The pieces did not trickle down at the start—they fell in sheets that peeled off like expired wallpaper, leaving a starless abyss gaping wide overhead.

It’s been months now. The deluge has slowed some: a chip here, a sliver there, carving a dark and crooked chunk from the otherwise perfect summer sky. But it’s always at its worst where I’m currently biding my time, on a gritty towel in the shadow of some oversized driftwood—she loved the beach more than anywhere else. Someone too much like her runs past, and my heart clenches. On cue, bits of the sun and clouds and high blue sky plummet into the sand like tiny ominous meteorites.

My response is a rehearsed routine. I rise with a choppy breath to collect the mess, appearing to onlookers as just some ashen unwell woman scooping up a handful of nothing from the ground, which I fumble into my pocket. By the time I leave, it’ll have company. But I’ll wait to fix things until I can get somewhere smaller. Ideally indoors. Private. It’s easier to use a ceiling when reattaching it all overhead, and the last thing I need is a nosy swarm of witnesses.

#

The first time it happened, I thought it could only be a psychotic break. It started in the car on the drive home. I was lucky—in the ER, mine wasn’t the doctor’s first case. She called it “quantum grief,” and she told me it was new. It would be harmless to the people around me but very much real, and something to keep an eye on. If I let it get too big, she said, it could swallow me, or I could fall into it, or…whatever, they aren’t really sure what happens, because the people who would know are gone.

My partner, gripping my fingers too tightly beside me, dropped a heavy breath as the doctor left the room. When I glanced over, his face was tilted not at me but upward. His eyes traced the patternless ceiling in jagged turns—it’d all progressed so quickly that in my panic, I hadn’t even thought to ask. That explained his unusual silence, the lack of reassurance throughout the appointment. I wondered but didn’t ask when it had started for him.

When we got home, we decided without words that we wouldn’t hide it here. We put the fragments back in place together, with faces wet and red and scrunched. I never know exactly what he’s working with, and he can’t see mine either. But sharing the space, the task, seems to lend a sense of calm in the nausea of it all, with the beckoning starless night staring down through the gashes in our popcorn ceiling.

It’s a strange kind of soothing when our pieces overlap.

#

The second night after, we made sure to get a nightlight, so we’d be able to spot the void in the dark—waking in a nest of smothering scraps had not been fun. The little lamp was shaped like an astronaut, and the helmet projected a swirling nebula onto the ceiling, with a range of selectable colors and lasered pinpricks for stars. I set it to red because that was supposed to be okay for sleep, though I don’t know how true that is really.

I wondered about the timing of all of this—I’d been mourning since well before we’d actually lost her. But at this point, I didn't want to look up what little research there was on the affliction. What I decided on my own was that at the moment of death, the energy from that separation of body from consciousness had been a catalyst to spark this nightmare—a parting curse she never would have intended on those she’d left behind.

I think we said all the right things as she went, and that she felt loved, and warm. But something had burst inside my chest between the sedation and when we finally left her body behind. Something had burst inside all our chests—mine, his, hers, even the doctor’s—at the exact same moment to break our skies.

#

It's hardest when I don’t see a big collapse coming. Those days—or, usually, nights—getting the fragments to stick again to the gaping holes above is a tedious, irritating task. Instead, when it’s been building for too long, and I have a few hours to spare, I prefer to schedule it.

I’ll take her bag of ashes out of the ornately carved box, and without even meaning to, I’ll rub my fingers over the smooth plastic like she can feel it. Like it’ll help. The void overhead will yawn wide, and I’ll luxuriate in its cruel pull as my mouth tugs into the ugliest, wettest cry I’ll have allowed in weeks. The contents of my stomach will threaten to rise through my swollen throat, burning up into the nothing—

If I forget to get back up, lost pleading with the ever-expanding darkness, my partner will find me on the floor when he gets home. He’ll wrap his arms around my shoulders, the pressure in his fingertips a reminder: don’t go. He’ll help me put away what’s left of her. Then we’ll scrounge on our knees together, scooping everything that fell into our shirts, pockets, just piles if it’s too much. He’ll bring in the stepladder.

It will take some time.

#

On the beach, my pockets fill, and I let them. The night-like wounds above chip away at the sunset, but they aren’t too wide today—I don’t worry. I keep the rise and fall of my chest as even as I can.

I sneak a look to my left, and beside me, my partner’s jaw is set while he imitates a past version of himself, propped casually on a vinyl-laced chair on the sand. Along the shoreline in front of us, a staggered parade of life roves in gleeful little packs, punctuated by laughter and barks and screams. I can’t see his eyes, but his mirrored sunglasses trace the movements of the ones who remind him the most. They’re the same ones I can’t stop following either.

I wonder if our voids look the same, with the sky above peeled away. I wonder if his beckons him like a silver-tongued siren as relentlessly as mine calls for me.

© 2026 Lex Chamberlin