A novel by Amanda Sarratore
Bella dies by suicide and enters a mythic underworld governed by movement, exchange, and cost. Her sister Rosie survives an overdose and remains in the living world — suspended, unmoored by guilt and unresolved grief. Told in alternating voices, the novel traces two parallel descents through systems that demand sacrifice for passage. When the sisters finally meet in a liminal space created not by death but by unfinished attachment, they do not offer redemption or rescue. They offer witness.
The porch was the last thing that made sense.
She was sitting in the rocker — their rocker, the one with the cracked armrest Mama never fixed — and the sky looked wrong. Not wrong like weather. Wrong like someone had painted it from memory and gotten the colors slightly off. A bruised-plum sky stretched overhead, bleeding into something darker at the edges, and the air smelled like woodsmoke and copper pennies and something underneath both of those things that she couldn't name but her body recognized.
"Bella."
She turned. Nobody was there. But the voice had been so close she could feel the breath of it on her neck, warm and damp, like a child whispering a secret.
"Bella, you have to get up now."
The rocker was still. The porch boards didn't creak. And that was the first wrong thing she noticed with her mind instead of her body: nothing here made sound unless it was speaking directly to her. The wind moved the trees but the leaves were silent. A bird crossed the sky but its wings cut nothing. The world was holding its breath.
Then she remembered.
Not all at once. It came the way water fills a crack — sideways, finding the lowest points first. The bathroom. The bottle. The way her hands had shaken and then stopped shaking. The way the light had looked on the tile, and how she'd thought, clearly and without panic: Oh. So this is what it feels like to choose.
The porch dissolved.
Not collapsed. Not shattered. Dissolved — the way sugar dissolves in hot water, the structure surrendering to something that had always been waiting to absorb it. The boards beneath her feet turned to dark silt. The railing unfurled into branches that weren't wood anymore but something between bone and root, pale and pulsing with faint light. The rocker simply ceased. And she was standing in a forest that had no sky, only a canopy so dense it created its own dark, and from somewhere deep inside the trees a sap glowed like lanterns, amber and slow, dripping from wounds in the bark.
Three words carved into the nearest trunk, the letters still wet:
Name what's real.
She pressed her fingers to the bark. It was warm. The sap stuck to her skin and wouldn't wipe off, and where it touched her she could feel something — not pain, not exactly, but a pressure, a knowing, as if the tree were reading her back.
"My name is Bella," she said. Her voice came out strange — layered, like two versions of herself were speaking a half-second apart. "And I am dead."
The forest leaned in.
The sap glowed brighter and the forest exhaled around her — a sound like a thousand held breaths releasing at once — and from somewhere far below, through root and rock and the deep black arteries of a world she was only beginning to understand, she heard it: a second heartbeat. Not hers. Slower. Angrier. Alive.