Content Warning: self-harm/cutting descriptions and some suicide discussion
When you see the thin red line along Olivia’s wrist, she is reaching for the salad bowl. The cut brands her pale skin like a signature in pink ink, its edges not yet settled into scar tissue.
The fork slips from your grip, clattering against the plate. The sound echoes in the small kitchen, its yellow walls press closer as air flees the room.
“What’s that?” Sharper than intended.
Olivia’s sleeve snaps down like a window blind. “Nothing.”
But your mind is already racing, connecting dots you’ve been too busy, too tired, too trusting to see. The bloodstains on Olivia’s school blouses blamed on nosebleeds. The way your daughter had started wearing long sleeves even on warm days. The extra time in the bathroom, door locked, water running.
“Show me your arms.” The voice that makes your junior colleagues straighten their spines.
“No.”
“Olivia!”
You’re rising, chair scraping against the lino. Between sink and table, you feel enormous, looming. Olivia stays seated, her dark hair a shield around her face.
“Mom.”
“Roll up your sleeves. Now!”
The silence stretches between you, filled only by the tick of the wall clock and the distant hum of traffic on Crumlin Road.
Olivia’s shoulders sag. She pushes up her sleeve, revealing marks scattered along her forearm like fallen eyelashes. Some are silver with healing against the freckled skin, others angrier, fresh and red-rimmed.
The breath rushes out of your lungs. Your knees go liquid and you grip the back of the chair to stay upright. This is your baby who used to chase butterflies in the back garden, who’d spent hours on the swing beneath the crab apple tree, pumping her legs as the branches creaked with laughter.
“Did you do this to yourself?” Broken whisper.
Olivia’s eyes meet yours for the first time in weeks and your stomach tightens. There’s no defiance or anger, just hollow exhaustion, too heavy for fourteen.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.” You move around the table, reach out, but Olivia flinches away. “Has someone put you up to this? Is this some kind of TikTok challenge?”
“God, Mom. You really don’t get it, do you?”
“Explain it to me.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like?” Your voice is rising, and Olivia flinches again. “Talk to me, love.”
Now Olivia is standing up, her chair toppling backward. She is all sharp angles and unfinished growth, her school uniform hanging loose.
“What’s the point? The world’s fucked anyway. Look around, the Earth is burning! Microplastics in our brains, rising seas. We’re all going to die whether I cut myself or not!”
Something wild and desperate unfurls in your chest. “You can’t have it all, Olivia. Which is it—burning or drowning?”
The words hang in the room like acrid smoke. Your daughter’s face crumples, her composure shattering like glass on stone.
“I hate you,” she whispers and she is running, footsteps thundering upstairs.
The house shudders with the slam of her bedroom door.
You stand in the quiet, hands trembling. The dinner abandoned on the table and outside, the sun is setting, painting the kitchen walls the colour of old bruises.
You climb the stairs, fingers trailing along the banister worn smooth by years of hands and knock gently on the door.
“Liv? Can we talk?”
Silence.
You try the handle. Locked.
“Livvy, please. I’m sorry I shouted. I shouldn’t have said that about burning and drowning. I…I was scared.”
Nothing.
You press your forehead against the wood, feeling every mistake you’ve made as a mother. Long hours at work leaving you too tired for conversations. Assuming Olivia’s silence was normal teenage behaviour. The bloodstains dismissed because it was easier than finding the truth. The daily machinery of single parenthood preventing you from seeing what was happening to your daughter.
“I love you. I want you to be safe.”
Nothing.
You go back downstairs and open your laptop, its blue glow harsh in the kitchen. The search terms foreign as you type: “teenage self-harm,” “cutting behaviour,” “suicide risk.” Websites that come up speak of pain you cannot fathom, offer explanations that are clinical and inadequate.
An article mentions Pieta House, “Therapy for Thoughts of Self-Harm,” with offices in Dublin. You bookmark the page. Professional help. Someone who understands what you clearly don’t.
You close the laptop and scrape the half-eaten dinner into the compost bin. Washing the dishes, you look out the kitchen window. Mrs. Murphy’s sheets are flapping in the evening breeze like mad ghosts. The crab apple tree stands bare branched against the sky, its trunk gnarled and bent. The swing is gone, taken down last winter, but the rope had left pale scars where it had rubbed for years.
By ten o’clock, the darkness has claimed the back garden.
You sit on the bottom stair, listening for any sound from Olivia’s room.
The silence gnaws at you. What if she has scissors up there? A kitchen knife smuggled in? What if your harsh words have pushed her past some invisible breaking point?
You climb the stairs again, faster this time, and pound on the door with both fists.
“Olivia? Answer me, please.”
Nothing.
Your chest tightens, and you press your ear to the door, straining for any sign of life. The silence feels deliberate, ominous.
“Olivia, if you don’t answer, I’m calling the guards.”
“Go away!” Your knees buckle with relief.
“Let me see you.”
“No. Leave me alone!”
You close your eyes, fighting panic. “I need to know you’re okay. I need to know you’re not going to hurt yourself.”
“I’m not going to kill myself, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Olivia’s voice is thick with tears and disgust. “I’m not going to make you that happy.”
“What?” You press both palms against the door, as if they could reach through the wood and touch your daughter’s face. “You think I’d be happy if you died?”
“You’d be free. You wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore.”
The words punch me.
“I would not be free,” you say. “I’d be destroyed. You’re the best thing I’ve ever done with my life, Liv. The best thing I ever will do.”
No response, but you can hear sobbing.
You slide down the door until you are sitting on the hallway floor. The carpet is flat, pile crushed down by years of daily traffic.
The house settles into an uneasy quiet, broken by the occasional moan of wind, tick of the heating pipes, hum of the refrigerator downstairs. A car passes outside, its headlights sweep across the hallway ceiling.
Through the landing window, you can see Crumlin streetlights, the orange glow turning the darkness not black but deep blue. The colour of Van Gogh’s Starry Night hanging on the wall. Its swirling sky moves in the shifting light with the turbulent energy within.
Olivia chose this print when she was ten. You remember her in the art store, studying the reproductions with serious concentration. She passed over the sunflowers and irises, the peaceful café scene, drawn instead to the wild night sky and the cypress tree reaching upward like a dark flame.
It looks like how I feel inside sometimes, she had said, and you’d bought it without a second thought.
The painting’s blue is nothing like real darkness. It is the colour of a night’s restlessness. The cypress a towering presence, solemn and unwavering while the sky churns around it. The tree stands guard over the sleeping village, its branches stretching toward the stars as if it could hold them steady.
Midnight comes and goes. You doze fitfully against the door. Your bare feet have gone cold, but you cannot bring yourself to leave. What if Olivia needs you? What if the silence means something terrible?
You wake with a start. Movement inside the room—footsteps, the creak of the bed. You press your ear to the door.
“Liv? Are you alright?”
No answer, but the sounds continue.
Your relief is so sharp it brings tears. You wipe them with your sleeve and settle back against the door. The Van Gogh print pulses in the dark.
Art historians call it a flame tree, reaching toward heaven. But you see a rooted guardian keeping watch while the world sleeps. People in their beds, trusting that morning will come, that the sky will stop spinning.
At three-fifty, you know the coffee maker’s red light will start blinking, you’d set the timer before dinner. A habit that started when Olivia was small and mornings came too early. Now she sleeps past noon on weekends, emerging with pillow-creased cheeks to test the kitchen air for safety.
You shift carefully, trying not to make noise. You stretch against your joints’ protest. Your neck has developed a crick from leaning against the door.
In the kitchen, you pour a mug of coffee, black and bitter. The liquid is hot, but you drink it anyway, burning your throat. The crab apple tree’s branches catch the moonlight. For a moment, you can see the swing that once hung there, can hear your daughter’s laughter in the night air.
In the living room, you pull one of Olivia’s hoodies around your shoulders. It smells of vanilla body spray and coconut shampoo. You bury your face in the soft fabric and allow yourself to cry.
The tears come in waves, each carrying a different fear. You have failed as a mother. This is your fault. The cutting is only the beginning. Your daughter will slip away from you, so far into her ache that you’ll never be able to reach her.
The night stretches on.
Your eyes burn with exhaustion, but you cannot rest. You are standing guard, dark and patient, while the blood of your blood rests. You are holding the sky steady while the world swirls.
A bird calls, first tentative note of sunrise, four-forty. The sky lightens. Dawn is breaking over all the neighbourhoods where mothers sit vigil, and children carry pain too large for their young hearts.
Your eyelids are heavy, body wanting to fold inward, to curl up and sleep.
Streetlights flicker off, and the houses along your road begin to show signs of life—light in a window, cough of an engine starting. Your lower back aches, your legs have gone numb.
You must have dozed off because the next thing you know, there are footsteps on the stairs. You sit up and listen to Olivia’s descent.
She appears, pale, eyes red-rimmed and swollen, hair tangled from sleep, wearing an old t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. You see the child who used to climb into your bed during storms, who picked dandelions and called them treasure.
“Mom?” Small, uncertain voice. “Why are you sleeping on the sofa?”
“I was worried about you,” you say.
Outside, the distant rumble of early buses, the slam of doors as people leave for work. Life carrying on as if the world hasn’t shifted sometime around sunset last night.
Olivia’s face crumples. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know why I do it. It’s not about dying. It’s just…sometimes everything feels too much, you know. When I hurt myself, it goes quiet for a while.”
You nod, not trusting yourself to speak. The wrong words might send Olivia back to her room, back to the silence. You can see the marks on both her arms—some old, some new, a roadmap of pain on skin.
“I want to help,” you say. “I want to understand.”
“I know.” Olivia’s eyes fill. “I just don’t know if you can.”
You open your arms, and for the first time in months, your daughter comes to you willingly, collapsing into your embrace like a bird seeking shelter. You hold her, feeling the rapid beat of her heart, the solidity of her bony body. This night is over.
There will be others. And you will be here. Patient, protective against the stormy sky, standing guard over the sleeping village of your daughter’s dreams.
Marketa Dowling (she/her) is a Czech-Irish writer and theatre/film professional. Her work has been published in Midnight Ireland Journal, the 2026 Scottish Arts Trust’s Edinburgh Anthology Series, and The Honest Ulsterman. She writes and lives in the West of Ireland.
Bluesky: @marketadee.bsky.social