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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Cute-Blueberry-1133 on 2024-09-16 02:44:05+00:00.

Conversation Hearts: Part 3

Previous Update: Longing with Teeth

Sorry for the delayed update, I think I’m going to have to split this post into two parts as, evidently, I have exceeded the character limit. It has been a long week. We had a bit of a scare with the baby. Everything’s fine now. I had some light spotting the other night. I’m not all that shaken anymore, but it freaked Johnny out real good. The doctor says everything looks healthy. He even let us listen to the heartbeat for reassurance, though I think that was just to make Johnny stop crying. A little blood is supposed to be normal at this point in a pregnancy, the cervix is becoming tender or something. I don’t know, I stopped listening after he said the baby was healthy, everything after that was placation. All the doctor’s mambo-jumbo didn’t seem all that important to me, but Johnny ate it up. Honestly, I might start sending him to appointments without me, cause I certainly didn’t need to be there for most of that with the way he and the doctor got on. On the bright side, they put me on pelvic rest, so I guess that’s one less wifely duty to worry about. 

I fucking hate my life. 

Not actually. I’m super excited to be a mom, or literally anything other than “just Johnny’s wife”. This town is going to kill me. Sorry for the rant, I’m kind of struggling to adjust to the idea of parenthood, or maybe it’s just the idea of parenting with him. Please ignore me. My life is wonderful and I couldn’t ask for a more attentive husband, I’m just tired. Been tired for years and it hasn’t killed me yet so I doubt it will kill me now. Don’t worry.

Mags I miss you, so if you’re reading this please stay away. I am hormonal as all hell and I don’t think I have the bandwidth to chase you off if you come back.

Our town was the type where most folks didn’t know nearly enough about birth control to keep their families from growing like weeds well beyond the borders of their houses. It was the perfect breeding ground for religious fanaticism when most kids were married by twenty and raising-up a new generation of followers before the ink could dry on their childhoods. It didn’t help that no one ever seemed to leave. Year after year me and Mags waited for our turn, for our houses to fill with laughter and little feet but they never did. We were stuck, alone with each other, locked into our age-appropriate activities without any older siblings to teach us the lore of the town. So we started making our own kind of folklore. 

Mags would make up stories, at first silly little things like a baby raccoon who got adopted by the king and dressed in fineries. Sometimes her tales were closer to the truth. A queen who would spend hours in the library talking with the handsome scholar, whispering to him from time to time when she thought her husband wasn’t looking. Dead princesses who waited by wells for their living little sisters to come play with them. A mother who had been so taken with the world she didn’t notice when all her children left her one by one until she was alone in her huge house. That one had always seemed oddly sad to me, but knowing what I do now I just feel sorry for Mags. I knew her home life wasn’t the best but to be forced to keep secrets so young, it’s no wonder she never learned how to tell the truth. 

Back then Mags had all the words and I just did my best to capture her wild imagination on the paper. I had nicer spelling and handwriting than most of the others in our grade, but as the year went on it became increasingly obvious that my perceived prodigy was failing. I had no innate talent for academics, only the little step-up my mother had given me by starting my education earlier than most. I knew the game wouldn’t be half as fun if I wasn’t useful to her so I put everything I had into learning how to draw. I like to think I got halfway-decent at it. The kids at the school used to think so anyway, but then again when you’re a kid it’s easy to find wonder in the world of adults. It made them happy at the least.

Mags and I kept to ourselves in those early months, not necessarily by choice, but we were used to isolation and things were not nearly as lonely when there were two of us. The tight confines of our friend group didn’t bug us much. We were not welcome in the typical liminal spaces of childhood so we found our places to settle away from the spiteful eyes of the town. There was a small river valley in the forest that brushed up against the border of suburbia. The drop wasn’t large, maybe ten feet of high-piled boulders at the edge of the river’s tempting expanse, and on a good day, a small child could almost think they could clear the jump to the other bank. We never tried, but I can’t say we were never tempted to, the only thing that dissuaded us was the turbulent flow of the river and a story born so early in our friendship that neither of us could quite remember if it was really ours or some old relic of the town. 

According to the story the river had a hunger, or maybe the river was an embodiment of hunger. It’s been years so you’ll have to forgive my imperfect memory. Whatever the case, the important thing to know was that the river was responsible for swallowing up the weeping dead girls of the town. According to the story, there were two little girls— who may have been sisters but probably weren’t— who lived on the stubborn edge of the forest where the trees grew so thick the town had never managed to cut them back. It was the last bit of unbroken wilderness in the quickly spreading melancholy of industrialization and those two little wisps made their home at its mocking edge inviting in whatever primordial evils slumbered at the forest’s heart.

The water was higher then. So high that the jagged rocks at the river’s bed, that gnashed at the water like hungry teeth, were nearly completely covered. Not lying in wait, but still thunderstruck with that terrible hunger. The river was a gentle bounty that raised the girls when their parents couldn’t be bothered to. It gave them delicate, salty fish and sweet crawdads to eat, clear clean water to drink, and a lovely melody of singing streams to listen to once they had had their fill. 

In many ways, the river was their mother, which might be why they were called sisters. Their lives were simple and sweetly mild back then. They could spend their days in meadows with berry-smeared faces, hair in wild tangles, and come home as the least burdenful children of their families with their full bellies and pretty faces. They were content. They wanted for nothing and in return, the river took nothing from them. Which is why the first dead girl was such a shock. It had been a temperate, sunny day, so perfect it was almost boring. The girls as always were at the river’s bank soaking up the rays of summer and chasing dragonflies along the water. 

It happened when the cracked egg of the sun sizzled high in the sky, the girls were so lost in themselves that they forgot who they were entirely. In their games of chase, it wasn’t clear what they were chasing, or perhaps what was chasing them. They were in stride with all of the insects and all of the birds unsure who should follow who. So, they just ran in the sun, overjoyed to have bodies that could run on such little legs when one of the girls, the taller one, was overcome by a sharp, hot pain in her foot. And then another, and then another. Her senses were overwhelmed by saccharine and gold, and above all else that terrible, droning pain. The younger girl could only watch as thousands of angry bees overwhelmed her friend forcing her into a blind stumble until her heel went over the edge of a rocky bank and she was swallowed whole by the river. She watched her friend’s surprised face from under the glassy surface as the girl didn’t even try to fight, instead smiling, twisting in pain, screaming, laughing, clawing at her throat, and floating with her arms out like an angel. Filling her lungs with fresh clear water until her body stilled and the river went calm. 

By the time the smaller girl had returned with adults her friend’s body was picked clean of all but its bones which shone amongst the brightly colored river stones like gems. It was decided that there was no point in trying to retrieve a girl so scattered by nature. So there she remained one with the river that had raised her.

The smaller girl visited her friend as often as she could because— despite what the adults told her— she knew the other girl wasn’t gone. She had just changed shape, the same as the smaller girl would one day have to if she wanted to stay in the forest. The smaller girl grew up strange and pretty and the river grew with her pulling down the facade of soft waves to bear sharp, blood-hungry fangs rolling over a sandy tongue. The townsfolk might have whispered about how the girl would talk to the river when no one was looking, even dance with it, laugh with it, strip off her clothes, and frolic in her undergarments like a little girl on wobbly new limbs and throw her head back in a show of sharp teeth. They would say all of that if any of them had the guts to even get close to the forest after what happened. So the smaller girl spent her childhood alone, becoming plump wi…

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