Mother returned from the grocery store, arms trembling from the sheer absurdity of her devotion—grocery bags heavy with cartons upon cartons of eggs. A fragile offering for a child long decomposed.

She placed them carefully on the stained kitchen table, her movements rehearsed, precise, as though she were maintaining a shrine rather than a home.

Without pause, she shed her rain-soaked garments for threadbare house clothes, cigarette already pinched between her lips. She muttered to herself as she approached the parlor—

"Alice, darling... Mommy's home. I brought you your favorites." Her voice, syrupy sweet yet corroded by madness, barely covered the sound of flies, their wings buzzing in harmony with the sound of flesh collapsing in on itself. The air was sick with decay, a miasma that oozed from Alice's lifeless, infested shell. The house reeked of denial made manifest.

Mother pulled the curtains aside, smoke curling from her lips, and gazed out the fogged window. That's when she saw her—a young woman, maybe mid-twenties, strolling on the pavement. The storm teased the air, rain beginning its descent like the sky itself wept. She was beautiful—achingly, insultingly alive. Skin unmarred, steps confident. Mother shook her head, dismissing the ripple of alien warmth that stirred beneath her ribs.

She was no pervert. No deviant.

And yet... she stared. Eyes hollow but hungry. There, in the rhythm of her dead heart, something tremored. A beat. One. And then... nothing. The rain masked her breath against the windowpane as the stranger passed by, the air between them thick with something unspoken, something unspeakable.