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The Alcove and The Afterglow
Chapter 1
“Searching For Something”
Her
She’s been awake for a while, lying still beneath the weight of unfamiliar blankets in a room that smells like lavender soap, vanilla candles and someone else’s memories. The silence is too complete and it takes a moment for her to realise that this means it’s still too early for the owners to have emerged from their private area of the B palms turned outward. Trying to ease the tension climbing your neck toward a full-blown headache.
The movement pulls something tight in your lower back and you breathe through it, rolling your shoulders a little to help your muscles unclench a little faster. You hold the stretch a moment longer, then let it go with another sigh.
It’s not even lunchtime. And already you feel like you’ve been here for days.
The desk in front of you is a scattered graveyard of yellowed inventory sheets, faded purchase records, and the mess of notes and plans for the new exhibition you’re slowly, slowly, bringing to life. It had been weeks of reorganising and cataloguing, trying to bring some sort of order to the chaos masquerading as an archive while identifying the pieces that would fit with the vision in your head. But it was all starting to come together now. Finally.
It had all started with a small cigar box tucked away at the back of a steel cabinet you’d had to break into because the keys had long ago disappeared, buried in the corner of a storeroom that probably hadn’t been catalogued ever. Inside the cigar box were dozens of letters, one woman writing to another. The types of letters that would have idiot historians classifying them as ‘great friends’ but that anyone with half a brain would immediately recognise for what they were.
Longing wrapped in domestic updates. Tenderness folded into weather reports and travel plans. Intimacies dressed in the mundane fabric of living a life you’re pretending is more than just quiet despair.
Careful words. Coded truths.
You haven’t been able to find out anything about who the two women were, despite your best efforts. There’s nothing unique about these letters, you’d found others almost exactly like them as you’d dug through the archives. And some had even been a lot more blatant and obvious about what the writers were feeling, wishing for, fantasising about. So, you don’t know why these particular letters struck you the way they did–but they did. You’ve read them all. More than once.
Maybe it had been the photograph tucked between the carefully opened envelopes. Casual at first glance — just two women mid-laughter at what looks like a party. But their bodies are too close, their eyes too aware of each other. It looks like the camera caught them seconds after pulling apart from an embrace neither wanted to break.
You don’t know why it matters so much. But it does.
The museum has never done an explicitly queer exhibit before, though it’s always been about the invisible and the forgotten. This story fits. Whether the family likes it or not. They can mutter in the group chat all they want. You’ve been tasked with reviving the museum and this is exactly the type of exhibit that would get people talking. So, you’re not asking for permission.
You glance at the bank of monitors lining the wall–half out of habit, half as an excuse to let your eyes rest. A moment of rest before returning bayburt escort to drowning in the paper tide.
That’s when you see her.
Standing in what you’ve dubbed the west gallery is a woman in jeans and a ribbed top. Hair loose and curling down her back, the strands catching the light from the high windows in a way that makes you pause. She’s still. Not just not moving — but entirely, completely still. Like the moment has folded itself around her, freezing her in time like the subjects in the photos she’s looking at.
Of all the displays and collections in the museum, this one is your favourite. You remember the first time you saw the collection: sensual, gritty, and too beautiful to be comfortable. A fine art style series of photographs featuring sex workers. Framed in shadow and neon, back against a wall with one leg propped to reveal a flash of thigh, leaning through the window of an obviously expensive car, scantily clad and hip cocked, cigarette dangling from fingers and in the background the blurred figures of a man and woman clearly striking a deal. And the final image: a woman seated alone on a curb, elbows propped on knees and high heels dangling from her fingertips, her head bowed into her arms and a curtain of hair swinging forward to hide her face. Anonymous, painful, stark reality by the soft glow of a streetlamp.
Your personal touch was the addition of a poem you’d seen years before on Tumblr, now handwritten by the poet on raw cotton paper and framed for all to see. If the photos themselves didn’t drive home the message that this was never a life that anyone wanted then the poem would.
The woman on the monitor is reading it now. You can tell by the way her weight has shifted forward slightly, arms folded loose across her stomach, head tilted just enough to expose the line of her neck.
There’s something about the way she’s holding herself–like if she moved too quickly the moment would crack.
You glance toward the time stamp in the corner of the screen. Nearly lunch. You’ve still got so much to do, both for the new exhibition and simple day to day admin. Your hand moves to the mouse, zooming in on the display. The monitor shows her from the side, what you can see of her expression showing that she gets it — she’s feeling everything you did when you first encountered the photos. More even.
You find yourself leaning in. Wanting to be closer.
She tilts her head again, one hand moving to push her curls back over her shoulder where they tumble like spilled ink. Your eyes follow the arc of it, trace the exposed line of her throat. Her arms are crossed loosely over her stomach, not in defence but in some tender instinct — like she’s trying to hold something in.
You’ve watched plenty of visitors on these monitors. School groups. Couples. Retirees wandering in for something to do. You’ve seen people cry. You’ve seen them laugh too loud, roll their eyes, scroll their phones. But this is different. She’s different.
There’s a stillness in her that draws you in. A kind of brittle gravity carefully contained by a shell of manufactured calm.
You wonder what brought her here.
You wonder what she sees in those photographs that makes her lean forward instead of away.
You wonder how long she’ll stay.
Something flickers in your chest. Sharp and warm, you let it curl, low and slow, somewhere beneath your ribs.
On the bilecik escort monitor, she turns slightly, revealing more of her profile. Her lips are moving and you suspect she’s mouthing the words of the poem to herself. Your pulse shifts as you watch her, like her silent words have cast a spell aimed directly at you, the pen suddenly in your hand tapping against the desk in time with thoughts that bristle uncomfortably.
She’s probably just passing through, the typical curious tourist, like so many others.
She’ll see what there is to see and never come back.
Still, your eyes stay on the screen even after she finally steps out of frame and the small office feels suddenly, shockingly quiet.
You glance back at the notes scattered across your desk. Try to remember what you were doing before she appeared. Before something inside you shifted. You pick up the pen again, but this time it’s not to make a list or circle a line of inventory code. You write one word in the corner of the page, almost absently.
“Letters.”
You’re not thinking of the ones in the cigar box. Not anymore. It’s just the shape of the word, as if writing it out was a spell that might call her back into view.
You stare at it a moment longer, then set the pen down carefully and reach for the folder closest to you. There’s still a full afternoon ahead. Still so much to do.
But all you can think about is the woman in the west gallery. And how still she was. A musing smile plays across your lips as you wonder what she’d look like if something…someone…managed to break through that shell of hers and release whatever it was holding in check.
Her
She’s not sure how long she’s been standing there. Frozen in place by feelings that are both too much and not enough all at once.
The ache behind her ribs is delicate and precise, like a bruise blooming slowly with her heart at the centre. The photographs had hit her hard, all synthetic glamour bottled like cheap perfume and reckless bravado disguising the mourning for a life never lived but desperately wanted.
It’s the poem that lingers though, taking root somewhere deep. Each verse unfurling a silent tendril of something that cuts as it wraps around her bones, tightening with each breath.
She exhales, long and low, and lets her eyes trace the words one more time — softly, like a hand brushed soothingly over bruised skin.
Tousled Angels
Midnight drapes itself along a back road
That knows not to ask what broken
Dreams led you here
And uncaring of the faults in the
Stardust of our souls,
A street light flickers a halo on the heads
Of nobodies whose choice would be
Anything but this
Had they been given it instead of the
Wounds that trademark them
As warriors
But they were born on the
Wrong side of lucks draw for that
And so here they are
Jaded eyes and cherry lips
Renting happiness by the hour
Practising the artistry of the ending
And laughing away the idea of perfection
Looking anything like them
Concrete angels
Who just wanted somebody bingöl escort to die for
Back when the hearts on their sleeves still
Believed in forever
Before they knew anything about
The business of saving us
From the loneliness of ourselves
Who have never seen how the neon
Fantasies of a thousand men
Gild their tousled wings
In forgotten hope
She hadn’t expected this.
She hadn’t expected any of it if she was honest. The wind had been moody as she walked, strong enough that it had kept blowing her curls across her face. But she hadn’t minded. Just wrapped the ends around one hand, enjoying the way the town had slowly unravelled before her.
Quiet streets and uneven sidewalks, pale succulents blooming along the fences, stubborn old trees whose roots cracked the surrounding pavement in quiet rebellion, sun half-hidden behind a scrim of cloud. The buildings had become older as she followed the map on her phone toward her destination. Quieter. The sort that slouched into their own shadows.
The house itself was stunning. High stone walls almost completely overgrown with ivy, a brass plaque with the name etched in slanted cursive beside a gate that had sighed softly when she’d pushed it open. Like it still remembered almost rusting shut with how long it had stood unused and was glad to be serving its intended purpose again. Tall windows that looked out over small flower beds surrounding the building, and a massive medieval looking wooden door complete with weathered ironwork standing invitingly open.
Inside was something else entirely.
Room after room unfolding like a whisper. Or a memory. Or both. Each one told a different kind of story, all strung together without any kind of logic. A series of confessions arranged not by era or value, but by some feeling they’d invoked in whoever had put each display together. A home for all the types of things leftover from an estate sale. Things that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. The misnamed. The misremembered. The misplaced.
Anonymous family photo albums next to a row of discontinued perfumes that had long since lost their scent. A collection of matchbooks from clubs and bars, open to reveal the phone number scrawled on the inner flap and a room with nothing but shoes of all shapes and sizes, all worn and beautifully ruined.
A hallway practically wallpapered with the childish art that had once decorated fridge doors and classroom walls leading to a space overflowing with paperbacks given as gifts, sometimes multiples of the same copy, complete with a message from the giver scrawled on the first page.
A pile of recipe books, battered and outdated, on a table beside a shoe box of ticket stubs. A packed suitcase found in a train station locker and never claimed. Another room crammed with every instrument you could imagine, all broken and damaged beyond repair.
A wall of Polaroid portraits — all featuring homeless people, migrants, sex workers, runaways and each with a short written or recorded response to the question ‘How did you end up here?’ Sometimes one sentence, sometimes a whole story.
There might not be any logic to any of it, but she could feel what it was all trying to say. That even though each item might once have been deliberately concealed, erased, coded, overlooked, or just forgotten — someone had loved them so much that they’d given each one a new home where they could live forever in the light.
She continues her slow wandering, eventually ending up back near the entrance lobby. She pauses, eyes catching on a small sign tacked beside an old banister.
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