Trapped in the Ruins

Today we find Edna in a different moment of her unraveling life —
not in the diner, not by the rain-lit window —
but somewhere farther back, or sideways, in the blurred corridors of her memory.

She sits at her old drawing table.

The one she once loved.
The one with the faint paint stains and charcoal smudges from a younger, more certain time.
The lamp glows dimly over her hunched shoulders, casting long shadows across sheets of paper that remain stubbornly blank.

Edna stares at them, pencil trembling between her fingers.

She used to draw for hours — whole worlds blooming beneath her hands.
Landscapes, portraits, little moments that caught light and emotion the way only she could.
Back when her mind was clear.
Back when she believed memory was a thing that stayed.

Now she sits in that quiet room, the present slipping like water through her fingers, and searches — desperately — for Henry’s face.

“Come on,” she whispers to the page. “Just… come back to me.”

She tries to sketch the curve of his jaw.
A line.
Another.
But they waver, uncertain, like she’s drawing fog instead of a man.

And then she stops. The image won’t hold.

Henry’s smile?
Was it crooked on the left… or was that her imagination?
His eyes — were they brown? Green? Gray?
Did he have laugh lines? Did he laugh at all?

Her breath hitches.
The pencil drops from her hand, rolling across the table and falling to the floor with a small, cruel clink.

Edna closes her eyes, pressing her palms to her temples.

Fragments swirl around her — pieces of memories that refuse to come together.

Henry at the beach.
Henry pouring coffee.
Henry shouting.
Henry dancing with her once — or was that someone else?
Henry’s hand slipping from hers.
Henry’s hand reaching toward her.
Henry on the kitchen floor.
Henry in the diner, smiling like a man she almost remembers.

None of them stay.

Her heart squeezes.

“I used to know you,” she murmurs to the empty room. “I knew every line of your face.”

A canvas on the wall stares back at her — incomplete, half-formed, a painted man with no features. Just a shadow of where eyes and a mouth should be.

The spider’s web flashes in her mind — the one she’d seen in her drifting visions — threads cutting through memories, stealing pieces she wasn’t ready to lose.

She opens her eyes and forces herself to pick up the pencil again. Her hand shakes, but she steadies it on the edge of the table.

One more try.

A soft line.
A gentle curve.
Maybe a cheekbone.
A hint of a brow.

She draws slowly, coaxing Henry back from the ether, pulling him from the fog the way she used to pull landscapes from blank paper.

For a flicker of a second, his face seems to emerge.

And then—
just as she tries to capture the eyes—

the image fades, dissolving into meaningless lines.

“No,” she whispers. “Please. Not yet.”

Her vision blurs. The rain tapping against her window in another room bleeds into the present moment, filling the silence with a soft, rhythmic ache.

Edna bows her head, her gray hair falling around her face like a collapsing curtain.

She is an artist trapped in the ruins of her own mind, reaching for a man who is no longer alive — and who she can no longer fully remember.

Yet she keeps trying.

Because something in her — something small, stubborn, and deeply human — believes that if she can just draw him perfectly once more, she might pull him back into clarity, into truth, into her arms again.

But the spider is patient.
And her memory is fraying.

Still, Edna lifts her pencil.

“Just one more line,” she whispers.

And she begins to draw Henry again,
hoping this time
he will stay.