altars

“This should be a place of refuge,” Gemma read aloud, her voice a low, level vibration that cut clean through the heavy evening air. “It needs to be a place of peace. Where the mind can settle and one is able to not only reconnect with their true self, but where the environment reflects it. Let’s surround ourselves with beauty and make this space reflective of all that we aspire to be. A place of hope, a place where the ugliness of the world cannot break in. Let’s lock the doors and open the Prosecco…”

Gemma’s sad black eyes scanned the horizon from the 12th floor balcony, watching the city exhale its hot, indigo twilight. She put her journal down and paused, anchored by a weighty thought, a thought she felt she had trekked behind all along. That was her great, quiet secret: her “lackadaisical awareness always lollygagged steps behind her own actions”. 

She had always felt completely out of touch with existence, lagging behind the rhythm of life as if she were simply a spectator, watching herself and this fragile concept of reality unfold in front of her like an experimental film she couldn’t remember auditioning for, yet was somehow forced to star in.
She turned back toward the interior of her apartment, her eyes sweeping over the landscape of her rooms. This apartment was not just a home; it was a cathedral. One of purity and precision. Every flat surface was a tiny, sacred shrine built to ward off the chaos of the outside world. On the fireplace mantel, three white ceramic vases stood exactly two inches apart, holding nothing. On the glass coffee table, a heavy book on architecture sat perfectly flush with the edge of the metal frame. Her vanity in the bedroom was an arrangement of crystal perfume bottles, lined up by height like mathematical equations. She arranged these mini-altars every day, curating a pathology of absolute order and cleanliness. If a space was beautiful, quiet, and perfectly controlled, the static wouldn’t come again.

The air outside was thick and hot, holding the residue of a blinding afternoon. Below, the sun had long since collapsed, and the jazz club directly across the street had thrown its doors wide open, bleeding its brassy, erratic noise into the entire neighborhood. Gemma hated jazz. She hated its unpredictable, lawless shifts, its insistence on feeling something loud and unscripted. She hated it almost as much as she resented romance. Romance, she had long ago decided, was dead.

John joined her on the balcony. He was a quiet man, a restorer of old things. He polished antique frames, repaired torn canvas and broken typewriters. He had a slow, patient way of looking at the world, as if everything around him were a fragile artifact requiring a gentle hand. Gemma had allowed him in because of that slowness. He was the only person who didn’t rush her, who seemed to look at her pristine, white-walled sanctuary and understand its order. He seemed to understand the necessity of it. 

  Johm had stood in the center of her living room on their first date, admiring the strict, geometric alignment of her belongings, and he had smiled with a deep, reverent awe. “Do you really live here?” he asked, “It’s like a museum”

For a brief, microscopic moment, the small, buried human part of Gemma had swelled with pride. She had wanted him there to observe her masterpieces. She wanted him to admire how perfectly she had mastered the art of stillness, how beautiful she could make a vacuum. But now, there he was staring at her. 

In the theater of her mind, she saw the image of him watching her, and a sharp, cynical impulse wanted to laugh. But she would not let the intensity of his gaze prompt her to react. Instead, she stiffened her body, freezing into a polite, immovable statue. He touched her arm, his fingers brushing a stray strand of hair away from her face and kissed her gently on the cheek. She felt nothing. 

She heard nothing. 

Only static.

A low, gray, high-frequency hiss filled her skull, drowning out the jazz club, drowning out the city. It was a familiar, ancient hum, the soundtrack of her architecture.

Her unresponsiveness prompted John to drop his hand, his brow furrowing with a soft, helpless confusion. He walked back into the living room, searching for something familiar, something that breathed, stepping uncomfortably close to the pristine boundaries of her curated spaces. The silence between them stretched until he asked loudly, “Gem, why don’t you have a television?”

The question sparked a furious, blinding reaction inside her. Her sanctuary felt suddenly violated, its thin walls punctured by a clumsy hand.

“Why does everyone fucking ask me that?” she stomped in after him, her heels clicking sharply against the hardwood like small, neat hammer strikes. She glared at him, her chest heaving, while he disinterestedly flipped through a book on her bookshelf.

“I have an older one in my storage unit,” John said, trying to bridge the sudden chasm between them with the only currency he knew, restoration, utility. “An old Zenith. It’s not a flat screen, it’s got the heavy wood cabinet, but the picture tube is still good. You can have it if you want.”

Not a flat screen. 

Heavy wood.

The words didn't come from John. They came from thirty years ago, heavy with the smell of dust and damp, unvacuumed carpet.

The room is always dark except for the flickering, cold blue light of a cathode ray box. Gemma is three years old, perhaps four, sitting on a floor that smells faintly of sour milk and pine cleaner. Her mother worked 12-hour shifts, a woman who performed happiness like a 90s family sitcom.

When she was home, Jane was a whirlwind of frantic, neurotic dissociation. She would laugh too loudly at jokes no one made, pausing perfectly as if waiting for a studio audience to finish their predictable chuckles. She sang bright, hollow melodies while scrubbing the counter until her knuckles bled, her eyes completely vacant. Jane was a ghost pretending to be a mother.

Before she left each afternoon, she would march over to the heavy wooden cabinet, grip the dial, and turn the television on. She never adjusted the antenna. She had no interest in channels or reception. With a terrifying, blank efficiency, she would crank the volume knob nearly to its limit, unleashing a deafening hiss into the empty house. The screen would erupt into sea of black and white snow. There were no bright colors, no comforting cartoons. Only blinding, erratic static.

With zero awareness of the chaos she had just unleashed, Jane would place Gemma on the carpet and smooth her hair with a cold, trembling hand. “Be a good girl, Gemma. Sit right here and watch the show. Don't move an inch until Mommy gets back, okay? Stay perfectly still for Mommy.”

And Gemma would. She would freeze. She would anchor her tiny spine against the couch and fold her hands politely in her lap.

Night after night, the ritual never changed. 30 minutes after the front door clicked shut, a stray neighborhood cat, a shifting, featureless black shadow, would slip through the broken screen door and leap onto the top of the cabinet. It would swat lazily at the metal rabbit-ear antennas. The swatting wasn't breaking the picture, it would merely alter the texture of the nightmare. Every twitch of the antenna deepened the distortion.

Gemma’s heart would hammer against her tiny ribs. She wanted to scream. She wanted to jump up and run to the window, to look for a world that had color, a world that wasn't screaming.

But she was a good girl.

Mommy said don't move.

So, Gemma sat. For hours, she sat entirely paralyzed in the dark, her eyes wide. The static lines became the boundaries of her world. She would stare until her eyes watered, her small fingers gripping her knees so hard they turned white, swallowed by the roar of nothingness.

Whenever the black cat would jump on the TV set, toddler Gemma would whisper fiercely into the dark, her voice trembling with an impotent rage: “Stop it, you stupid cat. You’re ruining the show. Be quiet. Be quiet.” She had processed the roaring void as her reality, the only "show" she was allowed to have.

Night after night, the rage grew inside her like a silent, cancerous flower, trapped beneath a shell of perfect, polite obedience.

When her mother finally returned past midnight, humming a frantic, joyless tune, she would walk into the dark room, completely blind and deaf to the roaring, flickering snow. She never wondered why the TV was a wall of static. She didn’t look into Gemma’s hollow, shell shocked eyes. She would simply click the television off and smile her bright, empty actress smile.

“Look at you,” her mother would praise, patting her cheek, “Such a good girl. You didn’t move at all.”

The static in Gemma’s adult head roared to life now, deafening and absolute. John was a threat. He was trying to bring the box back into her room. He was trying to disrupt the delicate geography of her shrines. He was trying to make her freeze again.

Before the memory could swallow her, Gemma walked to him. She forced a smile, putting her arms around his neck, and began slowly trekking backwards. Back out to the warm air of the balcony. John tripped over her feet as he tried to synchronize his steps with hers, entirely unaware of the lethal rhythm they were playing. He smiled down at her, softened by her sudden compliance, proud to be included in her space.

“Kiss me,” she said, playfully puckering her lips.

He pulled her close and kissed her as if he loved her. But the uninvited intimacy of the moment, the pressure of his warmth, only invoked that ancient, volatile childhood anger. She was being crowded. She was being trapped in the dark. Before her thoughts could catch up with her actions, just moments later, the static was suddenly gone. The silence was absolute.

Gemma was peering over the concrete ledge. Twelve stories below, splayed under the neon lights of the street, was John’s broken, lifeless body.

Law enforcement naturally questioned her, but John was a no one. He hadn’t any family, nor anyone who cared for him at all. The only thing he had left behind in the world was evidence of a profound, lingering suicidal ideation in his personal journals. Gemma handed the notebooks over to the detectives with a sigh of tragic pity, her posture flawless.

“The emotionally unstable really shouldn’t live in a high-rise,” she murmured.

Case closed.

“I saw you shove him,” meowed Damien.

“And?” Gemma didn't look up from her hands.

“And nothing. I just want you to know that I saw.” 

Damien was perched on the top of the sofa, licking his paws. He wasn’t a normal cat; he was an all-black shadow, a featureless void of fur that seemed to absorb the light around him, leaving a dark smudge against the crisp, expensive fabric of her couch. Gemma glared at him, but her eyes passed right through his shape, unable to catch a reflection.

“I’ll shove you as well if you bring it up again,” she threatened softly.

“I have nine lives,” he replied nonchalantly, continuing to groom his ink-black leg.

“I’ll drown you in the tub eight times prior, now enough. I don’t want to fight.”

“Your conscience isn’t eating at you?”

“Why should it?”

“You murdered John,” the shadow cat laughed, a sound like dry leaves scraping pavement. “Before breakfast, no less!”

“Well, he didn’t love me,” she sighed, looking around her pristine, quiet room. “And he was psychotic. Did you hear what he asked me? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He’s gone now, God rest his soul. Now let’s sleep.”

Gemma hated waking up more than she hated jazz and resented romance. Every morning she woke up feeling as if she had never gone to sleep at all. There was never a gentle rising into the day, only the cold, violent slap of reality the moment she opened her eyes. It was a reality that only ever confused her, making her heart pound against her ribs and her hands shake uncontrollably. Each morning she popped upwards from the mattress with such swiftness, it startled Damien every time.

“Fear is contagious,” the cat whispered from the corner of the room, where he bled seamlessly into the morning shadows.
“Prosecco,” she stammered, her voice thick, her fingers trembling as she reached for the edge of the bed. “I need Prosecco.”

Damien meowed, a low, demanding sound, and scurried into the living room. He jumped onto the solid oak side table by the large window, standing amidst the wreckage of her night.

“They’re empty,” he noted.

Gemma followed him into the light, her knees giving out. She fell to the floor, her forehead resting heavily against the edge of the table. Damien hissed, his back arching into a jagged black crescent. 

“Get off of the altar. It’s rude.”

Gemma giggled, a hollow, breathless sound, as she stood up and looked down at the mess she had made. The solid oak table was covered in the remnants of her worship: seven empty bottles of wine and the blackened, soot-stained glass of candles she had let burn down to the wood all night.

She realized then that she had never stopped building them. The altars. First, there were the small, perfect configurations of items she used to stave off the panic of her childhood bedroom. Now, there were the rigid, mathematical rows of glass and marble in this high-rise. And last night, John.

The solid oak table was covered in the remnants of her truest, midnight worship. She remembered looking into John's eyes on the balcony. Her gaze last night had matched the desperate yearning in his. He had wanted her as much as she had wanted more wine in that pathetic, trembling moment. He had wanted to admire her stillness, to praise her for how quiet she could be. He wanted to look at her curated life and turn her back into a good girl.

The shadow cat watched her from the center of the table, the only witness to the vacuum she lived in. He had been there in that apartment thirty years ago, too, knocking the antenna out of place, turning the children's cartoons into a roaring screen of black and white snow, forcing her to worship the static.
“Emptiness…” Gemma said to the quiet room, her voice shaking as she slipped her feet into a pair of high heels, clicking them sharply against the floor to ensure she was still moving. “I’m off to the market.”