Esther Mercer 15th march 2004
Esther Mercer did not see herself as a bad mother, simply a holy one. She was a woman raised by the church and fulfilled her duties to the world, bringing up 2 children. A lovely son and a daughter.A lovely son, who, was given God’s toughest battle and died, leaving the daughter as the only survivor in a car crash.
Esther grieved her son—her Isaac—with a depth that frightened even her. Isaac had been the golden child, bright as morning, steady as scripture. Her husband loved him openly, proudly; Esther loved him fiercely, possessively, as if he were a living verse granted to her alone. Losing him felt like losing the sun. She moved through their home like a ghost, clutching his sweater, his Bible, the dent in the couch where he’d fallen asleep doing homework.
But grief, in Esther’s world, was required to kneel before faith. And faith meant accepting what she was taught: God does not make mistakes.
So in the hollowed-out quiet after the funeral, Esther tried to understand.
If one child of hers was meant to die, should it not have been Keir?
Keir—the fragile one. Keir, who trembled through infancy, who the doctors warned might not make it past Esther’s womb. First the heart murmurs. Then the lungs. Then the quiet fear in every nurse’s voice whenever her name was spoken. For months, Esther had prayed for her daughter like one prays over a burning candle—hoping it wouldn’t go out before morning.
But Keir survived. Against medicine. Against expectation. Against God’s, what? Plan? Judgment? Mercy?
The questions lodged deep.
Sometimes, in Esther’s darkest, whispered thoughts—thoughts she would never confess to a priest—she wondered if Keir had somehow switched fates with Isaac. If the wrong child had been taken. If the wrong child had lived.
Esther shook these thoughts away whenever they came, pressing a palm to her chest, whispering, Forgive me, Lord, forgive me, as if she could scrub the blasphemy from her bones.
But every time she looked at Keir—the daughter who lived, the daughter who wasn’t meant to—Esther felt a quiet, complicated ache.
Not hatred.
Not love, either.
Something colder. Something watchful.
Something like suspicion in a prayer.
“Paul,” Esther called for her husband, a week after Isaac had died. She was cooking pot roast, Isaac’s favorite.“Keir. Has she gone to confession, yet?”
Paul entered the kitchen quietly, moving like a man whose movements had been drained of purpose. His eyes were rimmed red; he had not slept properly since the accident. He removed his reading glasses and yawned, “No, we have been busy with the funeral preparations after all.” Esther held the knife she was holding tighter, like if she let go, she would weep.
“That is no excuse,” she murmured. “At her age, she should make an effort to be closer to God, before, it’s too late. After all, she switched destinies with her brother.”
Paul looked at Esther as if she had gone mad. She rolled her eyes, “Don’t act as if you don’t think so too, it should have not been Isaac who died.”
“It shouldn’t have been either, but God makes no mistakes.” Paul said.
Esther laughed—not a joyful sound, but a thin, exhausted exhale that scraped like something hollow. “Yes. Exactly. He does not make mistakes.” She turned back to the pot roast, her movements too precise, too deliberate, as if the right arrangement of carrots and potatoes might unlock divine clarity. “Which means Isaac’s death… meant something.”
Paul felt nausea roll through him. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It meant tragedy, Esther. It meant a horrible accident. It meant—”
“It meant a lesson.” Her voice rose, then sharpened. “It meant a message. God took Isaac because His will demanded it. The boy was pure, faithful—ready.”
“Esther…” Paul’s voice faltered. “Please. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“To myself?” She spun to face him. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but dry. Exhausted, but burning. “This is not being done to me. This is what I know. What I feel in my bones.” She pressed a hand to her chest, trembling. “Isaac died with grace. He died because God called him home.”
Paul closed his eyes.
“And Keir lived,” Esther continued, lower now, as though speaking to the floor. “Keir lived despite every warning the doctors gave us. Despite every complication in my womb. Despite choking in her sleep, and the seizures, and the surgeries.” Her jaw tightened. “She walked out of that car, Paul. With God’s breath still in her lungs.”
“She was buckled in,” Paul said softly. “Isaac wasn’t.”
“That is the earthly explanation,” Esther snapped. “I am speaking of the divine.”
Paul’s mouth opened, then closed again. Because even if he wanted to refute her—wanted badly to push back—some dark corner of his grief-whitened mind whispered the same question he’d been avoiding:
Why her? Why not him?
And that whisper was enough to keep him silent.
Esther smoothed her apron, regaining composure. “She owes God an explanation. We owe Him thanks.”
“Thanks?” Paul repeated, horrified. “For this?”
“For clarity,” Esther said. “For revealing the truth of our children. Isaac fulfilled his purpose. Keir… has yet to.”
Paul frowned. “She’s only fourteen.”
“And she has already lived through death twice.” Esther turned back to the stove, lifting the pot lid. Steam rose around her, fogging her glasses. “That gives a person responsibility.”
Paul stared at her. At the tension in her shoulders. At the way she seemed held together by faith and grief in equal measure.
Finally, he said quietly, “She’s not ready to talk about the accident.”
“She must,” Esther replied. “She was the last person to see Isaac alive.”
“That doesn’t mean she did anything wrong,” Paul said, but his voice was thin—halfhearted even to his own ears.
Esther set the lid down with a soft, decisive clink. “We don’t know that.”
Paul winced. “Esther…”
“We don’t,” she repeated. “Not yet.”
The kitchen fell into a heavy silence, thick as burial dirt.
And down the hall, sitting on the staircase with her knees pulled to her chest, Keir listened. Her face pale, her breath unsteady.
For the first time since the accident, she wished she had died. Not because she wanted to be gone.
But because it was suddenly clear to her:
Her mother would’ve understood it better.
31st March 2004.
Things began to splinter in the Mercer household on a damp Wednesday afternoon, when Keir refused—again—to go to communion.
She stood by the front door with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her backpack still slung over one shoulder from school. Her hair was unbrushed, her eyes rimmed with exhaustion. She looked fourteen in the most heartbreaking sense: too young for grief, too old to hide from it.
“I’m not going,” she said quietly, not meeting either parent’s gaze.
Esther’s lips tightened into a pinched, trembling line. “You are going. The sacrament is not optional, Keir. Not after—” She stopped herself, swallowing the name she no longer knew how to speak without shaking.
But Paul, usually the quieter one, the gentler, was the first to snap.
Maybe it was the way Keir’s voice wavered. Maybe it was how she flinched when Esther stepped toward her. Maybe it was the unspoken terror, festering inside him since the funeral, that the family was slipping beyond his ability to protect or steady.
But whatever the cause, something in him broke.
“Enough,” he said sharply. “We are doing everything, everything, to hold this family together, and you can’t even do this one thing?”
Keir squeezed her eyes shut. “I just… I don’t want to sit there while everyone looks at me like I did something. I can’t—”
“I’m not going,” she whispered again.
And that was it.
The moment was small and stupid and petty—exactly the kind of moment that ruins everything.
Paul’s eyes flicked toward the living room shelf, where Keir kept the handful of delicate porcelain figurines Isaac had given her over the years—tiny animals, saints, a little winged angel missing one paint stroke on its cheek.
He’d never touched them before.
But grief is a hot, unreasonable thing, and it had been burning him hollow.
Before thinking, before even breathing, Paul grabbed the nearest object—an old loafer he hadn’t worn in months—and flung it across the room.
Not at Keir.
But toward the shelf.
The shoe hit the wood with a dull, violent thud.
One figurine—a tiny ceramic fox with a chipped tail—toppled, hit the floor, and shattered into a scatter of bright, jagged pieces.
The sound it made was impossibly loud. A gunshot in a quiet house.
Keir froze.
Esther inhaled sharply but said nothing.
Paul stared at the broken shards on the floor, the shoe lying inches away, his face going pale. He looked horrified—at the noise, at himself, at what he’d done.
“Keir,” he started, voice breaking, “I didn’t— I wasn’t aiming— I just—”
But she was already running up the stairs, barefoot, shoulders tight and shaking. The kind of run that wasn’t meant to escape a person, but a moment.
A truth.
A breaking.
Her bedroom door slammed shut.
The house fell into a silence so sharp it could cut skin.
Esther’s voice finally came, low and brittle as ice. “Paul. What have you done?”
Paul didn’t answer. He simply stared at the broken fox, as if hoping it would stitch itself back together. As if that could undo the fracture in the room—between him and Keir, between him and the memory of the son he’d lost.
He knelt slowly and picked up one of the shards. It sliced his thumb, drawing a thin line of blood.
He didn’t feel it.
Upstairs, behind a locked door, Keir muffled her sobs into her pillow, clutching the remaining figurines to her chest like they were the only things left in the world that wouldn’t break when touched.
And downstairs, in the kitchen, Esther stirred her tea with a hand that trembled only once.
“In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.” Paul began closing his eyes, as he heard the tears of his daughter, “Forgive my innocent daughter, lord, for she has sinned in her refusal to go to church and help my son forgive me for destroying his collection he had given to his sister.”
Esther continued to stir her tea. “Let’s go, darling, we don’t want to be late for church. Keir will come around.” She said, leaving the tea half filled. “God knows your heart. Isaac is a generous child, and in heaven, he shall forgive you of course.”
aah bored so decided to do a little of this
