I am leaning over a pan on a Friday afternoon making dinner for later. The sun has turned its spotlight on the kitchen. I live inside sick heat. New Ethel Cain bleeding out the speakers — been listening to this one song, Nettles, on repeat. It’s just the way she sings, like she’s sorry she has to tell you this. That particular way she breathes in or out on every word like she’s pulling on the reins. Breathless slowcore storytelling, it’s anaesthesia, and every song is counting me down to sleep.

The music steeps the kitchen in an atmosphere it doesn’t suit. A theatre with the roof blown off. One 8 minute song ends and another hums on, and I stir for so long I pick up my phone and begin to pass through apps and tabs and tilt my phone away from that flat afternoon glare and — ah — it becomes one of those moments that I might always remember, you know, where I was, what I was doing, because I see a new email in bold and then something else is making my body want to fall.

I recently put in a freedom of information request to Merseyside Police because I needed to know how a thirteen-year-old could get beat up by her father, photographed in the hospital, and still have all charges dropped and life return to… well, it wasn’t exactly normal. When I moved back home he made me sleep on their bedroom floor like a dog until he was sure I wasn’t a suicide risk. Like a man walking down the street and telling a girl to smile even though he’s just punched her in the back of the head, none of it made any fucking sense. Not that power needs to make sense. Power is just power.

I brought myself into the next room and read all 10 pages. Time-travel to 2008 when I read my own statement. Sad, sad treasure to find a text message reprinted in caps lock that I’d sent a friend asking for their help. I didn’t cry for long because I wanted to read the whole thing a second time, and because I was awake now, blood changed for adrenaline. I got some answers, new questions, and this strange vindication that: it was even worse than I’d remembered. Memory like a third person walking down the street trying to get in the way of me and that vile man.

A witness on the police report wasn’t enough to stop the police from putting me back in that house where I was seasick for the rest of my childhood. I thought about how people who have experienced trauma at a young age are more at risk of developing chronic illnesses, and how I’m nearing five years of Long Covid, sick with dysautonomic nerves that make it hard to stand for a long time in the — ah —

— time it took me to return to 2025, that dinner was all dried out.

In the weeks that followed, I listened to that new Ethel Cain album every day. When I came home from Rough Trade with the vinyl for ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,’ (trying hard not to think about old things because there are still new days to make), I explained to my boyfriend that Ethel Cain isn’t even a real person! Ethel Cain is a character the Tallahassee singer Hayden Anhedönia created! Willoughby is another character in the story and, actually, this album and her 2022 LP ‘Preacher’s Daughter’ trace Ethel’s life and death and, god, she goes through it. She sings about relationships she can’t salvage and cycles of violence and how she wants to reject her family but knows she’ll always be made of them and her father’s abuse and —

it was all so obvious when I said it out loud. I was just begging someone else do that thinking for me? I always find the art I need. These two albums are like the soundtrack to a play that doesn’t exist. If books could shiver. If films could retch. If churches were for people with broken hearts, the songs that’d cry down the walls. I hear them sliding down the walls of this house I rent. I lay in bed last night reading her lyrics like a novel when the cat came home past midnight bleeding from a paw. We licked our wounds side by side while the music made a nest of the dark.

And I am still at the bottom of the well. I don’t want to speak to the devil, and I’m not interested in the witness, and I don’t think the police are real. Michael told me ‘anhedonia’ is the inability to feel pleasure, and when I wonder what would make me feel good, the only thing I really want to do is write my way through the story I’ve been dragging behind me for 17 fucking years. Write. But I can’t just list details and be done with it, because I saw that report and it’s obvious the truth means nothing.

I listen to Ethel Cain and I think: art means something, though. I listen and find I want my own Ethel Cain. I imagine stitching a doll and dropping her from a great height into the black holes redacted across the police report. She makes me want to write fiction so that some proxy soul can go through these things, and I can climb back onto dry land. I could make characters of these people I don’t wanna know. I could discharge the electricity that makes radio waves of my nerves. I could take it out on the reader, like she guts the listener. I could count down from ten until you sleep.

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