Today was marked on his flip calendar in big red letters: PROMOTION.

David had woken up from a restless sleep before his alarm could go off and found that Stella was already out of bed.

He got up and dressed, tying his tie before the mirror and combing back his hair, realising that he could not stop smiling. He felt like a child again before his birthday.

It was important he looked his best today because everyone would be in the office and there might even be photos.

Downstairs, Stella had prepared him a breakfast made up of juices, meats, cereals, and pancakes. He sat down at the dining table and told her good morning.

She kissed him on the cheek and told him she was proud.

David’s son even crawled out of bed and made an appearance on the stairs, his hair tousled and looking for all the world like the consequence of jamming a fork into a wall socket.

‘Congrats, old man,’ he said and disappeared back up to his bedroom.

David chuckled and ate his breakfast.

‘Tonight I’ll make your favourite,’ said Stella. ‘It’ll be ready by the time you’re home.’

That would mean honey-roasted lamb chops and sweet potatoes tossed in butter and rosemary and garlic. His mouth watered at the thought.

‘Today I think I’ll walk to work,’ he said.

And carrying his briefcase and wearing his smartest suit, walk he did.

The way was cold but he did not mind. He walked through the park smiling and noticed that the trees had shed their leaves and that the dense branches looked like chalices set ablaze and golden by the morning sun.

The office block was slate-grey and inside the elevator he straightened his tie in his metallic reflection. The office floor was long and straight with the ceiling lined by pale sodium bulbs. Heads were bent over desks and the pitter-patter of fingers rambled across keyboards. One by one his colleagues looked up over their desk dividers. Some smiled and some even clapped.

He was called into the head office where he shook the regional manager’s hand, and though there was no one to capture the moment with a camera, it was still almost as good as he imagined.

‘Twenty-two years,’ said the regional manager. ‘That’s something.’

In the afternoon there was cake and a small party in the breakroom. A couple of drinks went round and they raised their glasses to his name. He was told too that by tomorrow morning his name would be added to the list of executives, embossed on the large plaque nailed to the wall dividing the main floor from the annex. It was a long list but regardless his name would be there, an extant reminder of the dedication to his job for all those before him and to all those who would come after.

He was moved to a bigger desk, this one by the water cooler which meant he could save at least twenty seconds during each walk over.

But as the hours of the day passed, he noticed unconsciously that the momentum which had spurred his walk that morning had begun to slip, and whatever document he was filling out he had put aside. His fingers stopped moving and his eyes settled above his screen, staring at nothing in particular.

Somebody came to his side, the same someone whose face he had seen many times on this floor but who he had not cared enough to speak to on any other level that made them more than just a face. A grey face. He had hardly noticed the grey before.

‘Keep up the good work,’ said the face, squeezing David’s shoulder as they walked past him to the water cooler.

The sound of the water dispensing into the paper cone was faintly similar to someone having a heavy piss. One by one, the faces on the floor gathered to take their long pisses behind David, sometimes chatting while they did so.

In the late afternoon he went to the regional manager’s office, knocked and waited until he was permitted entry, and proposed that he have his old desk back.

The regional manager chuckled.

‘What do you want that small thing for? It’s been assigned to the new clerk, and it’ll be a hell of a long time before they get what you have.’

He winked and laughed again and David saw himself out.

David did not get off until later than he expected. He called Stella and told her he would be late, that now he had been promoted he had been given new responsibilities. She sounded pleased over the phone and told him that she would wait and keep the dinner warm.

He walked through the park but it did not look the same in the night. The absence of light was one thing but the abundance of shadow was suffocating. The path was lit by the occasional lamp and he decided to sit on a bench that was illumined beneath one.

His first day in the office felt like a long time ago, but that was because it was, though reflecting on the bench, he could recall the moment he stepped onto the floor. The small corner of desk he occupied felt like the whole world, and he had become familiar with the world in its entirety. The long list of executives was always something he aspired to be a part of, and after twenty-two years, he finally was.

In that time he had seen his son go from an infant into the precipitous stages of early adulthood; he had lost his father to a heart attack and his mother months later to what he could only attribute to a lifelong bond being broken; the living room was renovated and the brown carpet was stripped away and replaced with nice, shiny wood, much to David’s preference; and the plum tree he planted years and years ago had grown and given fruit and was one day struck dead by lightning.

He had liked that tree a lot and sometimes on his days off found himself sitting in its shade, watching wasps buzz near the sweet and ripe fruit.

He remembered its charred corpse the morning following the storm that oversaw its execution. There was still shade to sit in by its seared trunk, but the shade was an impenetrable black sort that stank of something he did not know. That smell remained with him for a long time until one day it disappeared many years ago and he had forgotten it altogether.

But sitting on the bench, there it was again.

He looked around thinking that lightning must’ve struck somewhere but deep inside he knew that it had not stormed that day.

A cat slinked out of the shadows and seemed to watch David who in his pensive posture, hands rested on his lap with his feet loosely crossed, looked like a statue that would inspire generations to come. The cat joined him on the bench and hummed in its own silent thought, and David looked out across the dark wondering how tall that plum tree might’ve grown and how long it might’ve kept giving.

He did not know how long he remained on the bench. He felt a tug of sympathy thinking of Stella sat with their son at the dinner table, the food steaming and the clock eating away the seconds.

She spent a lot of her time waiting, he knew that, but she did not speak of it.

He did not feel hungry and felt like he could not move.

The cat beside him slumbered, and David’s eyes turned to the sky and he looked for the lightning that was not there.

Faye trembled against Ava, each of them as cold to touch as the other. They lay on a mattress whose end had a burst spring and whose colour had faded from the factory-standard white to the yellow of old onion skin. It smelled like the two of them, a musk of something sick and long departed from the living.

Them fused together over the years spent in the same room in the same grey tenement block on the edge of the same nowhere.

They had no windows to see by, but beyond the walls snow fell in huge tarps, muffling the running canal under its ever-growing weight, freezing the current and stealing its noise out of the air. And the snow continued to fall in its strange no-sound, and it did not stop.

Beside Ava was a needle and a blackened spoon discarded among lighters and baggies and hair ties. The belt was still tight around her bicep, and Faye, trembling, crooned for more. Just one more. Ava still saw stars swim across her vision. The last of the warmth was something she could’ve sworn she only imagined for how fast it fled her system.

Faye nudged closer, her arm resting upon the concave plane of Ava’s stomach; her arm that just by sight registered to the mind as bone. Grey bone, unadorned by flesh or muscle or any affinity to the living. She breathed like the corpse in her only wished to be set free.

‘Once more,’ said Faye.

Ava blinked the stars away. It had all gone by so fast. In a couple of weeks Faye would turn twenty-six, and she herself would turn… she couldn’t recall how old. She could count the days between her last and next hit, but the encompassing years were only made of snow, and how quickly snow could melt.

‘It’s gone,’ said Ava.

Faye stilled for a moment and became silent. Ava thought that it had finally happened. It had finally happened.

‘One more time,’ said Faye.

Hearing her voice brought Ava a prickle of relief that warmed her skin. But it came as quickly as it went. Their vows to quit became a sort of ritual before mainlining, and only once did it almost become their last time. They were so close.

‘We would have to mean it,’ said Ava.

‘Ok.’

‘No more just saying it.’

‘Ok.’

‘So we take it from the source in a way that we can never take from it again.’

‘…’

Ava turned to look at the cold wetness on her shoulder and saw Faye crying through closed eyes. They had once been the prettiest two eyes she had ever seen, deep with meaning and want and life. Now they were just two faded colours, and the colours of fog at that.

‘He will always sell to us if we have the money,’ said Ava, voicing her thoughts aloud for herself. ‘Money is his maker.’

‘…’

‘So we take what he has. Yeah?’

Faye managed a light nod.

‘And we make sure not to give him what he wants. Ok?’

Faye didn’t move.

‘Ok?’

‘Mikey’s a bad bad man,’ said Faye.

She sounded like a frightened child, but Ava supposed that’s what she was. And she had a right to be frightened, for Mikey was a bad bad man and would hurt just about anyone if they wronged him.

One time Derek C., a friend of Ava and Faye, tried lowballing Mikey and Mikey got him back real bad. Derek C. wore a steel bullring and one night when he was asleep inside the cold room of his own grey tenement, Mikey alongside his two heavies called Chowder and Sam kicked down his door. Sam pinned Derek C.’s arms and Chowder clamped his head in the vice of his grip.

Derek C. kicked and screamed and cried for his mother, but his cries were worthless because his mother was dead and the walls too thick for him to be heard.

It was Mikey who carried the 9V battery, and Derek C.’s eyes went bug-wild jumping across the dark space, tracking the small shape of the battery as it neared his face. He screamed his throat dead until his sorrys and pleas no longer sounded human.

Mikey touched both positive and negative terminals of the battery to each tail of Derek C.’s bullring. A spark flashed through the room and the ring began to heat and the longer he held it the more Derek C. kicked and tried tossing his head, but Chowder’s fat hands kept him still and the assailant’s small dark eyes winked down at him. It wasn’t long before Derek C.’s eyes rolled back until they were just whites and his jaw hung slack and open.

The three men stood and Mikey spat on Derek C.’s smoking head, and they left him unremoved with what looked like two gaping mouths on his face locked in a silent scream.

Ava found Faye’s hand beneath the blanket and held on.

‘One last time,’ she said.

‘Ok.’

The snow didn’t stop and they thought it would never stop, but still they marched outside in their patched up long coats stuffed with old newspapers, hoods thrown over their heads, marching across the white and grey like two small pencil lines. The canal was frozen over. Faye stopped almost without realising and looked over the stretch of untouched snow. It went on and on, and she wondered what it would be like to fall through it. Herself preserved in cold form waiting to be found.

‘Come on,’ called Ava. Her voice chopped in the wind.

Mikey lived on the other side of the canal. At the bottom of the crude tenement building Ava buzzed the door and waited for it to click open. Mikey was all the way up on the seventeenth floor. They entered on the ground floor, the corridor lit by pale, uncovered bulbs. Ava called the elevator.

‘Remember what we’re here for,’ she said.

Faye nodded. One last time.

Mikey called his space the cell. Like the other buildings, this one also had no windows and the walls were naked of any decoration. It smelled inside like an unwashed armpit and Ava imagined it to be a place that hell was carved from.

‘What are you ladies looking for?’ Each time he spoke he grinned like there was always something funny rooting around the back of his mind; like he knew something about you that you didn’t want him to know.

Faye was drawn by the neat white parcels and the set of scales sitting upon the low table in the centre of the room.

‘We want just enough for one hit,’ said Ava.

‘Oh, is that right?’ Still grinning. ‘You ladies cutting the cord?’

Ava nodded.

Faye avoided looking at him. She hadn’t forgiven him for what he did to Derek C. Derek C. had been nice to her and that was all there was to it; nice right up to the end until the rotted hole in his face became infected and he died bleeding from his eyes.

‘How about two caps?’ asked Mikey.

‘That will do.’

Ava watched him portion the bags. The steel pressed against the damp of her flesh reminded her of the kitchen knife she had tucked up her sleeve.

‘Dangerous walking in all that snow,’ said Mikey. ‘You might end up getting lost.’

‘Maybe,’ said Ava. She suddenly wondered why she had even brought the knife. What was out there for her if she quit? It would all be the same as it was now but without any means of relief. She turned to look at Faye who stared at Mikey in a sort of dumb-frozen trance.

Mikey sat hunched over the low table on a three-legged stool that looked like it was made for a kid. Ava’s arm trembled with the mad anticipation that came from looking at his exposed back and the possible change of all things if she could just manage to act.

Act.

A voice urged her and the image of Faye’s hollowed eyes became wildly apparent. The shine in them gone. Worked away. Just take out the knife and stick it in him. Anywhere. Down along the curve of his spine or the soft meat at the back of his head. Just stick it in him.

Mikey stood and offered Ava the two bags and without thinking she took them and pocketed them away. The transaction was made. Faye watched from the corner of the room unmoving, silent, like an effigy plucked from a waking dream.

Ava didn’t know what happened. One moment she was ready to do it and in the next she was mired in something larger than fear.

There was quiet, and then Mikey laughed. A low chuckle that he kept to himself and that only Ava seemed to hear.

He leaned in close to her, his skin stinking of wax and wood, and whispered:

‘You think I don’t know you.’

She recoiled slightly and he walked her down until her back was square with the wall.

‘One day you’ll try it,’ he said, ‘really try it, but not today.’

He winked and Faye’s hand found Ava’s and the strange reality that had just passed by her seemed forgotten already and it all felt dissonant in some feverish way.

‘Let’s go,’ whispered Faye, and they left.

They walked again along the frozen way they had come, their old tracks long filled by the new fallen snow.

Ava led Faye along closely, holding her hand. They wore no gloves and their skin was purple from the cold.

‘One last time, right?’ asked Faye.

‘That’s right.’

Snow falling and snow falling and snow falling.

The two young men walked their dogs beyond the forest, and beyond the forest there was a lake. Morning had come with reefs of fog descended upon the water, where along the muddy banks ducks idled in sleep or silence.

Hugo emerged running through the tree line at the edge of the forest, calling for his terrier, Bramble, who blasted through clusters of flowers chasing a butterfly. Mud splashed up his trousers and sweat prickled his skin.

He came to a panting halt, and Benton idled out of the woods after him with his Cocker Spaniel, Noodle, walking on a leash. Bramble launched around a corner and through some bushes and disappeared out of sight, sending startled quacks and the mad flap of beating wings across the quiet lakeside.

‘She’ll come back, don’t fret, chap,’ said Benton.

‘I don’t want her to kill that butterfly.’

‘She’s a sweet dog. Just listen to how happy she sounds. She couldn’t hurt a thing.’

‘Dog-sitting might be above my pay grade.’

‘Why did you let her off the leash?’

‘She was getting so restless that it felt almost cruel to keep her on the thing.’

‘Does your role as dog-sitter concern cruelty or her safety?’ asked Benton, brushing a ball of lint off his jacket.

‘It’s both.’

They listened to Bramble’s yips from afar. Hugo straightened himself and blinked his blurry vision back to focus. The sun reflected sharply off the water onto the earth so that even the stippled mud looked like burnished copper. Both young men and Noodle followed Bramble’s prints.

‘I feel that in this instance you’ve neglected her safety and what’s cruel.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Well, you let her off her leash thinking you’re doing her some sort of justice, but really it’s cruel.’

‘…’

‘No really it is. The ethics are… I read something about it. The ethics and that sort,’ said Benton. He scratched his head and looked off in thought.

They turned the corner and the sun blinded all six eyes and despite such light it was still a cold morning, but the fog nested around them burned with an amber glow and it seemed without thinking too much that a fire had started somewhere in the depths of the water and spread upwards burning all along the lakeside and laid carnage to the trees still wet with dew.

You could almost smell death hanging heavy in the air.

Hugo stopped and his breathing stopped and in that moment so did his heart.

‘Holy Christ,’ he muttered.

Across the stretch of mud and weeds sat Bramble wagging her tail; fur streaked with flecks of brown. A duck dangled limp from her jaws, clasped by its neck.

‘She didn’t get the butterfly,’ said Benton.

Noodle barked and Bramble with her trophy walked over.

‘Didn’t you say you’ve recently undertaken vegetarianism?’ asked Benton. ‘How does seeing this make you feel?’

‘Will you not try to psychoanalyse me right now, Benton,’ said Hugo. His cheeks flushed and despite the cold he was sweating his bodyweight.

Bramble dropped the duck and it landed in the mud almost soundlessly like the weight of its carcass had disappeared alongside its soul.

‘What do I do?’ asked Hugo.

‘I don’t know, but there’s a dead duck by your feet and you’re responsible for it.’

‘You’re making me hurt, Benton. You’re physically making me hurt all through my body.’

‘Well I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do either.’

None of them knew how long they stood watching the dead duck. And it seemed strange to both of them that the longer they watched it the more it seemed to move incrementally. Then a wing twitched and its neck reared up and dropped back down.

‘Did it just come back to life only to die again?’ asked Hugo.

‘There aren’t any blood marks.’

‘Maybe it’s just shock.’

They both crouched and watched the animal closely. It was safe to say that it was alive, but to what extent they couldn’t tell. The duck would move or try to stand or flap its wing and stop for a while and start all over again like a broken engine.

‘You can’t leave it like this,’ said Benton. ‘Now that’s cruel.’

‘What do you suppose I do?’

‘We need a priest.’

‘Right. Let’s look around,’ snapped Hugo. ‘Do you see any churches?’

‘Not that kind of priest,’ said Benton. ‘It’s a sort of stick with a heavy metal head at the end. It’s used to kill… well to kill game in moments like this.’

‘Like its last rites?’

Benton nodded slowly.

‘You can’t expect me to kill the duck.’

‘Your hand has already played a huge part in its impending death.’

‘But it looks like it might live. Look, there goes its wing again.’

‘It will only suffer and die eventually. At least you can do the honourable thing and kill it swiftly.’

Hugo was nearing tears.

‘I don’t want to do the honourable thing,’ he said. ‘I’m a vegetarian now.’

‘So long as you don’t put any of the duck in your mouth, I suppose it’ll be alright.’

Hugo wiped his eyes. All around them were trees and mud and water. He considered the plausibility of driving to a vet, but the nearest ones were all so distant and if anything the duck would die in his car and taint the vehicle. He’d have to get it blessed by a priest—a real one—not that he believed in that sort of thing. But its death couldn’t be a portent of anything good.

‘Here,’ said Benton, picking up a rock that fit in the palm of his hand. It was smooth and twinkled in the sun and upon its grey face seemed to turn wheels of endless stars.

Hugo took it and weighed it in his hands.

‘Is this what I am now, a barbarian?’

‘It will be over soon,’ said Benton, lowering his head.

Hugo didn’t know if he was being spoken to or the duck, but either way found his arm rising above his head as if autonomous of his body, guided by an instinct that it knew was morally right and justified.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Hugo.

‘Don’t be.’

The rock came down hard and the noise was not as bad as both had braced for. Hugo’s eyes were tightly closed. Benton was watching through his fingers.

‘Is it dead? Tell me if it’s dead, Benton.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

The rock was administered again—a dull wet thud—and each time the duck did not die nor did it even bleed; and each time its wings would jolt and its feet kick, and each time its head would recede deeper into the mud.

‘Why isn’t it working?’ asked Hugo, tears streaming down his cheeks, dripping off his chin, splashing in small droplets upon the duck’s glistening feathers. ‘Is it God, do you think? He’s sending me a message perhaps.’

‘It must be the ground. It’s too soft.’

‘Well what do I do? It’s a wet morning and the whole earth is soft.’

‘Here,’ said Benton. He found another rock and handed it to Hugo.

‘I can’t.’

‘You have to.’

‘It’s inhumane.’

‘It’s the most humane you can be.’

Hugo dusted off the rock and Noodle whined and Bramble whined too. Sounding all through the infernal fog were what an observer from afar might have taken to be the hounds of hell gathered in the blaze, and the duck at the centre of it all like some sacrificial lamb, its head placed upon a pedestal, its neck moving with what marginal strength remained.

Benton placed a hand on Hugo’s shoulder and squeezed, though it did nothing to reassure him of what he was doing.

‘Should we say something?’ asked Hugo.

‘…’

‘Please say something.’

‘I think it should be you, the wielder of the rock, the executioner.’

‘Don’t call me that, Benton. Please.’

‘…’

Hugo sighed and said, ‘You were only a duck, but a duck you still were. And a good one, I’m sure. There will be lots of places to swim in the next place, and lots of worms to eat. And leaves. I think that’s what you eat. And—’

Benton gave him another light squeeze and nodded softly at him to hurry along.

‘Right. Goodbye, I’m sorry.’

The rock came down and it was the last time it came down. Both young men, one crouched and one standing, loomed over the mangled carcass on its stone pillow.

Bramble edged closer to the carcass, sniffing.

‘Please not now, Bramble,’ said Hugo. He attached the leash to her collar.

‘The question is,’ said Benton, ‘what do we do with it?’

‘We can’t leave it here. And we can’t toss it in the water. Imagine what the others would think. And I’m not burying it, not with my bare hands I’m not.’

‘Maybe we could bring it with us,’ said Benton.

‘I don’t think I could touch it.’

‘Well, I’ve got a bag.’ He pulled out from his pocket a black waste bag. ‘We put it in here and bring it with us and dispose of it in a more appropriate way at a more appropriate time.’

‘God, Benton. Is that a shit bag? And how big is that thing?’

‘Big enough. Noodle eats far more than she’s supposed to. I’m a loving dog father.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Now, if you don’t like this idea, what would you propose?’

Hugo realised he was still holding the death rock and launched it into the water. The splash was large and the sound carried. Everything was so quiet. He looked from the duck to the bag and back to the duck.

The two young men walked along the mud bank in a silence that was neither comfortable nor strained. There was no need to speak and there was nothing to say. Yet it wasn’t so quiet after all; bugs hummed from far off in the green, and even the fog in its unspeaking stillness seemed to emit a sound akin to the slow, shallow breathing of some creature ancient and unknown.

The dogs walked on their leashes. The black bag swung with every step.

From out of the fire they all walked, alive and dead, and the dead had more to say than those that breathed.

It was evening when he walked out onto his balcony and dialled the number. The street was grey and quiet and he felt lost in it all, so he closed his eyes as the phone rang.

‘Crisis hotline, my name is Faye. Thank you for calling. Would you like to tell me what’s going on tonight?’

‘…’

‘Take your time.’

‘Sarah,’ he said without meaning to.

‘Is that your name, Sarah?’

He stood on the balcony, shaking his head, looking with a blank gaze over the occasional car that droned across the road.

‘Sarah and I don’t talk anymore. It’s been two months.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Would you like to tell me about it?’

‘…’

He hung up the call and leaned against the balcony ledge. It started to rain and he went inside to fetch a tub of ice cream from the freezer and went out onto the balcony again and spooned the ice cream crying as he ate and the rain fell harder.

It was past midnight when he went inside and stripped out his wet clothes, his nose blocked and his ears aching. Naked, damp, he stretched out on the couch and dialled again.

‘Crisis hotline, this is Faye. Thank you for calling. Would you like to tell me what’s going on tonight?’

‘Can you miss someone you’ve never met in person?’

He turned on the television to a random channel just to fill the quiet. There were no stars in the sky he could see, nor any moon to behold.

‘I hope so,’ she said after a pause.

‘…’

‘It’s just unfortunate that we don’t get a say in it.’

‘Maybe.’

‘We have control only over the small things, I suppose.’

‘Like?’

‘We get to choose what shoes to wear in the morning or how we style our hair, but all of that stuff inside… it’s almost like we’re two separate entities, and the outside one has no say in what the inside one does.’

‘Would you change that?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘…’

‘I think we’d all be more closed off about everything if that was the case. We’d not be as exciting as a species, and the thrill—’

His phone battery died and he sat up so fast his head spun and he rushed stumbling for the charger in his bedroom. Waiting for his phone to charge, he fell asleep on the sofa and woke several hours later. The moon had appeared and filled the room with iron light. He tried to get back to sleep without any luck but had nowhere to be in the morning so he decided not to worry about it. There was half a bottle of brandy in the cupboard, and he poured some into a glass. He sipped it only wishing he had someone to sip it with and dialled the number once more.

‘Crisis hotline, my name is Ben. Thank you for calling. Would you like to tell me what’s going on tonight?’

‘Where’s Faye?’

‘She’s finished her shift. But I—’

He hung up and went to sleep.

The next night he resolved to jump. He was sure the balcony was high enough so that the fall would kill him on impact and the street was empty enough so as not to cause anyone any significant trauma. He did not drink anything before standing on the ledge because he believed that a sober death was more apt for his rather bland life than a drunken death.

The wind was cold and rushed by his face. His balance wasn’t great and he already wobbled and the way down looked so far that a knot grew in his stomach. Maybe he wasn’t made for jumping. Behind the bathroom mirror was a load of medication. One fistful and he’d be out for good.

Still, he stood carefully, looking out over the night like a vigilante primed to pounce into a cesspit of darkness.

‘Cooper?’

He looked over to the balcony on his right and saw his neighbour. He had long forgotten his name but the man’s face from sheer familiarity made him feel queasy with a sense of guilt. If he jumped now, his neighbour might be traumatised indefinitely.

‘What are you doing Coop?’ His neighbour was in his early thirties, handsome, and by the looks of it, drinking. He had come out for a smoke.

‘Just looking.’

‘Looking at what?’

‘I’m not actually looking at anything,’ he admitted.

‘Oh.’

The neighbour lit a cigarette and offered Cooper one. He shook his head, his eyes never leaving the street way below.

‘I was thinking of jumping.’

The neighbour grimaced and looked over the balcony’s ledge. He shivered and tossed his head.

‘Nah, mate. I wouldn’t. It’d kill you from this far up.’

‘I think so,’ said Cooper.

The neighbour smoked and popped the cap off a beer bottle, drinking thirstily and breathing easily, a smile playing on his face as he looked out over the city.

‘Nice night for it, though,’ said the neighbour.

Cooper, startled by the man’s audacity, lost his focus on the jump and shot his neighbour a confused look.

‘Nice night for what?’

The neighbour with a guileless grin raised both hands, his left toting the beer, the right the cigarette.

‘Nice night for it,’ he said again. ‘If you fancy a drink, come by. You know where I am.’ And before he went back inside he looked at Cooper seriously. ‘I’d get down from there if I was you. Wouldn’t want to slip. I had a mate slip off a roof once.’

Cooper thought that had concluded the conversation but sensed his neighbour from the corner of his eye still stood on the balcony watching him as if waiting for him to continue the conversation.

‘Yeah?’ said Cooper, looking at the man. ‘What happened?’

‘He’s dead now.’

Cooper nodded gravely and clenched his jaw. It was a long way down.

‘He was hit by a car.’

‘…’

‘He survived the fall. Fell onto a hedge and made it out with just a couple scratches. But a week later he was crossing the road and was hit by a car.’

‘…’

‘Used up all his good luck, see. Don’t waste yours,’ he said, nodding at Cooper’s unsteady footing. ‘Well, goodnight.’ And he walked back inside.

Cooper didn’t see any point standing on the ledge any longer, he was only going to catch a cold at the rate he spent on the balcony in the chilly wind. He went inside and fell asleep.

For the next few days he coped with any temptation to go onto the balcony by instead going for walks. He laid for a long time on a park bench looking at the stars and from several streets over he could hear a baying dog. Its long calls into the night made him feel worse, and he thought of Sarah. She popped into his mind suddenly and he realised that for the last few days he had not even thought of her once and yet was still occupied by this great walking sadness that seemed to wear him like a jacket.

His head rolled to the side and he saw a small grey cat lying sprawled on the ground as if mocking him. It licked its fur and its green eyes flashed catching the moonlight.

‘What are you here for?’ Cooper asked.

You’re in my spot.

‘Sure,’ he said.

The cat stretched and rolled onto its belly and then stood on all fours. It slinked through the darkness until Cooper couldn’t see it, then hopped onto his chest and curled into a ball of fur that smelled like autumn.

‘I’d gone from thinking about her every day to having forgotten she even existed.’

Things happen.

‘It was like this whole time my mind and heart and body were playing this game against each other but competing for different things. And whichever lost would be seriously left in the dust. But I’m all three of these things combined and I’m the only one ever left in the dust.’

What do you want me to say? I’m just a cat.

‘Sure,’ he muttered, and closed his eyes.

The cat purred and warmth radiated from its body, and Cooper imagined the creature to be powered by a small engine.

Cooper closed his eyes and fell asleep. When he woke up it was still dark, but the cat was gone and he felt colder than he could ever remember being. He sighed, sat up and walked home shivering, and climbed up six flights of stairs to his apartment and headed straight to his balcony where he pulled out his phone and dialled.

‘Crisis hotline, my name is Faye. Thank you for calling. Would you like to tell me what’s going on tonight?’

‘Hello, Faye.’

She hesitated in her response as if recognising his voice.

‘Hello, is everything alright tonight?’

‘One reason,’ he said. ‘Give me one reason not to jump.’

There was a pause, then a longer silence. He was suddenly sweating, his phone pressed against his ear, listening to her breathing on the other side.

She finally spoke. When she did, he did not smile nor did he frown or lament but nodded shortly and hung up the phone. He wanted a drink and even more he wanted a cigarette, but no part of him could be convinced to move. He thought of the grey cat and his neighbour and the long way between himself and the street.

The dark clouds shifted and the stars and moon laid claim to all space. They looked to be staying for the rest of the night. He watched them, unmoving in their silence, watching them for as long as he could.

When the four of us, Shovel, Boner, Beefy, and myself, had all turned eighteen and felt for the first time like we were filling our boots, the only reasonable action was to celebrate. We asked out a couple hoors we knew from school, one Ms Lacy Winkler and her big-boobied friend, Layla Cheatle.

The six of us parked our ratted arses in Beefy’s basement, each of us kissing the glass lips of a bottle. Us lads, we’d convened before meeting the girleens and devised a sort of plan of action. Myself and Boner would have Layla, then Shovel and Beefy could share Lacy. Once all that drink was flowing in their systems, they’d been itching to give anything a go.

We were sat in the centre of the basement beneath a naked bulb, throwing its copper light across our faces. Layla and I squeezed onto an armchair that smelled like old shoes. Boner was sat on the arm, scratching his crotch and sniffing his fingers. He’d a hood thrown over his head, covering the bruised, tired-looking flesh around his eyes. Beefy and Lacy were lying on a blue bean bag that had scattered about its ripped skin black stars of mould. Her head rested on his lap and her pasty makeup left behind pale renditions of her face on the leg of his joggers. He played with her ear, rubbed it red. She burrowed her cheek into his crotch and giggled about something.

Shovel had spent the past fifteen minutes with his shirt off and the grotesque, pale eye of his outwards bellybutton in everyone’s face, counting on his stomach the ribbed pinprick scars from landed darts.

Tracks I didn’t recognise played on the radio. The lilt and ebb of soft song guided my eyes that felt like they were spinning on small wheels inside my skull; guided like a mother’s touch my sight across the room from the damp of old plaster to the bare ribs of the corrugated roof.

One second we were laughing—spouting shite about shite—then I’d Layla’s thick tongue like some wet sponge scooping the words out of my mouth. Her weight shifted across the armchair and her belly beneath her cropped shirt nuzzled into me. My cheeks flamed. Massive fucken headlights rubbed into my neck and chest. Boner was watching, his gaze hungry and desperate. But I was soft as a kitten.

Something had also been bothering me—Shovel wasn’t in the basement.

Rain pounded the slit windows. Thunder sounded far off and I knew lightning would be like white veins coursing through the dark sky. I was waiting for it. Muscles and mind, stiff.

That morning had seen enough rain to drown a child, hounding us all the way to the corner store where even inside we could feel the wind and sharp needles of wet lashing us, and driving us fast and away to Beefy’s place with bottles of cheap vodka and cans of cheaper lager. We’d kicked through the front door, startled the living shite out of the cat and sent it bolting into the kitchen, then we hunkered down in the basement.

Nobody was home but us.

Running through that storm, I was thinking of Shovel, how that day in Ms Dingley’s maths class his face had gone white. Like the blood in him froze. He always had a blank look on his face; mouth always open and letting in flies. But at that moment with him wedged between seat and desk, he managed to look even blanker, like someone had drawn a face out of chalk, then wiped it away leaving only traces behind. That smeared, sort of foggy blur of a forgotten thing. I wasn’t the only one to notice it. As lightning flashed through the windows and several of the girls yipped, Ms Dingley snapped her fingers at Shovel.

That was when he started to piss.

The lads, they laughed about it, but I’d seen it in his face, smelled it streaming down his right leg and into his shoe—what the lightning had made him do.

I pushed Layla off me. Her hair whipped back and the scent of concentrated perfume and fags went with it.

‘What you doing?’ she asked, screwing up her face.

‘Where’s Shovel?’ I said.

Boner was looking at me in disbelief while Beefy and Lacy didn’t seem to hear me over their lip smacking.

‘Who gives a fuck, mate,’ said Boner.

A shadow of a growing bulge nosed through his grey joggers. Layla mashed her hand between my legs, pinching with her sharp, red acrylics.

‘You’re limp,’ she said, ‘like a wet fucken chip.’

Boner clutched his belly, laughing.

I pretended not to hear them both and stood up off the armchair, mussed back my hair and looked through spinning eyes for a bottle with something in it. Layla asked if I liked boys, and I told her to fuck off. Boner, who moved quicker than a flick blade, pushed me square on the chest and sent me falling backwards.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ said Beefy. He’d torn his mouth away from Lacy. A rope of saliva hung trembling from his bottom lip, then broke and darkened the grey of her tight sports bra. He was scowling; his buzz-cut I could’ve sworn was bristling like a living thing.

‘Just having a laugh,’ said Boner. He didn’t even look at me.

‘Where’s Shovel?’ I asked, picking myself up off the sticky floor.

‘I don’t know.’ Beefy shrugged. ‘Said he was hungry.’

I rubbed my eyes. Fat bastard was always hungry.

Nobody seemed to care that I went upstairs. Had to use my elbows and knees to reach the basement landing. Below me as I listened came peals of laughter that I could’ve fallen asleep to. For a moment I closed my eyes and leaned against the hushed black walls. The weight of Layla’s hand on my cock still existed with dull heat.

When I opened the door, something stank so bad it made me retch. Could taste it on my tongue, like sucking a two-pence coin. Metal, lots of it. The lights were off in the living room but the streetlamps carried in enough of their fevered coral glows to see by. I pawed my way around a corner and saw leading into the kitchen a long, dark mark fanned across the tiled floor.

There was a shabby island fixed in the kitchen’s centre. The dark trail went to the other side of the island, out of sight. Then came that unforgettable sound, like a gentle lapping. Soft squelching. I didn’t say anything because I’d seen enough shit-scary films to know that was a mistake, but I hadn’t seen enough to kill my curiosity. I trod carefully around to the other side of the island.

Shovel was there with his t-shirt off. He was keeled over on hands and knees with his arse closest to me and his head thrown in the shadows, moving slowly backwards and forwards, lapping, squelching. The wide arch of his back glistened with small stars of sweat. A dark shape was sprawled around his face. It took me a moment to realise it was Beefy’s cat, Nimble.

Then it didn’t take long to realise Shovel was eating him.

There was hardly any time to process what happened before my foot slammed hard into Shovel’s arse. His body sort of unfolded like a jelly and his face nuzzled straight into the open cat. It screeched, too, the dying thing, like the last of its life had been squeezed out of it under Shovel’s weight. He turned and saw me, tears streaming down his cheeks.

‘What the fuck,’ I said. A white flame of lightning paled into the kitchen and the shadows of dead things vanished and flashed back. ‘What are you doing?’

He crawled towards me and I stumbled away. Even in the darkness you could see the red dripping down his chin. He bared his teeth, revealing the clots and strings of meat and fur packed between them.

‘Help me,’ said Shovel.

There was blood and excrement—whatever the fuck it was—smeared all over the floor where the cat must’ve been dragged, dying. The room was no longer spinning. Shovel seized my ankle with a wet hand and I nearly fucken screamed, but then I remembered he was my mate and he was ill in ways you would never understand until you got to know him—know him like I did.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Listen to me, you need to get the fuck out of here.’

‘What?’

‘Get up, grab the fucken cat, and run the fuck away. Do you understand?’ His trembling eyes shone darkly, and despite the blankness of his expression, he nodded. ‘Bury the cat and don’t let anyone see you.’

Shovel stood, then scooped up the limp cat, cradling it like a new child still dripping. His t-shirt was on the floor, a Led Zeppelin rag splattered blackly red. A scythe of light arced through the room.

‘Grab your shite and go!’

I opened the back door of the kitchen which led into an alleyway lined with overflowing bins and empty bottles. The rain was biblical; scum and muck spewed out of the drains. Shovel barged outdoors, bare-chested and red, the red diluting and running down over the ridges of his round flesh.

‘Don’t let anyone see you,’ I shouted after him.

He turned a corner and was gone.

I found drain cleaner in a cupboard under the sinks, and poured it over the darkened kitchen tiles, then grabbed a dry sponge sitting beside several stacked, dirty plates. On my knees and hands, scrubbing, drooling threads of saliva onto my wrist. My fingers stung from where I squeezed the sponge and the drain cleaner soaked into my skin. It smelled like cancer, scratched my eyes, made me cry.

The floor was still filth. Two entire kitchen rolls were used to soak up the pink, stinking fluid. I thought about the lads and hoors downstairs, their bodies unravelling, flesh sloughing off and into each other like messy puddles; the steam in the basement from their wicked bodies rising, laying dewy eggs of sweat onto the wall. My cock so soft and small like a child’s thumb.

I punched the floor, desperate to hurt something, and wouldn’t know until the next morning that I had fractured my hand.

I wondered how far Shovel had gotten. Had he made it home, and were his fingernails blackened by upturned soil? Or was he lying in the road, struck by lightning, with dead fur draped across him, water lapping over his milk skin.

More lightning flashed and my muscles tightened like they had one night a couple years ago with Shovel, Boner, and myself. A purple summer night on which we’d climbed through the skylight of an abandoned carpet shop, each of us carrying a pocketful of darts. In a dark, damp corner beside rolls of blackened bathmats, Shovel took off his t-shirt and hung it on a nail in the wall. He raised his arms and closed his eyes.

‘Stick me,’ he said.

We did so without thinking. Boner and I took turns throwing darts into the soft of Shovel’s gut. You had to throw them hard enough or they’d just bounce off. He’d wince when a good one stuck him, and he’d also hold his hand over his mouth to muffle a moan. But he could always handle it. After he plucked out the darts needled across his chest and gut, and their small red eyes wept thin trails, he handed them back to us and loosed his belt, shook down his trousers and took off his pants. He revealed his rattail cock which his stubby fingers made look like a stretched length of dough.

A warm rain fell that night, and when a spare blade of lightning cleaved through the room, it illuminated his cock. My body felt like it had ossified. His cock looked flat in that strange no-light, flat in a way that only wet litter could be.

‘Stick me in me prick.’

Boner’s hands were shaking. We’d only ever thrown darts at his stomach. Shovel looked over at us both with our dart-hands hanging tight at our sides. I was young then. Foolish. That was the first time I should’ve known to walk away. Shovel began to plead—began to emulsify that stiffness in our bodies with the dark sort of energy from his words. I did as he told me and threw my darts. Stuck one in his thigh and the other nosed right into his veined shaft.

His scream harped through the burnt-out shop. Almost gave it back some life.

Sometimes I still hear it. Even as I wiped circles on the tiled floor with a bloody sponge, that same animal cry of pleasure and pain catapulted through my mind.

I would never be short of Shovel, that’s what I realised. None of us would be.

And there, dog-arched on hands and knees, I realised that was the second time I should’ve walked away.

Over the downpour came footsteps from the basement. Someone was coming up the stairs.

‘No.’

‘What better time to share one than now in the great undercroft? We’ve even the candles for atmosphere,’ said Peters.

‘And first-years to frighten,’ said Carter, winking across the dining table at Morrell.

‘Do you know how old these buildings are? We’ve the oldest quad in the entire country. The cloisters have seen centuries of bodies passing by them. Think of the things they might’ve seen.’

‘And it all boils down to this evening. New history,’ said Carter.

Students in their tails and ball gowns dined at the long tables when the clocks chimed and the provost rose from the high table and declared the dinner at an end and the night’s revelry begun.

‘I’ve heard moaning from the libraries past midnight,’ said Carter, ‘and not the good kind.’

‘One time in winter it was a foggy dawn and I was walking across the churchyard to the chapel when I saw a spectre.’

‘How do you know it was a spectre?’ asked Morrell.

‘It appeared out of the fog and walked through the walls of the observatory,’ said Peters.

‘Seen one moment, gone the next.’

Morrell took lightly whatever the boys spoke of, but the several glasses of red he drank had massaged from his mind any care for reason.

The three followed the music out of the undercroft up the stone staircase to the great hall where the eight-piece band would play through the night.

Peters went off with Carter for more champagne, leaving Morrell alone among the heaving fluster of bodies. Perfumes passed him and his heart quickened and the music loudened and girls swayed all around him, beautiful and proud, faces carved under the low light, handing their dance cards to the men who asked for them, filling out their names for the price of a dance. Morrell tucked himself away into a corner where he waited for the others to return.

He watched for a while the beauty before him: glimmering bracelets and pendants hanging, white gloves and shifting skirts and the glitter of the chandeliers trembling like shards of ice. It was all too much like staring into a bright light without pause. He looked away and what his gaze snagged among the bodies was the gliding stride of a girl in a red ball gown, wearing her black hair down to her shoulders. She looked lonely with no one calling on her for the next dance. He had scarcely begun to work up the courage to approach her when she turned and looked his way with such intensity you’d think she had only come to the ball to see him.

Morrell introduced himself and she told him that no one had asked her to dance; she looked to have been crying. He told her he was happy to be her first, and through the next two songs they danced with their bodies pressed closely, and Morrell forgot all else happening around him.

The song came to an end and applause swelled through the hall. She thanked him for the dances and he bowed low, and when he stood upright he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see Peters and Carter smiling about something. They gave Morrell a flute of champagne, and the three marched outside to the grounds where the air was cool.

They sat in the cloisters beneath the moonlight, the three of them like marble figures.

‘You’ve been rather quiet,’ said Peters.

‘Didn’t you see that girl I was dancing with?’

‘You got a dance?’ asked Carter.

‘Two.’

‘Bravo, Morrell, bravo.’

‘Who was the lucky lady?’ asked Peters.

Morrell thought for a moment and the boys leaned closer.

‘Angelique.’

Their faces fell and they exchanged a serious look.

‘Angelique?’ said Peters.

‘Yes.’

‘Be serious for a moment, Morrell. That couldn’t have been her name,’ said Carter.

‘It is her name and it’s a beautiful one at that.’

Others stepped out of the great hall and the quad came alive with chatter.

‘Let’s go somewhere quieter,’ said Peters. ‘We need to talk to you, Morrell.’

They walked behind the chapel and stopped at the gate of the cemetery where a reef of fog settled over the gravestones. Morrell leaned his back against the rusted iron gate, pinching his white bow tie.

‘This is bad,’ said Peters.

‘Really bad.’

‘What’s so bad about it?’

‘Don’t you know the name Angelique?’ asked Carter.

Morrell shook his head.

‘I suppose you’re only a first-year. But it’s still bad,’ said Peters.

‘Really bad.’

‘Come, let’s go further,’ said Peters.

Morrell didn’t want to go anywhere, but Peters led the way into the cemetery and Carter followed closely, and soon Morrell was aware he stood alone in the dark with the cries of nightbirds sailing overhead and fog curling slowly nearer, and he walked inside after them.

‘There was a rumour once—I’ve heard it several times but never paid much attention to it—that a woman in a red ball gown would find a man to dance with during one of the commemoration balls, and in the next several years the man would die.’

‘It all depends on how many times she danced with him,’ said Peters, his head bowed. ‘And she danced with you twice?’

Morrell nodded and said, ‘Could be rubbish.’

The boys shook their heads.

‘Her name was Angelique, too,’ said Peters.

Morrell didn’t care for ghost stories, certainly not in the graveyard. He wanted to be anywhere else.

‘Maybe you misheard her name,’ said Peters lightly.

‘I hope so, for your sake,’ added Carter.

Peters rested a hand on Morrell’s shoulder and Carter led them around the base of a withered tree where all three boys stopped by a gravestone.

‘This is her grave.’

Angelique Moresby.

‘She was a student who was said to have died during the college’s first ball,’ said Peters.

‘I thought it was the second ball.’

‘Some say it was when her beau refused to dance with her and danced with someone else,’ said Peters.

‘I heard the music wasn’t to her liking.’

‘Then she fell to the ground and never got up. And by the time anyone even had a clue of what was going on, she was already dead. So she comes back from the dead for the ball to find a suitor to dance with, and when they pass away—which they always do—they dance with one another forever. She collects them, like rings on her finger.’

Both boys bowed their heads as if trying to hide their emotions. Morrell did not know what to believe: what his mind wanted to believe or what the wine insisted he believe. The graveyard was cold and the only light was the moon and the low orange glow of the great hall’s entrance seen through the trees.

A figure from behind a gravestone leapt out of the dark and lunged at Morrell, shouting, ‘You’re dead, you’re dead!’ He nearly tumbled over but caught himself against the tree. The boys clutched themselves laughing, falling over one another. The figure was a girl in a red ball gown. She was laughing too, but not so much as the boys.

‘What’s going on?’ said Morrell.

Peters pulled the girl in close against him and said, ‘Sorry, Morrell, meet my girlfriend, Bethany, though you might know her as Angelique.’ And again the boys burst into laughter.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, Peters, you’ve frightened the boy so much his brain has stopped working,’ said Carter.

‘This is Angelique, your partner on the dance floor,’ said Peters, winking.

She frowned and shook her head.

‘I never danced with him. I was with the girls.’

‘You must’ve.’

She stared just as blankly at Morrell as he stared at her.

‘Didn’t Carter tell you to dance with Morrell?’ asked Peters, shooting a look at Carter.

‘I thought you were going to tell her, Peters.’

‘I was only told to hide myself near the dead girl’s gravestone. Can I go back to dancing now?’

Wind stirred the grass and a moment of quiet passed them. The boys without looking at her nodded slowly, their eyes wide and settled on Morrell who was half in shadow. Bethany lifted her dress to her shins and trotted through the fallen leaves away to the great hall.

‘You didn’t dance with Bethany?’ asked Peters.

Morrell shook his head.

‘Then you danced with someone else, certainly,’ suggested Carter.

‘There was only one Angelique in this college, so far as I know. And she’s dead.’

‘Then it might’ve been someone else who thought it would be funny to play a trick, right?’

‘Did you see any other names on the dance card?’ asked Peters.

‘There might’ve been a Ben Mosely. I can’t remember.’

‘God, Morrell,’ said Peters. He pulled his face with his hands. ‘Mosely died when I was a first year. He walked off the chapel roof one morning, no one knows why.’

The air settled around them and no boy said a thing. There was nothing to say and Morrell took a deep breath and straightened his bow tie.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I fancy another dance. One more.’

‘Ok,’ said Peters, ‘let’s go and do that.’

The three of them in silence walked out of the graveyard and towards the great hall where the light spilled out like melted copper and the moonlight pressed against their backs.

‘Hello slick.’

I opened my eyes and the world had turned the shade of steel but stood clear in the shadow bright as a moonstar was Jacob, smiling, smiling like he always did through thick and thin and the bad times that rolled on heavy, still smiling, my big brother.

‘Jacob, is that you?’

I scrambled up in disbelief and fell into his open arms and we embraced for some time, my head spinning and tears standing in my eyes.

‘Missed you, kid,’ he said.

Ma sidled up to the yard door clutching Rosie who sucked on her thumb. Jacob let me go and smoothed my hair and smiled and I watched him walk over to Ma who couldn’t help herself crying too; and Rosie and myself with our red, bleary eyes, we were like a whole family born all too close to the well, as Ma put it.

I thought it would be far longer before I ever saw him again. The day he left home those three months ago had seared itself into all our minds, changed things inevitably and with sureness, like how a season changes the trees.

Ma fixed us all some tea in the kitchen. She busied herself at the stove after putting Rosie to sleep who was knocked out after all the fuss and excitement. Jacob sat next to me staring off into the living space, his eyes sort of blank. His fingers were interlaced too, and I had the thought that college made him all too serious. He looked at the clock beside the cupboard and I looked too, then when Ma was out of earshot, I asked him why he’d come back.

‘You don’t want to see me?’

‘Course I do, but…’

He looked at me square and for the first time I realized he did look different. Something about the old him was gone and replaced with something I couldn’t identify, like trying to point out blood on a bleeding cardinal.

‘It’s just that you said you weren’t coming back.’

Ma set the tea on the table and she pulled out a chair to join us. We drank and spoke about small things and Jacob told us what it was like in college, that the people wore nice suits and tried their best to shed their home accents. His hadn’t changed. She asked if he was looking after himself and he nodded, then she asked if he missed home and he smiled. It was a smile he kept to himself but we all saw it, and we all knew that it was one empty of any happiness. She asked if he met any nice girls. He told her no.

Ma became stone-faced and hard to look at. We finished our tea without speaking and she took away our cups and washed them and said from the sink without turning to look at us, ‘your dad will be back soon.’

Jacob stood and asked me if I wanted to go for a drive and I half-expected Ma to snap around and tell me no, but she remained hunched over the sink scrubbing like it was only her in the world and those teacups and the water she washed them in.

I shrugged, told him OK, and we grabbed our jackets and soon left the house.

He’d taken a back lane through the woods and we cruised alone on the road under the shade of giant trees. The road was narrow without much space to meet a car head on, but it was just the two of us and the small trill of birds that rolled through the window I’d cracked open.

‘How long are you home for?’

He shrugged. He leaned back into his seat with just one hand on the wheel.

‘Ma don’t stop talking about you.’

‘What about the old man?’

‘Him not so much. You ain’t too hot in his books.’ I looked out the window at nothing in particular and raised my hand to the cool stream of air that rushed through, hoping it would dry the sweat on my palms.

‘What are you gonna say when you see him?’

‘I had four hours on the drive down to think about it.’

‘And?’

‘Figured I might skip the whole talking and just shoot him.’

‘Jacob.’

‘I’m kidding.’

I believed him as far as his smile would let me believe him, creeping up the side of his cheek like it was a joke only he could understand. I knew that some deep part of him would find relief in it all, like a piece of gravel in your boot finally removed after a hike to hell and back.

But I knew him never to have a bad bone in his body, even up until the day he left home. College didn’t start for another month, but he left anyway.

He moved in with Cain, and that only fired dad up even more.

The day after Jacob left, dad sat waiting on the porch, a shotgun loaded with rock-salt laid across his lap, making sure that he had no ideas about coming back. Luckily Jacob never did.

‘Why did you come back?’

‘Well, I still got family in this little part of the world, don’t I?’ He turned to look at me, his smile had changed to what I thought was affection. ‘That is even if the old man doesn’t want me being part of it.’

It was getting dark out and soon dad would be driving back from his shift at the paper mill. I could’ve only hoped that Ma had taken the initiative to hide his guns, or at least unload them.

‘Rosie’s getting big, ain’t she?’ he said.

‘I suppose. I don’t really notice it.’

‘Noticed she’s started sucking on her thumb.’

‘That only started after you left.’

He sighed, and at the next clearing spun the car around, taking us back through the darkening road in the woods. The trees seemed to close in the closer we got to home, and the closer we got, the bigger this bad feeling of mine started to get.

‘Cain’s dead,’ said Jacob.

‘What?’

‘He got sick.’

Jacob wasn’t smiling anymore but kept his eyes wide on the road like he was expecting it might suddenly fall out from under him. His hand was trembling and I wanted to tell him to pull over but I knew he wouldn’t so I kept quiet.

‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘I’m sick now too.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘That I’m sick like Cain was sick.’

‘So.’

‘So I figured I don’t know when it is I’ll next see everyone. Ma, Rosie, you, even the old man. Doctors say it’ll just get worse. Then they reckon it won’t be long.’

‘Long before what?’

He kept his mouth shut like he never even heard me.

I would’ve thrown up if it wasn’t for him putting his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed a little as if to remind me he was still there, and I closed my eyes hoping that the dark I saw would slip into my mind, maybe take me away.

The trees flitted by and they all looked the same, and the road we took was the same I’d taken a thousand times, yet it was different like how Jacob was different. His hand still rested on my shoulder; his eyes still fixed on the road.

No cars passed us by that evening. The way home was quiet.

Dad’s truck was parked on the dirt apron by the porch when we returned. Jacob parked a little ways down the road out of sight. Still, with the quiet the evening brought, I wondered if dad had heard the sound of the engine and was already waiting by the door.

‘You know I saw him one time,’ said Jacob. ‘It was the day after I left. I came back.’

He turned to look at me and I could feel his gaze asking mine to meet his in return, but I kept looking at my feet.

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ he said. ‘He didn’t see me, but he was armed. He was ready. I wonder if he really would’ve done it.’

I remained silent. I didn’t know the truth of it. I didn’t know what went on in either of their heads.

The sounds of evening awakened and suddenly the long quiet between us was loud with the whir of bugs and small life. The sort of life unseen that grew an agency away from any viewing eye, and I wondered where it all came from.

‘Now I suppose he won’t have a thing to worry about,’ he said. Then he bumped me on the arm and opened the car door. I didn’t budge as he got up. My bottom half was numb and no part of me wanted to move.

He walked round the car and knocked on my window and I looked up at him on the other side.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I want to go home.’

Our ship rocked and the shore came into sight; us in the quiet on this dark wood dragon. It was a dim night, purple, like some bovine tongue. Birds swooped down from the mast and the river panta lapped, calling to any stars that would listen. A horn of henbane and mead arrived in my hand, and a voice spoke:

‘Are you ready to become the bear?’

Our hundreds docked on the mudflats as the spidered branches of trees creaked and insects sang through sleep. Through the canebrake we marched slinking like pale shadows rooted in moonlight. The henbane warmed my stomach and the bear inside me kindled; its pelt hanging down my waist. The oiled fur baked in sun all day was heavy with the musk of pride.

Such a starry night for a feeding.

Whose heart will I breed.

What child will I make of the men I maim.

There in the trees mounting the branches were the small black shapes with beaks turned up to the sky and black eyes rolling like oil in their dipped skulls. The fingers of Odin and his reaching touch, watching.

Onwards we dragged and in low voices muttered:

Cattle die,
kindred die,
every man is mortal:
but the good name
never dies
of one who has done well.

A hill came into view and over the hill came rising figures in capes and cruel helmets. Twisted iron sat burned to their flesh. From these helmed black slits peered small, God-driven eyes. Those with no helmets scowled. The bitten moon cleaved the clouds and illuminated the sad faces of those grey men. Their ranks wet and rotten, the stench of them like dead heaps of hunted prey.

Had their women and children already mourned them, or was it too late?

A horn called and cries flagged the night and the bears in us bounded forwards. And falling through the skies like the tails of dark serpents, arrows pierced through the warmth of men beside me from which their shields did not catch, ripping out of them their reds and purples and scattering the mess across the mud. Earth trembled like a mother in birth, and far behind, the panta stirred like a cub with a pelt as pale as snow.

I am not dead yet.

My axe haunted the dog-animal child who twisted like a landed fish and tried to flee. The sky rained red. Another stepped before the bear and the edge of my axe rode through his cheek and gums, shattering the dark bumps of his teeth. The axe crushing fell through the leg of another weeping man, mud-slouched and cowering into the gut of an uprooted tree; weeping a name, some name I did not know.

Around me howled the wolves, these bare-chested brutes who like myself did not feel the cold nor urge to stop, but fell onwards like a fire through crop. Deaf stars gave their glow to the waves of glittering steel, making new constellations in the first zodiacs of these split bodies. When came the serpent’s tail that struck my calf, I went onwards up the hill, for wyrd is wholly inexorable, and when sailing on the wood dragon had found that peace that knew my end—the end—beneath the glimmering cape of sky. Wind moaned like an old dog. It started in my fingertips, the hoar cold, and skulked its way into my back.

I am not dead yet.

The darkness was made of something soft, and in it I wished to lie. So I found the earth that was far away, where the echoes ringing did not reach, and the display of hunger finally faded. The bear was full, and I was to take my rest on the mudflats. Hundreds of dead tongues pressed coldly into my back. The hot and sticky lips of red honey puckered on my chest and arms. They looked like open flowers. To the roots of trees and plants that drink their thirst away from the dripped throats of fallen men, I say tonight you shall not go unsated, but find your generations quenched, and bloom in every green.

I will not die, I told myself, but open my eyes into the halls of the slain, where the lights rain in blue and green like the open glades, and the world tree mounted high and wide and golden, sheds its leaves into the breeze. And the feast is marked at the endless table, and we bears and wolves will wet our fangs with glory and sweet pride.

Were my eyes open, or were they still shut? The ringing was long passed and the wind no longer walked from shadow to shadow. And it all looked bright about me, where the mud was bronze, not brown, and the life from the lifeless had finally returned. Even the panta was clear, and somehow, I had made it back so far that my feet lay in the water.

I turned my head to the bank and looked:

The flower billowed in the wind, and folded its petals for a bee.

If I stopped to ever wonder why:
could meadows spring
from darkened holds?
The stars and sun would soon retreat,
to let you make all into icy-golds.

How much desire have you seen,
or heard curses thrown?
Mutters of what might have been,
and lovers beat about—
their loves still unknown.

The cactus in the Sonoran-scape,
drinks upon your snow-fallen cape.
And all things sweet in forests kept,
have known your glow
to which they softly slept.

For so long you have loved me;
mine was indifferent care.
But were you to disappear
or fall out from the sky,
I would wish to know you more,
or see you one last time.

When all deserts me
and time has told me so;
when faces I was once fond of
faded long ago,
I would wish to hear your tales
and fall asleep beneath the snow.

The doc by mi bedside talken bout theatre, a stageless place wi no singers no dancers, on floors tiled white like Turkish teeth. Applause here is flat and relief is a heartbeat. The nautic hum of life, tube-administered. Theatre: mi ball acts alone—thirty-minute solo—external of meself, examined like a sugar plum fer mould. Outside me… ball… the spectator’s all hands, scalpel-eyed. A cape of ugly atop me. A bad wave, all of it. Has one yet had the general anaesthesia or has one not stopped dreaming…

The waiting room, some bardo o’ white lights and stillness nil. Beside mi this girl groaning, clutching her gut whimpering, clutching and grovelling like her insides are a-spillin’ or splittin’. Some fat twat bald as two stones, round as the hump of a fucken camel sat across from mi, giggling. Doves sprung with mi every step and now springs dead pets from decades past. In the bog wi mi pants hitched round ankles. Right ball – slant – nosin’ into the left like a lover desperate fer a shag. Pain realer than the fucken floor. Google says: six hours to save it or it’s fucken dead.

September, 1914
Feather Down, Wambrook

Dearest Charles,

This morning on my walk I happened upon a fallow deer grazing peaceably by the stream along which we used to walk. At the sound of my approach, it reared its head before bounding off into the trees. Had I known of its presence, I would have slowed my pace. It was a tender-faced creature, and in the brief moment our eyes met, I dare say it looked pained.

In the afternoon Florence and I stopped at a comfortable little inn by the Feather Down. The sun shone beautifully but we found little to say for our hearts ached with the silence of a war-torn land.

The papers insist we are fighting steadily, though they never disclose the entire truth. Father bids me tell you he keeps your tools well-oiled, and mother has picked the last of the stubborn roses and placed them beside your photograph.

I believe they both miss you more than they let on.

Do not trouble yourself to write oftener than you must, only when you are able and when it is safe. Even your chair is forlorn without your humming, and the hearth knows not the warmth it once knew before your departure.

Until your return, I remain as ever,

Yours devotedly,
Alice

The shrike diving drops the shrew,
spikes it through breast and eye.
For the rack, upon a twig—left to die.

On the honey locust tree,
I see nailed to its thorned reliquary
a larder decorated with small deaths.

Its songs for the killed offer no lament,
but wind in tunes not new nor old.

Feet dipped into the soft mush
of the green swamp scum,
with sundrops on my tongue.

The whistling glades where I sat,
whose heat is long like an open hand.
The days, the rolling spokes of a dancing wheel.

The shore was long and hooked; to my left, only sand and sea, and the frogged ivy that laced the bank in lines and veins within the shade of trees. The land was bodiless and the sky free of flying things. Alone like no time ever before. To my right: the shells of new buildings, or were they old? Abandoned, grey skeletons of lines unfolded and forgotten. I wondered what happened inside them after dark.

The sea was warm, uncomfortably. For a while I swam, then shored with sand in my gaps and my hair. I sat, burning, and imagined my life in verse. Nobody was around to lay eyes on me—nothing new to happen, nothing to boil into excitement. The same sea and the same sand beneath the one sun, changing in fractions so small that I could not notice. Tomorrow it would all be different; the world happening around me. Oblivious.

At night, when the days were
I think of next
and tomorrow dawning

I’m dreaming wanting
more

River boy on the water passing with time. The drift of wind making song in your ears. The line reeled in.
Across the sky flies a black arrow of dark metal. Birds hunting. From them drops white lines of speed and impending. Their shrieks like alarm. You watching from your boat with one caught fish writhing in your deserved hands. The weight of cooking for your mother and your father becomes like something suddenly from before.
Clouds burst like fallen stars and the birds of meat much like yourself scatter and sail the air to everywhere but away.
The water shakes. The splinters of things reach the riverbed; shells nick your cheeks.
Ten fences to your home erupt, and the cemetery is in bloom.

glowing

cut from the stuff
of suns

lightning
veinslit eyehole into hell
weight of heat, puddles of us married

animal fat out of the fridge

Sonora, if lightning happened here
who would know
Zeusstandard
heaven behind black tarps of sky
stars poured upon us
skin flayed skin fused

eating your chin and drinking your teeth

caught in our act
who would know

Auldies dyin’, fearin’ the bleak man o’ bone ‘n black mist,
fearin’ the deep descent, tengling cold toes.

Daft cunt – dinnae mistake the current fae the cold… mathsy-blue ‘lictric current; boxed away, riddy to peak-a-boo yer puss!

I did not realise I was watching the television until it snapped from static, and my eyes trained carefully on the man behind the glass eating strawberries. Devouring, actually. He’d bury his thick, hirsute hand into a picnic basket topped with red swollen strawbs – his fingers rigid like the tines of a fork – then scoop them out, the strawbs, one pawful at a time.

We are succinct in our half-naked unfolding of tender limbs. I want to be painted, and Sid talks about being an apple, being de-seeded without his skin being pierced, and then cored. I don’t know what he means.

The cat does something funny; personification comes to mind when it literally yawns like a person. Its cat hand rising in polite timing to cover its sharp and wrinkled mouth. Then it slumps over like any tired thing ever after a big meal. I point and giggle and ask Sid if he saw that and he says no. For whatever reason I crawl army-style towards the cat who must be called Belle, for whatever reason I don’t know. She smells like earth and her calloused underpaws remind me of seaside stone. Belle’s a little too unresponsive to my touch. Her face frozen in caricaturish expression, eyes sort of lobotomized and askance; pink tongue no bigger than my pinkie’s nail slipping out of her mouth.

‘Sid, your cat might be dead.’

Sid doesn’t seem to understand because he’s still unfolding in various ways, like anything ever to slough its skin and await the donning of something new, bright and beautiful.

‘Your cat might’ve been killed by something.’

Like Sid’s brain is keyed into receiving only the passive voice, he snaps awake.

‘What?’

‘Sid come over here.’

A couple minutes of name calling and poking ensue, leading to a pretty informed conclusion that Belle’s death occurred at around 1522h. which is when the man on television quit his strawberry eating and began to hack up red phlegm.

We call his mum who after eighteen rings does not pick up, then try his dad who went straight to voicemail after a couple seconds.

‘You have a sister, don’t you?’ I ask.

‘Yeah.’

No shot there; endless ringing into a void.

‘Shit, she’s really dead.’ Sid finally stops poking Belle.

‘She’s been dead for almost ten minutes.’

‘You have parents. Call them,’ says Sid.

Following zero in the way of answers across everyone we tried, the small seed of fear had suddenly become real. A frightening real that limited no emotion.

‘You don’t think everyone’s dead, do you?’ I say.

Sid swallows hard, then shakes his head.

What proceeds that moment of contemplative silence is the World Revival Sustenance Operation that begins with opening the blinds and letting the violent heat and light from the outside in. The grey tarmac of the road even manages to betray an almost silvery glow among the green and blue of beyond. It was too nice a day for everyone on the map to die. The roads were clean and limbless, without noise from contraption or kid. A shuffling from behind as Sid stuffs into his mouth in telly-man-eating-strawbs fashion another two whole unforgiving brownies. And with a severe panic that borders existential I do the same.

*

‘Don’t you feel it like that pressure? Forced isolation.’

‘…’

‘Sid don’t you feel it?’

‘…’

‘Like you’ve got to make something now or never and be alone and deal with it. Sid, stop looking out the window and maybe cover Belle.’

Belle dead but still existing in our minds. The mind’s eye makes her walk again, makes the silence scurry by and invite some outside noise; of footsteps and kicks and laughter. The slap and gurgle of some hungry stomach.

‘I can’t find a thing in my life I’ve to learn from. And now it’s all gone. And I am this way and will always be this way,’ says Sid.

He is a puddle of pink wet lines. He is half of the sofa. Half in it. Part of him protruding in Sidiotic shapes.

‘Do you think,’ he continues, ‘that if we close our eyes they might all come back.’

‘We singlehandedly are more powerful than everyone and anything. I’ve realised that now. We’re timeless in a sort of way that allows time to negate itself. I think. Don’t you think that? Separation is a key. It makes things unfold.’

‘Reality is I’m dripping away.’

‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘It could be us at any moment and we just have to make do with that.’

Us in this vacuum of impending. Belle right about then is slowly become rigid. Time lying its heavy body on the knots of her fur. Us in the centre of this carousel; the world beyond these red brick walls revolves but without light, without childish sparkle or glitter; nought in the method of sturdy plastic carriages and or genitalless equine shapes. Just a lonely ride.

‘Some grief is so fast there’s no time to mourn. Do you get that?’ I ask.

‘I get it like the world is on fire.’

‘I’ve stopped sweating.’

‘Face up to it.’ Sid rises from his one strange shape into another. His underwear is nowhere to be found. ‘Do you think you’re ready?’

‘No one is ready. Not for the end.’

‘But we’ve got time to prepare for it.’

‘Sure but didn’t everyone.’

‘Yeah but they thought they had longer.’

‘People always think they have longer,’ I say. ‘We don’t know how long we have. Could be seconds.’

‘But it’s always been like this. It could always have been a couple seconds.’

‘So nothing has really changed.’

‘Except we’re not sweating,’ says Sid.

‘I can feel it creeping.’

‘Feel what creeping?’

‘The thing that’s like a damn full-stop. It’s here in the room with us,’ I say.

‘Sort yourself out. You’re talking too much. Don’t tell me another thing unless it’s a secret. During the end times one must only profess secrets, or so keep their tongues at all times tied.’

I realise then that while all others had gone, he had not. The man behind the glass whose animated stuffing-of-mouth seemed more self-aware than it did before. Like he knew what was happening, and the rapid flicker of his unsated eyes could’ve, I swear, for moment flashed by us. I am being painted by those eyes. Painted thickly red. Him pulling the strings. Storing all that was ever special inside his deep unhinged and unfixed mouth.

Gulping, looking away from the television, I say:

‘What secrets?’

‘Like the grimy kind,’ says Sid. ‘What you can only spill in the dark. Spend the dark on me. Tell me what it’s like to wallow in the mud of your mind, and I’ll tell you the same.’

Us once more in strange silence. The shapes of us taking over the space, ebbing and flowing like a backwards ocean. Maybe we’re dancing or maybe we’re not. Our movements are like a sort of lag, and behind us – chasing us – the frames of reality in the shape of clawed fingers, reaching out to us last children on the carousel.

And in the soft whispers aroused from the dark corners of us, a sleep like a sleep of summer when as a child the warm aestival evening brought into one’s room the most soothing, amber light, and falling into the land of dreams was like being wrapped in a leaf of gold, dropped in sap and sailed away.

Waiting for the other side of the red brick wall to show; us waiting for everything.