned like a tide dragging shells behind, Greyson sat alone in the dust by the urn he had displayed like a crown. He was hollowed. He had nothing to do but watch the pieces of his plan lie spread around him—the mirror, the nails, the dirty tools of a man who measured luck with a compass.
"You will be remembered for what you did," a woman said, and she spat on the ground in a final salve.
He crawled to the wall where I had been sealed and touched the plaster as if trying to find me through its thickness. For a moment, he pressed his forehead to it and sobbed without grace.
"You will not be allowed a clean life," my father whispered as he took his wife's arm. "You will be the kind of man who is watched. Your business partners will leave, your friends will walk away, your name will be recorded in whispers. That will be your punishment."
The town kept their eyes on him for months. He was watched at the post office, called by strangers in the market. The phones recorded him, the cameras had him, the days found him smaller and smaller. He would pass by my parents and they would not look up. He would meet a former colleague and feel a cold that was not winter. He pressed his palms to his face and tried to beg forgiveness from a world that did not need to be paid.
I felt something odd then—relief, perhaps, or the raw satisfaction of someone who had spent years with grief in their mouth and finally let it out like smoke.
But Coraline did something greater. She dug my urn from the wall by the old tools Edwin had shown her how to use. She took my ashes and carried them to my parents and to the temple, to the river. She worked like a person building a ladder out of glass.
"Girls help girls," she said to the priest once while handing over my urn. "We all must."
They burned papers and prayers; they walked the river with the old man and my bones. My parents knelt and held my soft bones like a thing that could fold back into whole. Their faces were not unlined by grief—but they were steadier, like oars set in a new hand.
I watched as Greyson's small world unspooled. He attempted to rebuild businesses but the names of his colleagues were not there. He tried to speak at a meeting and no one listened. He went to church and the choir turned away. He became something less than a man in many people's mouths: a cautionary tale.
Months later, Greyson—who once had a kind of bright swagger—was thin and listless. He came to the river alone and sat where the crowd had been months before. He looked out at the water and the small men who had formerly supposed themselves when he had been a man of plans and strategies.
"Forgive me," he said to a river that did not answer.
"If your repentance cannot be given," Coraline told me later, kneeling where the river wrapped itself like a shawl, "then punishment is the story others will tell."
Her face was open and young and terribly brave. "I wanted you to be able to go," she said. "And to let them know what he did. People must keep each other honest."
I did not move then. I did not need to. I had what I had wanted—the truth laid flat in light. The town kept its watch on him and his name became an example.
I thought vengeance would taste like iron and bile. Instead, it tasted like a small, sharp peace. Coraline gave me more: the right to be claimed by my parents again, the ritual the priest gave was hot with incense and old words. I felt something uncoil inside me, like a belt loosening.
The day Edwin told me I could go, I did not jump with the wildness I expected. I was tired. I had been hollowed out and seamed back into a world I had not lived through.
"Will you come back?" he asked me once, when the ashes were warm.
"Not this house," I said. "Not Greyson's world."
"Promise me," Edwin urged.
I let out a breath that was my first without plaster. I walked the spaces people gave me like a woman learning to use new legs. Coraline held my urn and watched me like a sister she had elected by fire.
"Goodbye, Livia," she said, fingers warm.
"Goodbye," I said. "And keep the house for your own life."
She nodded. "Girls help girls," she said again, and she meant it the way a person means the only truth they have left.
I passed with the priest's song and the river. The town let me go like a leaf, gentle and final.
As I drifted, I thought of Greyson sitting by the river and of my parents with their hands folded, and of Coraline who carried both justice and mercy in her small hands. I thought of Edwin, whose laugh had become less like a jar and more like a bell.
I thought, too, of how strange the world is that some people will chip at others to raise themselves. I thought how, sometimes, the ones left behind can gather and press their palms into the wound and make new skin.
I wanted to leave them with a final word, a burnished thing of language that could sit on a mantel and be read in years.
"Look after your light," I said where it mattered, where a girl's hand could find it. "Do not let men buy you with frightened bargains."
They heard me in the way that living people hear things they had always known and had now been reminded of, like a bell.
When the priest folded his hands and the river took my last small powder, Coraline crossed her palms over her heart.
"Goodbye," she whispered.
"Goodbye," I answered. Then I let go.
The End
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