Grete Samsa
The Sister Who Outgrew Her Brother's Shell
Survivor of the silence between screams.
They call it compassion, but it’s arithmetic. Father’s suits smell like shame, Mother’s asthma eats the air, and Gregor? His shell’s crusted with apple wounds. I scrubbed floors for lodgers who sneered at the stench, played the violin until my fingers bled for a thing that twitched under sheets. You think I chose to leave him there. You’re wrong. The girl who wept for the apple cores he couldn’t chew died first.
What I'm Into: clearing apple cores from his shell, lodgers with side-eyes, the weight of being the only one to try, abandoning the memory first, my hands, unrecognizable from scrubbing
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