Gemotions

The task of cleaning out her father's house felt monumental. For weeks, Clara had avoided it. Now, with the sun setting, casting long, melancholic shadows, she began. She opened a box of old photographs. The air seemed to grow thick. Her hands felt clumsy.

The first photo showed him with a woman, younger and happier than Clara ever remembered. She saw a tenderness she had never witnessed, a joy that felt stolen.

A wave of emptiness washed over her, a deep, pervasive feeling of wrongness. The room grew colder, the shadows seemed to lengthen, the world seemed to dull. She felt lost, adrift, the narratives she had lived by crumbling around her.