Survivor’s Remorse by Nicole Penrod

In all of the pictures from your dad’s funeral, your mother was smiling. Years after his death and freshly trained in the family tradition, you knew it was only because she hadn’t yet discovered that the ritual had a time limit.

“It’s unforgiving,” she told you in the kitchen. “Two weeks is the point of no return, but we aim for ten days to account for the unexpected.”

Across the room, Rudy was out cold on the couch, snoring lightly with one hand brushing against the carpeted floor. Neither you nor your mother ever asked him why he was over so much that summer. If he wasn’t always sleeping, he’d be halfway to trained up himself.

“We have to be diligent,” your mother continued. “We have to respect that there are forces bigger than ourselves at play. And we have to understand the true gravity and consequences of our actions.”

You took a long breath as you listened to your mother, and held the picture frame in your hand up wordlessly.

The skin around her eyes tightened. “Yes,” was her only reply.

You’d grown up in the negative space of her grief like bark around a bullet.

“Promise me,” she asked of you on several occasions throughout your childhood, “that you’ll be smart. Smarter than I was.”

You were seventeen years old and didn’t want to promise anything while you were holding a picture like this.

Your mother’s head turned sharply when Rudy stirred, lids fluttering as he pressed back up to awareness. You felt a pang of fondness for him as you watched—and then, more strongly, of relief. The conversation was over. You never had to talk about this again.

You were twelve years old when your Aunt Glory came back from the dead. One night she was gasping her last breath in a nose-stinging hospital room, and the next she was coming over for dinner.

“Fix your posture,” she snapped. Not for the first time, you wished you had siblings, someone to deflect attention or at least to trade commiserating glances with across the table. Aunt Glory was ill-tempered that night. Her hair fell around her face in tight, unyielding ringlets. 

“Did you hear me?” 

“Uh huh.” 

She scoffed when you belatedly straightened your spine. “Good. And for God’s sake, child, stop staring.”

Rudy shaved his head the summer after you both graduated high school. It made him fuzzy, like a peach, and though he resented the comparison he still let you run your hands over it.

In the park near your house, he admitted to you that he’d started packing a bag of his most valued belongings.

“Are you going somewhere?” you asked him.

He scratched the back of his neck. “Circus is coming through soon.”

You laughed. “The circus?”

He didn’t laugh back. “It’d be something new. I just wanna get out of here.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I know it sounds…”

“Cool,” you filled in quickly, if only to see him smile again. You thought of your own future, which you’d more or less resigned yourself to, which began and ended in this small town, if it ever ended at all. You’d likely become your mother, which would happen anyway but at a quicker pace at home, doing work that made your stomach turn and watching the normal world spin away without you.

You made the decision before consciously thinking about it. “I’ll come with you.”

Rudy’s eyebrows flew up. “You sure?”

You grinned at him. You didn’t want to know what that grin looked like, you just wanted to mean it. “Sounds fun. I’m always up for an adventure.” You’d followed him to campus clubs, bonfires in the woods, indie bands and illicit comics and the squeaky latch on his bedroom window. Why not this too?

Rudy, despite never asking for a tagalong, didn’t tell you no.

Your mom cried when you told her. It was only the third time you’d ever seen her do so, and you held her hand. It’s okay, you tried to convey with a gentle squeeze. If you’ve taught me anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as an ending that sticks.

While the hustle and bustle of the circus threatened to swallow you whole, Rudy flourished. Even Old Edna liked him well enough, and she hated everyone.

Six months in, you found yourself pressed up against his side in the mess hall—a hastily constructed tent, like all of them were—listening to the rumble of his laughter.

“Rudy,” you said quietly during a lull in the conversation, “what if I wanted to go home for a bit?”

“Then you could go,” he said easily.

Your stomach turned. You felt queasy under the lights and the noise. “I don’t actually want to.” You pretended he was the one you were reassuring.

“Okay.”

“Okay,” you repeated, tucking closer to him.

He lowered his voice. “My little shadow,” he said affectionately.

It was less of a pet name than a statement of fact. You shoved some tasteless potatoes in your mouth as the contortionists, Moira and Sanj, flirted while helping each other stretch—loose-limbed laughter, the ease of a leg behind each of their heads—so you didn’t have to answer, and ignored the teasing way he pinched your side.

I’d do anything for you, you didn’t tell him, because it frightened you to mean it so much. His quiet breathing steadied you. He never minded when you leaned on him like this. Outside, the starving lions threw themselves against their cages with a miserable repeated clang.

You shut your eyes, and finished your food.

Time blurred at the circus. Each morning the length of the tents glittered out of every corner of your eyes. Old Edna threatened to kick you both out with such regularity you started wishing she would do it.

You stayed, though. You tied balloon animals, and you appeased weepy children, and you kept your mouth shut. On the full moon each month, you’d stare at the sky and hear your mother’s laughter begging you to join in, but you tucked your tongue between your teeth and kept wandering for three long years.

“You’re old enough now,” your mother said, exactly at midnight on your fourteenth birthday.

When you peered up at her groggily from the bed, she pressed a cool glass jar into your hand.

“I didn’t have anyone to teach me,” she said with feeling, “but you will. You do.”

“Teach me what?”

It was the setup she had been looking for. When she smiled at you, her teeth were white as mourning. “Baby,” she said, “I’m going to teach you how to never miss anyone again.”

When you were twenty-one, Rudy died. It was a freak accident, everyone kept saying, all wide-eyed with shock and sallow in the face. 

You saw it happen. You didn’t think people knew you’d been there, under the hastily constructed bleachers, when the blow landed. A stray beam, not even integral to the tent’s structure, struck him unglamorously across the temple. It happened in a second. When he fell, he didn’t get back up.

And then someone screamed, and your years of training froze into a single thread of icy resolve.

Rudy’s corpse was heavy, and though you were strong for your build, your build was five foot four and hungry.

He’d been preserved to a middling degree by the bitterly cold nights. His eyes were shut, and remained that way. You dragged him painstakingly into the circle you’d created on the forest floor, pine needles swept aside by your sneakers for at least the illusion of decorum.

His head lolled and his body said nothing. You watched his still face and ached.

Ritual prepared, the only thing left to do was bring him back.

There was no puff of smoke, no bright light. There were crickets, but they had no sense of timing, and so the lull in their chirping had ended a full ten minutes before you uttered the words you needed to and released a handful of dirt, fresh from Rudy’s grave, onto his chest.

Between one of your heartbeats and the next, Rudy began to breathe again.

You stayed up all night that night. Rudy had, with your help, stumbled to your room before falling asleep in your bed. You lay on the floor consumed with cold terror.

Was that body Rudy? Could he even remember who he was? What would happen when he woke?

How could your mother smile while talking about this work?

He remembered himself, after a time.

This new Rudy liked to talk about the past. His stories were not about the carnival, or about your school years together, but about his early childhood.

“Dad was a real piece of work,” Rudy told you one night. You were sitting side by side on the edge of this town’s bridge, feet kicking over the water. His thigh was cool where it brushed yours. “He would send me and my brother to buy cigarettes for him, yell at the top of his lungs during my baseball games. My friends would always tell me how much he freaked them out. I couldn’t blame them.”

“I’m sorry,” you said. You never knew your father, not really. 

Rudy snorted. His face looked more alive than the rest of him, lending an uncanniness to his expressions. “Wonder what my brother’s up to.”

“We could visit.” You weren’t sure why you said it like that.

Rudy didn’t seem sure either. “You know where he is?”

“I could find out, if you wanted.”

Rudy had just spent the last of what he’d been buried with on a watch, and it glinted in the moonlight. He’d developed nasty insomnia since you raised him. You joined him in it, like you’d joined him in everything.

You wanted to say the words that were on your teeth. Don’t leave me alone. But there was no way to beg that would overshadow what you’d already done. He’d gotten the message.

“Maybe,” was all he said after a long pause.

Chastened, you started to stand.

But Rudy didn’t let you, his hand grasping one of the loops on your belt. You gasped as his chilled skin met your hip. “You do this often?” he asked, gesturing toward himself.

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb,” Rudy said. His brows drew together. “It’s unnatural, I know that, but you raise me from the dead and then have the gall to look scared of me?”

Your heart began to beat more quickly, thick in your chest. “Only you,” you said.

He chuckled mirthlessly. “That’s worse.”

“It was supposed to be a good thing.”

Rudy rolled his eyes. You always felt like a recalcitrant child when he did that. “Why’d you even do it?” he asked, which was close enough to I wish you hadn’t that you flinched.

Pathetically, now that you were faced with an angry, gaunt, cold Rudy, you couldn’t remember.

“Typical,” Rudy said. He stood, releasing you, and watched as you fell back onto your ass. “I’m going to find my brother.”

“It’s because of me that you even can,” you found yourself snapping.

“Don’t,” he answered. The façade had dropped. He sounded, more than anything, tired.

You were very good at holding your tongue. It bled between your teeth as you watched him go.

A thank you would have been nice, but you didn’t even get a goodbye.

In August, you ran out of money. I should have left him dead, you found yourself thinking with increasing frequency and sharpness. You’d spent so much on the components for the ritual that you’d left yourself essentially destitute.

Your anger burned like a coal. By the time things were dire enough to force your hand, you were wide awake on the cross-country train ride, stealing things off the drink cart as it passed by, and there was no view out the window beautiful or ugly enough to distract you from the resolution to never again give someone a part of yourself that you didn’t know how to get back.

Your homecoming was met with moderate fanfare. Your mother, much the same with the addition of new fine lines around her eyes and a wrist brace, hugged you tightly and told you she’d ready your room for as long as you wanted to stay.

It was the most kindness you’d been shown in months. Years. Your eyes burned with the sting of tears you didn’t allow to fall.

She’d taken your bag with her, and was gone and silent for just long enough to have you feeling antsy before her voice rang down the hallway.

“Hey, you didn’t tell me you were getting into the family business!”

You went to find her. When you arrived in the doorway of your room, she was sitting on the bed, holding a bottle of yarrow root extract in her hands. 

“I wasn’t snooping,” she told you, “it just rolled out. I won’t push you on it if you don’t want me to.”

Surprising even yourself, you smiled. “It’s fine. I did a ritual, yeah. It didn’t go well.”

“Survivor’s remorse?” your mother asked knowingly.

Having a name for it brought you so much relief you felt your knees threaten to go watery. “Yeah.”

“Was it hard?”

“Yeah,” you said again, thickly.

Your mother clucked at you, standing up and gathering you into her arms like you were a teenager again. “It can be beautiful,” she murmured into your hair. “Watching someone step into a new life, getting to guide them…” The reverence in her voice was unmistakable. “I’ll teach you. We can do it the right way together.”

The thought of doing it again at all sickened you, but nausea wasn’t the only emotion rising. Only you, you’d told Rudy. Some vindictive part of you hated the idea of him being not just your first, but your last too. Your mother smelled familiar. You hadn’t been home in years.

It was easier than you could have dreamed to say yes.

You knew you’d run from this too, someday. It was in your nature, but it was more than that—a bone-deep certainty that endings never stuck, and that life was full of them regardless. Joining her was just borrowing time, like extending a lease, like raising your best friend from the dead and watching him learn to hate you. 

Maybe there was no such thing as going back. Maybe it was only forward, and forward, and forward.

Your mother kissed the crown of your head, nattering on about a new cookbook she’d gotten like you hadn’t just agreed to rip your life open like a vein, and you listened as the cadence of her voice washed over you. At least she was happy, you thought.

Her time would come eventually, as everyone’s did. Her sentences curled cheerfully through the air like butterflies, and a resolution came with such strength you felt much, much older than twenty-two. 

You helped her reach the refined flour. You noticed the plod of your own heartbeat, the whites of your mother’s eyes, everything you’d inherited from her and all the things you didn’t.

“Ready?” she asked, rolling out a sheet of parchment paper.

You nodded, and promised you’d love her enough to someday let her die.