A note I wrote earlier:

People will try to stay politically neutral on here, believing it’ll open them to a more diverse audience/generalised success, but I’d argue that unless you’re writing generic genre fiction or something intentionally beige for mass consumption, our best writing with always have our values flowing through it. This is in part our life force, our reason for living life like we do, in some cases this is what possesses us to write every day even when it seems like a bad idea, both economically and sanity wise. Because you can’t keep the river and the sea separate, nor should you. You might find you lose subscribers. You might find you have to compromise on the numbers sometimes. But in the end, you will receive more authentic devotion from a readership that you meet on your most congruent terms.

Which is why I stand by my earlier commentary of Heated Rivalry. It’s very mediocre. I’m not saying you can’t have competitive sport queer stories, go nuts we actually do need more diversity in the romance genre, there are currently more popular stories about ladies fucking dragons than same sex relationships which is fucking weird. I’m just saying if you’re gonna do it…. make the DIALOGUE BETTER.

But really, don’t hold back on putting all of your stardust into your writing. What matters to you, why this life matters to you at all. Your identity. The reason you’re here, what you’re driven to preserve or change. The meaning you have imbued back on life. If you want it to be mass consumable, okay, but if you want it to resonate, the truth of who you are is unavoidable. You may not get the audience you first envisioned, but you’ll get the audience you deserve.


___________________________________________________________________________

Context: I didn’t JUST write it about Heated Rivalry (but I will be penning an essay on that eventually). But I want to clarify further, because I have an over explaining complex and because it feels low key relevant: I’m writing this because I’ve recently seen posts about people being harassed or deleted for sharing more vulnerable parts of their identity and their frameworks for that. Black people being honest about their experiences, Trans people theirs. And they’re getting negative feedback for it and wondering how much of themselves they should be sharing here.

Which, for the record, no you should’t. You are as entitled to be here as boldly as everyone else is. You’re not responsible for other people’s bad taste.

But I confess - pretty shamefully, when I approached this platform, I did so believing I could remain neutral - a privilege of being a white woman with a fairly generically acceptable life - one who can at least pretend these horrors don’t exist for her for a little while.

But as soon as I tried to put on my Mary Sue Does A Beige Hat Substack, I realised that of course I couldn’t. Firstly, I get mad about stuff and have impulse control issues with a keyboard and wifi, but also… I don’t write neutral stories. Because the generically acceptable life is a mask that I don’t have to wear as a writer. And what’s to be gained from pretending I don’t have views, that I don’t have personal stakes in all of this, that my children don’t? What does safe mean to a writer? I’m not going to attract the right kind of reader if I’m neutral, the kind who is going to stick around after chapter 9, when the gloves come off and don’t go back on for 3 books.

My ‘values’, my politics and my opinions bleed through the page in the fictional world, especially when I don’t realise they’re doing it, in one way or another, and one advantage of Substack is that you can hone a reader more than you might out int the wild. That’s the purpose of notes, isn’t it? To align yourself with the right kind of reader. To identify your village on here.

So I’ll try to keep being as real as possible. And if you don’t like what I do, that’s okay, there are a lot of us on here, I’m sure you’ll find a writer who does.

But as a heads up, I’m rabidly pro-human rights and rabidly mad about the decline of them in the world right now. I am furious about particularism, this kind of cognitive dissonance in those who take safe harbour in values that they do not extend to others. At the core of this is another kind of self-preservation. If we aren’t all safe, none of us are. And this will be the underlying theme of everything I write…eventually. So if you don’t subscribe to that, you won’t subscribe to me.

So if you’re looking at the current timeline and thinking this is great, we’re probably not on the same wavelength and you’re either going to rage quit eventually or leave nasty comments. So… better we part ways now.

I’d also like to reference who wrote a piece about this in another context; her last post (all of them, for that matter) is worth reading.

Why are you here? I mean Substack. Not the Meaning of Life. Although if you figure that out, let me know - I hear people are interested.

I’ll tell you why I am. I’m here because I write. But I don’t write because I have a Substack. I don’t write because I have readers. I write because I’ve always written. It’s how I untangle my thoughts and feelings. It’s how I shake out the clusterfuck that is my brain onto a page and sort through everything - what matters, what’s connected, what’s just my own bias talking.

It’s also an escape. When I write, I’m not here. I’m in a world of hypotheticals, a world where problems can be solved no matter how hard they are. Nothing like this world, where problems mutate into other problems and resolutions are usually just the calm before the next storm.

So. Let me tell you why I started to write The Other Girls.

I was reading a lot of hero’s journey stories at the time, and if you know anything about that structure, you’ll know there’s a part where the character resists the call. It’s usually pretty brief — a chapter or two where they refuse to participate in their destiny before they get on their horse or dragon and ride toward it.

And I thought: really, though? For me, that’s the biggest fantasy. That’s the part I find truly unrelatable. Because if someone told me tomorrow that it was my destiny to go save the world, I think I might go back to bed instead.

Which is exactly why I started The Other Girls. I wanted to write an anti-hero’s journey. I’ve always felt like the resistance could be a whole book. What happens if you get the call and, like any self-respecting Millennial, you send it to voicemail?

This isn’t a traditional hero’s journey. It’s a story about a woman who has to unlearn everything she was told— and every way she’s kept herself feeling safe— to become who she was supposed to be.

As a woman with an assortment of DSM-5 acronyms attached to her identity, I know what it’s like to spend years repressing the things that feel most natural to me in favour of what’s socially acceptable. I’ve hurt myself in that process. I’ve erased parts of myself, numbed myself, made myself smaller and quieter. And now, at 40, I’m trying to find the balance between being a financially responsible adult who provides for her children and actually being congruent with who I am.

I don’t write for readers. I write because it’s how I stay sane.

But if you get something out of it — if you see this very messy, very flawed woman on the page feel a little less alone because you recognise yourself in her, because you’ve been repressing parts of yourself that always seemed too dangerous or unstable to show — then welcome. I’m glad we found each other.

If you’re interested in an anti-hero’s journey, here is the link

New? Start here!
Previously on The Other Girls (Chapter 8)
Table of Contents (All chapters)

I’d barely dragged myself back into the flat before Ellie started going off like fireworks.

“Yes! We DID it! WE DID IT!!”

I closed the front door behind me, slipping the security chain on and locking the knob, grimacing at all the noise. “What are you talking about?”

“I found something useful! Something actually worth cabbage and bin juice hair!”

I turned to see her bouncing around like some crazed game show contestant, waving this ‘something’ around in her hand like a winning lottery ticket—a blur of brown—but I couldn’t make out what it was. Finally, she stopped jumping long enough to show me, holding out this mottled, regular brown thing like a trophy, a declaration. I squinted through the grime of light oozing from the remaining fluorescent bar light for a few seconds before I muttered, “It’s a book.”

When I didn’t match her enthusiasm, she sighed dramatically. “Don’t you SEE!”

I turned my back fully to the front door and leaned into it for support. My lungs and legs were burning. The two flights of stairs had almost killed me. “I see we disagree on the definition of worth it…”

“It’s not just a book, it’s a journal! Probably his journal.”

As she opened it, radiant with relief, I went into a silent panic. Here she was, digging for treasure, and all I could see were potential landmines. But as she started to thumb through it, the light left her face.

“Well, FUCK...”

“What?”

“It’s ruined, is what!” She huffed, turning the pages more violently. “Half of it’s stuck together and stained with something…” She brought it closer to her face, sniffing it, then twisted and recoiled. “Blergh, it’s all… sour and yeasty. Like it got soaked in beer or something…”

I let my breath go. Thank God.

“You’d better hope it was beer,” I said, making my way past her towards the couch.

“Gross, Abby,” she wrinkled her face up; as if she herself hadn’t just been crawling through a vat of waste, soaked with whatever was also soaked through that book. “I can’t believe this. We were so close…”

As she lamented about our dead end, I eased into the couch, resting my face against the synthetic scouring-pad cushions. It was a relic like the hairspray—from the 1970s if not before—lumpy, uncomfortable, reeking of cigarettes and weather—but it was the only way to stop myself from feeling like I was going to fall through the earth.

Ellie’s voice faded, and all that was left was the sound of her turning pages, the fridge humming, and the lights buzzing. I took the opportunity to slow my breath, my heart. It was over. I could finally stop.

Except my body didn’t seem to feel that way. There was this unease in my gut, flaring up like a violent rash all the way to my throat—some unreachable, relentless itch. Well, almost unreachable. Before too long, my mind was back in my bag, to what might just scratch that itch…

“Do you speak any Italian?”

I cracked my eyes to look up at Ellie, incredulous. She was standing directly under the remaining fluorescent, laser-focused on the page. “What?”

“Terra. Porta. P-O-R-T-A. That’s Italian, right?”

“The only Italian I know is puttana and spaghetti.”

“Well you impersonated one for long enough,” she flipped another page of the mangled journal, laser focused on it. “I figured maybe you know some basic Italian.”

“Esmerelda wasn’t Italian. She was a gypsy.”

“Who are Romanis,” Another page. “From Rome.”

“Romanis aren’t from Rome…” my headache was worsening. I closed my eyes again to block out the light. “Why is this relevant?”

“Could it have been Italian? You said he had a slight accent.”

“He was too fair to be Italian,” I murmured into the dark, “And George said he’s a pom. And he’s known him for twenty years, so he probably has a better idea than I do.”

“Well, this definitely isn’t English…”

On the outside, another page turned. On the inside, I felt like dark water was rising. Like I was drowning from the inside.

“...here’s another one… Vat-icin-ium….”

I had to find my bag.

I opened my eyes again, scanning the room for it. The last place I remember it being was on the table. Or in Ellie’s hands? I had no idea, I just knew it wasn’t anywhere I could see…

“The Vatican is in Italy, right?”

Just as my throat started to constrict with panic, I noticed the strap peeking from behind the coffee table, partly trapped under Ellie’s Docs. Using my hand to brace against the floor, I slipped over the couch’s edge carefully onto the floor, reaching for it.

“Even if he was blonde, there’s a lot of blonde Italians, you know…”

I yanked it out from under her foot with relative ease—she didn’t notice she was so absorbed in her own monologue—then dumped the bag into my lap. The rank odour of rotting spring rolls hit me, but I held my breath and forged through the rest of it—crinkled lolly wrappers, scraps of his strange paper money, disintegrated tissue…

“Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCAPrio…”

I found one of the little pill canisters. Too small to be the ones I was looking for.

“He’s blonde…”

Another. Its lid was too ridged. Wrong again.

“And you know Jon Bon Jovi’s real name is Giovanni…”

On my third failed attempt I finally upended the bag entirely onto the floor. Its contents spilled onto the carpet like a disaster. I crawled through the debris, scouring through it all, increasingly frantic with every second that I didn’t find what I looking for.

I was vaguely aware of Ellie next to me, bending to pick something up off the table, but I was too busy rechecking every pill bottle. Three. There were supposed to be four. Where the hell had bottle four gone?

“This watch sure seems old though...fucking heavy….”

No no no no no

“Hey, check this out. The back opens up, like a hidden compartment…”

I plonked back down, crossed my legs, and pulled the bag into my lap again, searching every crevice, every pocket, pushing my fingers through the broken lining. But all I found there were some waterlogged, swollen tampons. Suddenly, a small, folded piece of paper landed on my leg, no more than two-by-two inches. I vaguely registered Ellie hovering over me, then leaning down in front of me, her Mary Medallion swinging inches from my face as she retrieved it.

As my eyes followed her hands, I caught sight of the book I’d been carrying around in my bag splayed open on the floor spine-up, its purple cover and pages swollen and every bit as water-damaged as the rest of my bag. Poking out from between its swollen pages, the bottom of a pill bottle.

Elated, I plunged forward to pick it up, open it—and stared in horror into the hollow of it.

For a moment, there was nothing else—not Ellie, not the journal, the watch. Not even air or light. Just the absence of five small pills.

Ellie’s voice broke through—but it was all just vague gibberish. “VINGEL! VINGEL! VINGEL!”

Surely I hadn’t taken them?? Not after being so careful with them. And five? It might explain the memory lapse. But, I’d usually remember the first?

“ABBY!”

I looked up, snapping a little “What!?”

“There’s an inscription, see.” She knelt beside me, shoving it so close to my face I couldn’t read anything. I pulled back and squinted through the low light, vaguely able to make out the script etched into the back of the watch.

V. Engel

“This is amazing!” She popped back up, all gleeful again. “We have a name!”

Who the fuck cares, I thought, picking up another pill bottle. Sleeping pills. Not what I wanted, but they’d have to do. Sleep would give me distance. From the dark water, from the physical pain. Sleep would buy me time until I could get to a version of myself who could handle all of this.

“But it’s not like there are that many V names, right? Victor, Vincent, Vladimir…ooooh….what about Valentino?”

Her voice was far away. Like it was coming through a wall. I struggled to get the child-cap off the pills. My grip was too weak, too clumsy.

“Abigail, will you pay attention? Do any of those names sound familiar?”

Irritated, I looked up at her, snapping. “Ellie, will you shut up! That isn’t his name, okay? That watch is like two hundred years old.”

“Okay, but... it makes it more distinctive. Maybe we can find out where he bought it, maybe it was at auction or like… it’s a direct family heirloom, and he inherited it?” Now her attention was on the folded paper. She unfolded it, and her frown deepened. “Weird, it’s like full of a powder… do you think it’s cocaine or something…”

She dabbed her finger in it and sniffed it, then touched her fingertip to the tip of her tongue.

“Ellie! I can’t believe I have to say this to you, but don’t put random powders in your mouth.”

“You should talk,” she muttered. “The whole reason we’re even talking about this is because of the random thing you put in your mouth.”

“I told you I didn’t do that with him!”

“I meant the drink, you gronk.”

I finally got the pill bottle open. I tipped one tablet into my hand, then after a moment of deliberation, a second.

“How do you know what it is or isn’t?” She was still standing over me now, the packet in one hand, the watch in the other.

I threw them into my mouth, forced them down dry my swollen, sandpaper throat.. “For the same reason I know you wouldn’t give away your medal of Mary,” I rasped, my throat a little full, like the tablets hadn’t entirely gone down. I started to get up off the ground to get some water to wash them down with.. “ It’s our mother’s. It’s personal. Sentimental. And you don’t just... gamble away something that sentimental in a bar.”

“Okay, Abigail,” she sighed a little. “You know… I don’t care if you stole it.”

“I didn’t steal it!” I snapped, using the couch to brace against as I got to my feet. “I won it!”

She did not look convinced. And to be fair, you have to hear the story to believe it. And she’d run off before I’d had the chance to tell her that part. And even then, it was a pretty wild story.

I eyed the tequila on the bench on my way to the sink. As terrible as I felt, it was tempting. It would work faster than the pills if it stayed down at all. I suspected it wouldn’t. So instead, I filled a glass with water and washed it down. It didn’t get rid of the sensation of stuck pills, but it helped soothe it a little.

Once I was confident I could breathe, I shuffled back to the couch, willing the pills to do their work quickly.

“Well, I choose to remain optimistic,” Ellie went on. “Between the diary and this watch, and the weird money… what is this anyway…”

I picked up the empty pill bottle, stared at it, as if it would prompt my memory. But nothing. I couldn’t remember taking a single one.

“They might be enough for the police to at least look into it…”

Something in me snapped. “For fuck’s sake, Ellie. Will you fucking drop it already?”

“Drop what?”

“Talking about the police, looking for clues. Why? Nothing happened. Nothing worth bringing police into. Jesus. And what the fuck was that performance at the bin back there? Are you trying to get me arrested again?”

“What?” Her voice was high, and she looked genuinely shocked. “No, and what do you mean nothing happened? Something happened, Abby…”

I clutched the pill bottle tighter, the dark water getting hotter, thicker—more like lava. Simmering.

“You’ve lost three days!” Ellie went on. “And look at you! You’re sicker than you’ve ever been in your life! Clearly something fucking happened! And this guy is the last person you remember, the last person who gave you a drink …”

Bubbling now. “I know!”

“THEN WHY AREN’T YOU MORE FREAKED OUT RIGHT NOW?” Her voice was on the verge of shrill, her hands thrashing around like frantic wings. “THREE DAYS, Abigail! You don’t know if you were awake or asleep, you don’t know what happened to you or what you might have done. The best-case scenario is that you were unconscious for three days. The worst…”

“Ellie, stop it!” I struggled to my feet, wanting to get some distance from her, squeezing all of my anger into the pill bottle.

“No! I won’t stop it! For all we know you could be… pregnant or have an STD. HIV even.”

“Well, I’ll still be knocked up with HIV in the morning. Those things aren’t anything I have to deal with right now.” I was upright now, facing her across the coffee table.

“YES THEY FUCKING ARE. Oh my God!” She half laughed, clutching her head, the watch still dangling from her hand. “What are you not getting about this, Abigail? You could have died…”

“COULD. Exactly! You keep saying COULD. And there’s no point getting worked up over COULD.”

For a second, I was pretty proud of myself. I was talking shit, of course—I didn’t mean a word of it, obviously everything she said was right—but the point is I sounded wise. Zen, even.

But Ellie wasn’t placated by my Zen impersonation. She stepped closer to me. “Okay, who the fuck are you, Miss fucking Tsunami-in-every-Teacup? Don’t pull that fortune cookie shit on me. Especially not when, if our situations were reversed, you’d be rampaging right now. You’d be screaming for blood. You wouldn’t be like, ‘Okay Ellie, I respect your right to be a FUCKING IDIOT and just IGNORE what just happened...’”

She was right again.

But that didn’t suit me, so I said, “That’s DIFFERENT. You’re the kid!”

“I AM TWENTY ONE! I AM AN ADULT!”

“Yeah, we’ve established that.” I gripped the back of the couch with my free hand so I wouldn’t fall. “And we’ve established it means I can’t tell you what to do anymore, which is exactly what you said to me when you walked out of here a MONTH ago without so much as calling me to tell me you were alive!”

“No!” She jagged a finger at me. “You don’t get to do that!”

“Do what? Ask you to be accountable?!”

“No, you don’t get to change the subject to what a fuck up Ellie is this time! You had your chance to get mad about that, now we’re focusing on what a fuck up you are!”

“Well, Ellie, it’s like you said to me a couple of months ago: I’m an adult. I can make my own decisions. You don’t get to tell me what to do. You are not my mother.”

That last word cut. It cut her, it cut me as I saw her wince at the words. Her eyes got glassy with tears, but she crossed her arms and lifted her chin, steadying herself. “Fine, nothing happened. Maybe. You woke up. What about all the girls who didn’t? What if this is the guy who did that?”

“He’s not a serial killer, Ellie.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m not dead!”

“Well you’re barely fucking alive. And so what, maybe he got interrupted before he could finish. Maybe you’re the lucky one…”

I had to laugh at that. Lucky.

“What about the unlucky girls? Don’t you think they deserved more?”

“Little late for that.”

“Okay, what about the ones he hasn’t gotten to yet?”

”Why is this up to me to give it to them?”

She looked at me like I was speaking another language before she shook her head. “Because….you can. What’s that saying? With great power comes great responsibility…”

I had to laugh again. Great power. I could barely stand up. The wooziness was setting in. The pills were doing their work, giving me that cotton wool brain feeling, the heavier body. My tongue felt thicker. I had to focus on making my words clear. “Okay, even if you’re right, and this guy is The Ripper….the only evidence I have is a scattered story and a very valuable watch and his money. And who do you think they’re going to believe, Ellie, even if they bother to follow up? You want me to what, blow up my whole life over some hypothetical murders?”

“I’m sorry, what fucking life?!” She was raging now. “You don’t leave the block! You haven’t since you moved here! Just to go to work and come home, and it seems like you don’t even do that any fucking more because apparently you haven’t worked there for a month!”

I backed towards the kitchen bench, resting my body against it. “Ellie…”

She was too busy rampaging. “I mean, look at you! Look at this place! The lights don’t work, the oven’s broken, and you know there’s fucking maggots in the bin, right…”

I closed my eyes, trying to steady my breath. “Ellie..”

“You lose your shit at me because I didn’t call YOU. The phone has been disconnected, how the fuck COULD I call you?” I heard her pick up the receiver and slam it down, the crack of plastic on plastic. “You know what, I almost didn’t come back, but I was fucking worried about YOU, and it turns out I was right to be…”

“I’m not doing this.” I started towards the bedroom, too angry to look at her, too slow from the pills to keep fighting.

“YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.”

I kept walking. I was almost at the bedroom door.

“YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY HERE!”

I stopped, sighing. “No, Ellie.” I turned and looked at her wearily. “They do. Those girls have a responsibility. To not stick shit in their arms, or take money from strangers for sex…”

“Oh my GOD,” she laughed, shaking her head. “WHO FUCKING CARES WHAT THEY DO?!”

I spun around. “LISTEN! I’m not going to ruin my life so I can buy some girl another week of bad decisions until she runs into her next bad ending.”

Ellie’s eyes went wide, horrified. “DO YOU FUCKING HEAR YOURSELF? Even if they were shooting up a thousand times a day, it doesn’t mean they don’t matter, it doesn’t mean he’s more entitled to take their fucking lives from them…”

From under the haze, my rage spiked. “But they sure made it FUCKING easier for him, didn’t they!” I said, hurling the pill bottle across the room with surprising strength. It flew past Ellie’s head and clattered against the floor. The silence that followed was loud, heavy.

Ellie walked to where the pill bottle was on the floor, and for a second, I wondered if she’d peg it back at me. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d gotten into a throwing fight. Instead, she walked towards me slowly, pill bottle in hand. “So who gets to judge which girls are unlucky and which girls deserve it?” She pressed the empty pain pill bottle into my hand. “You?”

The empty bottle felt like a brick in my hand. It was hard to find my voice under the weight of it. “Well, men take what they want when they want it, especially when it’s easy and right there, and if those girls want to be easy and right there, that’s their choice. There have been a million dead girls before me, and there’ll be a million after me. I’m not the difference.”

“You could be.”

I shook my head and dropped the pill bottle, too tired to hold it anymore, my words slurring a little. “I won’t be.”

I turned back to my bedroom door, put my hand on the knob, barely able to stand up.

“Abby… I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t just let this go.”

I closed my eyes, clenching the knob. For fuck’s sake.“Ellie…”

“No, I'm sorry, but..I have a responsibility here. I know something, I…I have to go to the police.”

Under the exhaustion, the drugs, panic still beat quietly. “Ellie,” I looked at her, making my voice as stern as possible. “Do NOT go to the police. All you’re going to do is get me in trouble.”

She shook her head. She didn’t look angry anymore. She looked as tired as I felt. I realised she was crying. “I don’t have to bring you into this at all,” She shook her head. “I can say I took the watch…..”

“Then what, you’ll go to jail! Genius fucking solution, Ellie….”

“Yeah, well…I’d rather that than the alternative. I can’t just walk around every day knowing that I’m letting this happen when I could have stopped this. I’ll never forgive myself. And maybe you don’t realise it yet, but it’ll be the same for you. The next time a girl washes up, and you know you could have been the difference…”

Too tired, too angry, too broken to keep going, I stepped into my bedroom and pushed the door closed. Through the wood, I heard her final words.

“It’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life.”

These would be the last words she would ever say to me. And also the truest.

So here’s the deal .I’m a stickler for consistency. Sure there’s nuance and judgement but ultimately the law has to how up to some scrutiny. Which is why rape exemptions for abortion because they’re both illogical and harmful. If abortion is “murder,” why is it suddenly acceptable when the pregnancy is from rape? Under what moral system do we kill one person for someone else’s crime? A rape exemption collapses the anti-abortion argument. It’s a person or it isn’t, make your fucking mind up.

But logical fallacy aside it also forces women to prove they were raped to access healthcare and anybody who knows anything about our our legal system and sexual assault knows how complicated that actually is. What constitutes rape? A lack of consent. Okay, now prove it. When so many rapes have no physical evidence, involve partners, or are never reported, this is loaded with complications. What happens if she can’t prove it? We interrogate her? Put her on trial? Deny her medical care? Put her in jail if we can’t prove it? Bring the expense and trauma of court into what should be a safe and affordable procedure?

Rape exemptions would only make more of something that already exists in this system - “good” and “bad” victims. Forcing women to perform their trauma to qualify for a basic medical right. Abortion access should rest on bodily autonomy, the principle that we are not entitled to make other peoples decisions for them. Not on the circumstances of conception. Adding conditions only increases suffering and makes an already horrific situation worse.

So no, I don’t think there should be rape exemptions. The only exclusions related to abortion need to be everyone who isn’t that woman and her doctor.

New? Start here!
Previously on Other Girls (Episode 7)
Table of Contents (Every Episode)


“Hey, you said you believed in God before. But what about fate? Like, if it’s all God’s plan then we’re in for the same result no matter what, right? So why give people free will? Why give people choices if they’re just going to make the wrong ones? And why bother trying to make the right ones if you’re just going to end up in the same place? How can you believe in a plan and free will at the same time?”

“…”

“……Hello? Hello?! Are you there?! Irish Satan?!… Oh my God, you’re not there, are you, you are a hallucination…”

“Hey. Sorry. I’m here.”

“Irish Satan? Is that you?”

“…Technically no, but for our immediate purposes, aye.”

“Oh, Thank God! I thought I’d been talking into the void this whole time.”

“No, I’m here. I was just thinking about what you said.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry. It’s just….I don’t have any measure of time here. There’s no way of telling if you’ve been quiet for three seconds or three hundred years. The closest sense of time I have is your voice.”

“It’s okay. I know what it’s like.”

“How long have you been here?”

“What’s the last year you remember? 1999 did you say?”

“Yeah.”

“Long time then.”

“….so do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Believe in fate?”

“Oh. Well. I never used to.”

“What changed?”

“It was more about who than what.”

“So you believe in God and fate and you ended up here?”

“Yes.”

“Did you try to be a good person?”

“I did my best.”

“Rough deal. You might as well have just done whatever you wanted.”

“……”

“Hello? HELLO? Oh, you aren’t there! I am insane…”

“I’m still here. You’re asking some heavy questions. I need to think about my answers.”

“Sorry. I really am. It’s just I can’t tell the difference between three seconds and three hundred years down here….wait, I already said that, didn’t I? …The point is… before you, there was nothing for such a long time. And….well, it’s kind of like you made me real again. So every time you’re quiet…”

“Aye. Okay, okay. I have a proposal. Give me your hand.”

“My what?”

“Your hand.”

“..in marriage?”

“No, your literal hand, Abigail.”

“Oh...Right. Wait, for what?”

“To squeeze.”

“In what?!”

“Mine.”

“……”

“I was just thinking you could squeeze my hand when I’m quiet, when I’m thinking. And I’ll squeeze back, and that way you’ll know I’m still here, even when I’ve gone quiet. But I’ll understand if it’s too much. I know after a while in a place like this touch can be….overwhelming.”

“…No, it’s not that. Okay…this is going to sound dumb. I didn’t realise you have hands.”

“What were you picturing? Hooves?”

“No, of course not. Not on your arms, anyway. It’s just…you’ll think it’s even more stupid, but until you mentioned it….I forgot I even had hands.”

“Oh. Right. That can happen here too.”

“But I think that’s a good idea! The hand-squeezing thing. You’re right, maybe it’ll help.”

“Okay. Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

“…….”

“…….”

“…Abigail?”

“…..”

“Abigail? Are you okay?”

“….Yeah. Sorry. I just… I guess I forgot what warm felt like too.”

“….”

“Hey, this who you met, the one that changed your mind about fate. Was it a girl?”

“Aye.”

“Why did she change your mind?”

“…She arrived at just the right time.”

“It must be nice. Believing in fate and God. Something bigger than you. I’ve never been comfortable giving up that much control. But I can see the upside. Then everything wouldn’t be my fault. Maybe I’d hate myself less. I’d probably have still ended up in hell. But at least I’d know it hadn’t all come down to one stupid choice.”

Coming soon….

My friend, who is in her twenties and basically a fetus, was talking about love last week. “I want something real, you know. Something big, and intense and …. LIFE changing. I want LOVE. “
“Well, those aren’t necessarily the same things.”
“You know what I mean, like a classic, grand romance. Big gestures. Somebody who would die for you. I want that.”
”Make sure you put that in your Tinder profile. “Willing to die for me.”
”Shut up. You know what I mean.”

Sure. I knew. I made the joke for the same reasons I usually make a joke. Because in that moment, I lacked the words to articulate something more complicated - why I believe love is at odds with what she was describing. And I should have known. Because I’d had the kind of grand, obsessive love she was talking about. Or at least what we call love.

To be fair, my ‘love’ probably looks really boring. I’ve been with the same person for 18 years. We were friends for several years before that. We have three children together, ranging from 8 to 16. They have been legitimate for 7 years. He is one of my favourite people in the world. I haven’t tried to kill him, not even once. Well, not seriously, anyway. And I’m here to tell you the grand romantic love they sell you in movies is FUCKING BULL SHIT.

And I know because….. dramatic pause … I was that girl.
And .. my husband was the guy.

It was one of THOSE relationships. Grand. Passionate. Real.. I used to get up at 5am on a Sunday.. a SUNDAY … just to walk into town to meet him after his glassie shift. We’d have breakfast at Hungry Jack’s because it was the only thing open in Brisbane at that hour. I didn’t mind losing sleep. My hormones were all lit up like a Christmas tree. Who needed sleep? I had looooove.

Besides, we were going back to bed anyway. Eventually, that’s where we’d end up. Because we were in our twenties and had no responsibilities and it was a Sunday and we were Godless. Where else were we going to spend our Sundays?

It’s also not to say it wasn’t romantic. I doted on him and he doted on me. He loved risotto, so I cooked it for him every week. I made a joke about getting me a pony from the shops once so he bought me a My Little Pony and that running joke lasted for 5 years until I was like ‘Dude, enough with the ponies, we’re going to end up on one of those My Strange Addiction shows’. I used to stay up all night just to talk to him when he got home. We used to stay up all night talking most nights, when we weren’t busy staying up not talking. He used to write me letters by hand. He was broke, so he would pick me wildflowers. They erupted in bugs everywhere, but it felt incredibly romantic before I was covered in ant bites.

The sex was the best sex I’d ever had. In fact, it was the first time I understood why people cared about sex at all. Prior to that it was just something I did because it seemed to be what was expected of me. Some guy jackhammering on top of me and me being like “I guess it’s not the worst?” With him, it was a hyperfocus. With him, it was a necessity.

The first time he broke up with me I thought I was going to die.

“I’m not ready for a commitment,” he explained. “But we can still be friends.”
“I don’t want to be friends,” I said, adding very maturely, “My friends aren’t noncommittal cunts.”
“I don’t want my life not to have you in it.”
“Well, I can’t go back to just being friends. Sorry.”
“But I can’t imagine what it would be like without you in it.”
“I guess you’re going to find out, fuckboi.”

He didn’t find out. We moved in together a week later. He carried all of my belongings on his back, in a storm, 3 blocks to his house. Fortunately, I was very poor, so he didn’t have to make too many trips.

It was like that for the first two years. On again, off again. “I can’t be with you, I can’t live without you. This is too much, this isn’t enough.” Extreme highs, extreme lows. Maybe it was because I was so young. Maybe it’s because I was so unmedicated (okay, there’s no maybe to that….). But what I knew for sure was this was the passionate, crazy, intense love I’d been hearing about in songs and movies and books forever.

Except….was it?

If I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t care about his happiness in those days. I cared about our happiness. Which was largely dependent on my happiness. Which was at odds with what he cared about, which was his own happiness.

He cheated. I cheated right back, not because I wanted to (who needs another jackhammer?), but I wanted to demonstrate that I was 23 and totally stacked and could replace him easily. Mission accomplished. He got intensely jealous. I got intensely jealous right back. He lied. I lied. We kept coming back together like stray cats. With fleas, hungry. Impermanent. Before too long, we’d be off again.

We were legitimately awful to each other in those first couple of years. I can’t think of a single person in the world I’ve treated more terribly than I have him. He’d probably say the same about me and he’d be right, because he was an outright prick sometimes. Like the time he broke up with me on my birthday. For revenge, I had a party and gave away everything he owned. To be fair, I was pretty moody, on account of being pregnant.

(Booooooooo)

Okay, okay, dick move, but he did come back. He’d freaked out. He wanted to make it up.

He did level up his devotion, though. Now he went out at 5am on a Sunday to get me postmix coke from Hungry Jack’s, because that was what I craved. He argued with doctors on my behalf, advocating for whatever i wanted. He built baby furniture. He met strangers on Gumtree who could have been kidney harvesters for bags of baby clothes. He levelled up from douchebag boyfriend to guy who was really trying to be a good partner and father.

The relationship was still volatile. I can hold a grudge. In fact I can hold several grudges at once, stacked up on each other like grudge Jenga - but in this case I had a big one to sit with. He’d walked out because he wasn’t ready to be a father. I wasn’t ready to be a mother either, but I couldn’t leave like he could.

So what changed?

Well, the baby came out. I think that has. a lot to do with it.

It wasn’t until our son was born that we both loved something more than ourselves for the first time in our lives that we learned how to extend that to each other. For the sake of this common love, which finally seemed worth the effort to grow for. We needed to be our best selves for him. And that involved being our best selves for each other.

Just to be clear, I am not advocating for staying in a relationship with the parent of your child for the sake of the child. That’s fucking bull shit, there are messed up kids everywhere who know their parents secretly hated each other and were at their most miserable together. I am, however, advocating for being the most respectful and decent people you can be to each other. Sometimes that isn’t together. Sometimes the only way you can honour the love a child deserves is to do it apart.

18 years in, I can confidently say I love my husband now. But it’s nothing like it is in the movies. It’s not remotely exciting. It’s things like…. I actually think about how my actions will affect him. I choose him over my pride and say sorry twice as much as I used to (which was basically never and is still almost never, but to be fair I am rarely wrong). It’s honouring boundaries. It’s about waiting to watch the next episode together, or at the very least convincingly lying that I didn’t already watch it and then quietly watching it with him. You know that saying, “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best?” Well, I went to therapy to exorcise the worst out, because I knew I’d be short-changing him if I didn’t. He did the same.

It’s tempting to say I had the kind of passionate love my friend is pining for.

Except.. It’s not true. Looking back, I’m quite sure today what I actually experienced all those years ago was straight-up limerance, which is the sexual equivalent of a worm getting into your brain that impairs your judgment for long enough to get you pregnant. Which it did (good job, nature!)

But what can you do? Creative people have a penchant for the dramtic, so it’s unshocking that the love we’re presented tends to align more with obsession. “Would he DIE for you?” Well, so the fuck what if he would? Dying is cheap. It’s inevitable. We’re ALL going to die.

Would he go to THERAPY for you? Most men will never do that. Most men would Rather die. If he chooses to make real changes and not just cease existing, it might have potential.

Contrary to the assumption that I must have an idea by now, I know that I am very much not an expert on love. But I’m something of an expert on what isn’t love. And what we’re modelling love on isn’t. Love is not waiting outside someone’s house for 8 hours for them to come home after a fight and eventually begging their roomate to let you in and making their bed and leaving (see, he was just as unhinged as I was), it’s not even carrying furniture on your back in the rain. That’s… well, that’s mental illness and not being able to afford movers.

By process of eliminaton I think love is what limerance isn’t. It is doing the quiet, difficult work for another person because they’re worth it.

And in defence of all the writers out there who are presenting it as something bigger and grander and more mystical than it is….. real love makes for a very boring movie.

I wish I had met the version of you who hadn’t grown up in a war zone

The version who didn’t learn to hate women for her own preservation

The version who didn’t self medicate with whiskey at 10am

The version who did not sleep with a hunting knife under her mattress

The version who didn’t pass out with a burning cigarette in her hand every night

The version who was sober enough to see what happened to me when I was 14

The version of you who wanted family, not enablers

The version of you who wanted a daughter, not a carer

The version who went to therapy

The version who my children could have visited and called Nanna

The version who didn’t get so hateful we all had to stop calling for our own protection

The version of you who went to a doctor

The version of you who would probably still be alive today

That version of you who would be turning 70 today

Happy birthday to the version you deserved, the version we all deserved

What’s your plan?

Somebody asked me that the other day. “What’s your plan here?”

“My what?”

“This book you’re putting online? It’s a pretty intense read. It’s not what I’d call hobby writing.”

“…It is if I don’t get paid for it.”

“Well, do you hope to get paid for it eventually?”

I didn’t have an answer. Because plan and hope are different, aren’t they? A plan is something you actively seek out. Hope is the thing that keeps you going when things don’t go to plan.

But this doesn’t fit so neatly into either box.

I started writing this story after something weird happened to me. Something unfortunate. Something you see in horror movies but never expect to happen to you. Something you don’t plan for.

I’ll tell you what my plan was — the before-this plan. I was doing an overnight sleepover at the place I was working, following a shift at the same house. Standard practice. I looked after vulnerable people in home care with a range of psychiatric and physical needs. They had active nights and sleepovers. I was on the sleepover version — the ‘in case of emergency’ person.

My next plan was to go home to my husband, two sons, and our four-month-old baby. It was the first long shift I’d had back since he’d been born, and I was anxious to get home to him.

But here is what happened.

I woke up in the middle of the night to find a naked man standing over my bed. Watching me.

I couldn’t believe it. I quite literally could not believe it. My brain just staggered. It was so unbelievable that I assumed I was experiencing a sleep paralysis episode — I’d had them before. He looked something like the Slender Man, very tall, with his head tipped to the side, watching me in the dark. It was only when I realised I could move that I knew it wasn’t a dream.

I want to be plain about this: I was not assaulted that night. I wasn’t murdered — obviously, although that would be a twist, wouldn’t it? There were four vulnerable people in the house I was responsible for, which is the reason I stayed instead of going straight out the screen door. They were fine in the end too.

What did happen:

After I got a door between us, I contacted the emergency department. Then my husband — to tell him what was happening, that I loved him, and to tell our children I loved them too. Because at that point it seemed exceptionally important, as anything does when you think it’s the last time you’re going to do it. And then I spent an hour and a half talking through a door, keeping this man on the other side, trying to stay as calm as possible — after the first scream, anyway — mentally willing the police to hurry the fuck up.

They did. Nothing happened. Nothing newsworthy, anyway. And yet something shifted. I wasn’t the same anymore.

Up until then I had a lot of plans. I studied counselling at university. I was about to start work with a local domestic violence shelter. I was planning to keep working in this industry.

But then I stopped sleeping. Because every time I opened my eyes, I saw someone standing over my bed.

If you’ve ever stopped sleeping for a while, you’ll know how it goes. You start to lose touch with reality. Day and night blur together and your nightmares bleed into your days. Suddenly, you’re awake and there’s something on the other side of the room, or there’s bugs on your skin. That’s why we need sleep — to contain those things, to keep the nightmares in their place. Without that separation, it erodes your sense of what’s real and what isn’t. And when you can’t trust your own brain, what can you trust?

I ended up with doctors.

One such doctor was a male therapist.

“Why did you think you were going to die?”

“Because there was a naked man standing over me in the middle of the night.”

“Why would you assume that? It’s not like he had a gun or a weapon.”

I was baffled. “Men don’t need a weapon. Men are the weapon.”

I later read his report. He noted my unhealthy fear of men, suggesting this dysfunction had probably triggered an atypical bout of PTSD.

The lesser-known “Bitches be loco” PTSD.

I ended up with pills. A lot of them. I was a human Valley of the Dolls, a maraca of sedatives, chemically manipulating my body into sleep and calm. But chemically manufactured sleep is a different kind of sleep. It’s never restful, because somehow my body knew I didn’t mean it.

The worst part was probably how much it cost me with my youngest son. I felt robbed of being able to enjoy him. The sedatives numbed me as well as calmed me, and it’s hard to love and connect the way a mother wants to through that kind of fog. I found myself indifferent to pretty much everything. That’s still one of the worst parts — maybe worse than the skin spiders and the Slender Man in the corner every time I woke up. I can’t get that time back. It stole something from me that is lost forever.

I’m not saying I would have been better off without those drugs. Chemically induced sleep is still better than no sleep at all. But there’s no perfect solution. For me, the pills were the crutches to get around on. And while crutches are important — try having a broken leg without them — it’s going to take as long to heal as it’s going to take.

My plans got pushed back and back and back. Finally, they just dissolved completely. We weren’t compatible anymore. I was no longer the person who had made them.

Something did finally work. I did something radical, something I hadn’t done in years. I started to write about it. Not Facebook rants or articles about PTSD. I made up a fictional world. A story about a woman experiencing a disconnect between what’s real and what isn’t. A woman who finds that half the battle is just trying to be believed.

And it was healing. There’s something about putting imaginary people into real problems and coming up with creative solutions. There’s something in realising they’re only surviving because of you; that no matter how many times their plans fall apart, somehow, against all odds, the story keeps going.

So it’s definitely not fair to say my writing is a plan. It’s not exactly a hobby either. For now, it exists because it’s the best way I have to keep the dark and the light separate — to keep the Slender Man on the page and out of the corners of my room.

My writing isn’t a hope or a plan.

It is a survival strategy.

New? Start here!
Previously on The Other Girls (Chapter 6)
Table of Contents (Every Chapter linked here)

I was done for. I knew it the minute the torch stabbed me in the eyes. This was it; it was all over. And I had nobody to blame but myself.

“Good evening, Miss,” a deep voice marked with a thick, regional Australian accent transmitted through the dark. “May I ask what you’re doing here tonight?”

The dark entity in front of me lowered the torch slightly so it wasn’t glaring directly in my eyes—still exposing me while keeping themself hidden. I was sure from the flat, squared hat that it was a policeman, but that was all the detail I had. Mostly I could see the mass of him, taking up the exit.

And yet I knew who it was. My whole throat constricted. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even breathe.

“Did you hear me?”

Now that the torch wasn’t blinding me, my suspicions were confirmed. I could see the shape of his head, his features in the low light—that distinctively bulging forehead, the black pits of his recessive eyes. Not just any old cop on patrol, but the cop, the one from my so-called dream that was quickly becoming a living nightmare. The whole reason I’d ended up next to this bin in the first place—desperate to get away from him.

Seems he’d finally caught me.

“Miss,” he repeated, firmly. “If you don’t answer I’ll…”

“Sorry, officer,” I pushed my voice out, trying to make it as loud and clear as I could. Loud and clear enough that somebody could even hear it submerged in a bin. “You just startled me.”

Questions detonated in my brain like landmines. Did he remember me? Had he actually seen me pick up that leather case? Had he just found me by chance, or had he been looking?

When I didn’t answer fast enough, he spoke again. “Can I have your name, Miss?”

My instinct was a fake name—force of habit—but that was going to make things worse if he found out who I was. Then he’d definitely look into me.

“Abby,” I offered, as incompletely as possible.

He took one step closer. He was so tall and his legs so long, one step brought him halfway to me. Now, with much less space between us, I could see some of his facial features. A scar between his lip and nostril. And there was something uneven about his ears…

“And what were you doing talking to the bin just now, Abby?”

My heart kicked up like a caged animal. Because I was. This alley was a dead end; its back wall was an old factory. The only way I was getting out of this was if I could talk my way out of it, but in that moment, my heart beat so fast I was sure he could hear it, like a guilty confession against my own will.

I tried to come up with a good reason for why I’d be standing in a grimy alley talking to myself in the middle of the night, when rustling sounds started coming from the bin. Suddenly, Ellie burst out of it, like a showgirl from a cake. The officer turned his spotlight towards her, at the same time reaching for his holstered gun.

She raised her arm to shield her eyes from the glare of the torch. “She was keeping me company,” she declared, far too shamelessly for a girl standing waist-deep in trash.

“And who are you?” The officer’s hand left his gun, and he adjusted the torch to get a better look at her.

“Ellie,” she offered, as vaguely as I had. Besides some wilted cabbage in her hair, she looked pretty put together, all things considered. Pretty at ease. Like this was a normal thing for her to be doing. Like this was just what people did on a Tuesday night.

“And what were you doing in the bin?”

“I lost something.”

“What did you lose?” His voice was tinged with scepticism.

“My ring,” she said with a look of plain honesty. “My grandmother’s ring, actually. I lost it the other day when I was cleaning up, and I’ve realised it might have ended up in the garbage.”

Ellie had always been an effortless liar. She could spin a story in a second, and because she looked closer to twelve than twenty, people really wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.

But the officer didn’t seem entirely convinced. A silence hung between them, like he was making up his mind whether to probe her on that story or not.

“Sorry to hear that,” he said, finally. “But I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to get out of there.”

She widened her eyes with a look of genuine doe-eyed innocence. “Am I doing something illegal?”

“You’re doing something dangerous. I’m sure you can imagine the kind of people who come and go in this alley, what goes on here. That bin could be full of glass and needles.”

Cornered as I was, I took a second to feel a little vindicated.

“However,” he went on. “There is the matter of curfew.”

Now, Ellie looked the regular kind of confused. “What curfew?”

“Local law enforcement has implemented a curfew for women after dark. Until further notice, all women will require a male chaperone.”

She laughed. “Are you kidding?”

I pinned her with a warning glare. Do not drag this out. Do not make this more painful than it needs to be. Do not antagonise a fucking cop.

But she wasn’t looking at me; all of her attention was defiantly locked on him.

“It’s for your own protection.”

“So let me get this straight,” she moved, resting her arms on the lid of the bin like she was settling in for a conversation. “A man is murdering us, so we have to stay locked up?”

In that instance, I was the one who could have killed her. All she had to do was get the fuck out so we could go home and put all this behind us, and instead, she’d decided to hang out in a bin having a debate about gender politics with a police officer. And here I was, thinking higher education was supposed to make you smarter.

“I don’t make the laws. But it is my job to enforce them. And as you can see… I’m on duty.”

But Ellie stood her ground, defiant on her pedestal of bin bags and rot. I think it was just so rare for her to be taller than anybody; clearly, the power had gone straight to her head.

“I’m just saying that I’d be just as safe if it were the men who had to stay home. And then if one of them just came out to kill us, he’ll be really obvious because he’ll be the only one outside.”

The officer looked like he was restraining annoyance. I wasn’t managing to restrain anything. I gave her a look that could have burned a hole through her skull, telepathically threatening to throttle her if she didn’t do what he said.

“If you don’t follow orders, I’ll be left with no choice but to take you in.”

“For what?” Ellie looked genuinely outraged. “Challenging a made-up law?”

“ELLIE!” I jumped in before an irreversible line was crossed—a line ending with us at the local station. “I’m sorry, my sister is not… well.” I lowered my voice, imploring him with my eyes. “You know. In the head.”

I wasn’t looking at her, but I felt Ellie’s eyes on me and a silent promise that I would pay for that one later.

The officer still didn’t look entirely convinced, but given the fact that she was in a bin arguing with a man holding a gun, it wasn’t implausible that she was a bit cracked. “In such a case, who is responsible for her?”

“I am, officer,” I said, the words like ash in my mouth.

His attention returned to me completely. “Then be responsible for her.”

I straightened and looked up at her. “Ellie, the officer is being very reasonable. I know you want to find that ring, but we don’t want to waste any more of his time, do we?”

She pressed her lips together, challenging me with a silent look. Finally, she shrugged. “K.”

The tension left my body.

“Just one sec. I think I dropped my keys in there.”

The tension came right back.

She ducked down again, and I crossed my arms, started shuffling on my feet, looking anywhere but at the officer. The less he saw of me, the better.

“She really won’t be a minute,” I said, suppressing the urge to scream.

The next ten seconds stretched on like ten thousand. Finally, the officer thumped his fist on the bin, the noise shattering the silence like a gunshot. “NOW!”

“Found them!” Ellie sing-songed, popping up like a meerkat. She swung her leg over the side and landed easily. As she did, the low rumble of more voices broke. The officer glanced over his shoulder as two men walked by on the street. “FOUND IT,” Ellie mouthed at me, wide-eyed and excited, tapping the oversized pocket on the front of the hoodie. As he looked back, she reverted to looking casual.

My chest loosened slightly in the hopes we’d finally get to leave. But he made no move. He didn’t step back to let us through.

His focus lingered on my sister.

“Ellie, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you please roll up your sleeves, Ellie?”

She looked like she’d been slapped. I felt like I had been, too.

“Why?” she said, her voice giving way to slight defensiveness.

“Please just do as you’re told.”

Rage simmered in me—part second-hand embarrassment, half outrage at the request. Her defence was on the tip of my tongue: You don’t have to do that. He has no right.

But he did. He had the gun, and the size, and the badge. He had every right.

She knew it, too. After a couple of seconds of resistance, she finally ripped up her sleeve, and the officer tipped his torch to see for himself.

He would not find what he was looking for. No needle marks. Instead, he would see scar upon scar, layered and crisscrossed like their own constellations, from wrists to elbows. I remembered every one of them. Sometimes it was like I could feel them. Just like I could feel the shame, the humiliation. Her face was a mask of contempt, but her eyes were full of tears. He might as well have asked her to strip naked.

I looked up at him, trying to suppress all the rage I felt, expecting to see judgment on his face—follow-up questions, comments. That was usually the reaction from strangers and nurses and doctors—judgments that meant my sister wore long sleeves in even the hottest of summers.

Instead, I saw something unexpected. A softening of features, something that actually just resembled sympathy.

“You can roll them back down.” He paused, looking uncomfortable, maybe even regretful. “I’ll walk you home now, girls.”

“But it’s just across the street,” I said, a little too urgently.

“It’s my duty of care to get you there.”

Panic flared hotter. If he walked us ‘home,’ he’d probably recognise the building. Cops always knew those buildings. The ones delegated to the addicts, the impoverished, the criminals, and the mentally ill. Sharing walls. Sharing rooms.

I didn’t want him looking into which combination I was.

Just as I’d resigned myself to the worst-case scenario, the creak of a screen door alerted me to somebody behind us. George emerged, holding a garbage bag in one hand, the tip of his cigarette glowing in the dark.

He stopped on the stoop, looked from us to the officer.

“Uncle George!” Ellie exclaimed, her voice bright. “Officer, this is our Uncle George, our male chaperone. He can walk us home, right?”

George looked at the officer, then back to Ellie, and then stepped between him and us, hoisting the bag into the bin. “Yeah, no problem,” he said, positioning himself between us, wiping his hand on his jeans, cigarette still in mouth. “I’ll get them home.”

I held my breath as the officer spread an incredulous look between my ethereal blonde sister and me—who at a bare minimum had darker features—but clearly, neither of us were remotely Lebanese.

“All right,” he conceded, taking a step back towards the exit. “You keep out of trouble then, girls.” He gave Ellie a pointed look. “And stay out of the bin.”

Nobody spoke until his boots faded down the street. Finally, I let my breath go.

George gave Ellie a soft, disappointed look. “Elllllie,” he tutted. “What are you doing in the bin? You are not in trouble?”

“No, no,” she waved it off. “We just lost something. Total misunderstanding.”

“Was that you at my window before?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it was local kids. What are you doing here? I thought you were at the university?”

“I came back for my sister’s birthday….”

This went on for a while. I blinked while they caught up like old cousins at a wedding—Ellie rattling off his extended family’s ailments (”How’s Tetta’s hip? She really should be getting that operation”), George nodding along. By the time he said, “I’ll walk you home,” I was ready to lie down on the broken glass.

“Oh, that was just for his benefit,” Ellie said. “You know we’re just across the road.”

“Doesn’t matter,” George flicked his cigarette. “He is right. Not safe for you girls. I’ll walk you.”

There was no point in arguing. We let him lead. He ambled out with the slow, heavy gait of a middle-aged man who’d been on his feet since dawn. The cigarette glowed at his mouth as we crossed the quiet street, wading through dark pools of shadow cast by streetlights.

Halfway across, Ellie switched into interrogation mode.

“Actually, there was a reason I was at your window before. I came to ask—do you remember when my sister was in your store on Friday?”

George took the cigarette from his mouth, tapped it, and nodded. “Yeah,” he glanced at me. “Just before closing time.”

“And there was a guy in front of her? Bought newspapers?”

“Ah.” George laughed, a soft belly-shake. “You mean Roger.”

Ellie lit up. “That’s his name?!”

“Nah.” He waved the smoke away. “I don’t know his name. That’s just what my wife calls him—she thinks he looks like Roger Moore. You know, 007.”

“So he’s a regular?”

“Yes and no.” George puffed once more, then flicked his cigarette into the gutter. “First time he comes in, he asks how many newspapers I sell. I show him the main four. He orders a coffee and asks if I can keep one paper from every month and save them for him. Strange request. I did, even though I didn’t expect him to come back.”

“But he did?”

“The next year, same day.” We stopped at the entrance of our block. “He gives me a good bottle of scotch for my trouble, asks me to do it again. Every year since then—I give him the papers and a coffee, he gives me a bottle of scotch for my trouble.”

“How long has he been coming in?”

“Twenty years.” He shook his head, a look of marvel on his face. “You wouldn’t know it, though. Usually, the Poms age like milk, but him?” He lifted his eyebrows. “I swear he hasn’t aged a day since the first time he walked in.”

Chapter 8 begins in 3,2,1……

_________________________________________________________________________

Woman: So, Rhysand, what brings a 600-year-old immortal to Tinder?

Rhysand: Sorry, let me just jump in. It’s not RYE-SHAND. It’s REE-SAND.

Woman: Ree-sand?

Rhysand: Yes. Well, formally, it’s Ree-Sand, High Lord of the Night Court.

Woman: …. High Lord?

Reece: That is correct. But please, no need for such formalities here. You can call me Reece.

Woman: Reece. Sure. Sorry. High Lord? Your profile just said regional management.

Reece: Yes. That’s correct. I rule over one of the seven districts of Prythian.

Woman: I’m unfamiliar with Prythian.

Reece: Yeah, it’s kind of… well… nobody can really figure out where it is. Our best guess is it’s located in medieval British Isles somewhere, but for some reason, everyone has American accents and working modern toilets.

Woman: And what does a High Lord do?

Reece: This and that. Stars, darkness, managing minor political grievances, defeating the enemies at our gates and from within.

Woman: That sounds intense. What kind of enemies are we talking?

Reece: Where do I even start? Well, there’s this sort of witch who lives in the woods who’s blind and just spins souls and such into thread. She’s not an overt threat but we keep an eye on her — bit of a kook — but she is kind of essential to the whole magic system, you know, we keep her on the payroll. Then there are the kelpie of the deep seas, these serpentine creatures, and who could forget the Bogge….

Woman: Bogge?

Reece: Yes, they are a creature that you can’t look directly at.

Woman: What happens if you look directly at it? Do you turn to stone or…

Reece: No, no, nothing like that. It gives it power over you. It’s a whole thing about being seen… it’s very metaphorical. Anyway, I’ve been talking about myself non-stop. This whole date isn’t about me. What about you? What do you do?

Woman: I’m a medical receptionist.

Reece: Fascinating. And what do you preside over?

Woman: …mostly a desk and a photocopier… sorry, did you say serpentine monsters?

Reece: Oh. Yes. The Naga. Serpentine is a bit reductive; they’re humanoid, actually. Rather unpleasant. You’ll know one if you smell one — it’s all rotting meat and stagnant water with them. So, what about family? You said on your profile that you want children someday. Do you come from a big family yourself?

Woman: Not huge. I only have one sister.

Reece: Sisters. I know all about them. Let me guess, you have to hunt day and night to keep her sated in wolf meat and ribbons?

Woman: ………ummmm. Nope, nope. She has a job. She’s a teacher. Pretty much .. sources all of her own..wolf meat and ribbons…? So what about you, do you have a big family?

Reece: No, no. High Fae children are very uncommon. And of course, because of my Illyrian background, it can be… problematic for me to have my own. You know, on account of the wing situation.

Woman: Wings?

Reece: Yes. I am half Illyrian on my mother’s side. So I carry the recessive trait for wings.

Woman: But you don’t have them yourself?

Reece: I do. But I wasn’t born with them; I willed them into existence with magic and have the power to make them disappear.

Woman: …

Reece: Is that a deal breaker?

Woman: No, I’ve just never seen somebody with wings before.

Reece: It’d show you but… it’s not exactly appropriate to flop them out in a public place. I usually save that for the rooftop of the House of Wind with my brothers. Anyway, I’m not sure they would fit in this booth. They are quite cumbersome.

Woman: How cumbersome?

Reece: Hmm, I don’t have exact measurements- seems crass - but they’re often referred to as “towering and massive.”

Woman: Right. So… you mentioned brothers?

Reece: Yes. Neither are related by blood, but after the tragic death of my entire family, they became my covenant kin, my Inner Circle. We spend a lot of time shirtless wrestling, occasionally brooding over maps — the kind of things brothers always do.

Woman: Shirtless wrestling?

Reece: Yes, but enough about my hobbies. I want to hear more about you. It’s been said sometimes that it’s like the women in my life are only vessels to tell my story through, and I don’t want it to be like that. I’d very much like to know what brought you to Tinder?

Woman: Sure. Well, truth is I got out of a long-term relationship about a year ago. It was a pretty rough break up — we got together when I was seventeen, so it was, you know, very formative. Anyway, I’m just trying to get myself back out there and my friends suggested Tinder so… here I am.

Reece: Yes, that’s… highly relatable. Getting back out there. I suppose I’m doing the same.

Woman: You got out of something long term too?

Reece: Yes. My longest one to date. Unless you count the 49 years I was Amarantha’s whore under the mountain.

Woman: Amarantha’s what now?

Reece: My captor. Our captor. She was the high-ranking commander of Hybern. She came along, cursed the Prythian lands, everyone had to wear these animal masks that were fused to their faces… it was a… strange time. Anyway, to keep people alive I had to be her private whore and do her evil bidding. But finally the saviour came along, this 19 year old illiterate female who turned out to be my actual destiny. She won the riddle against the slug monster and freed us all from the terrible curse.… Anyway, the point is — I am too looking to get back out there. After all, I’m not getting any younger.

Woman: Are you getting any older, though?

Reece: Ha! You’re quite funny. And not illiterate. What a fascinating combination. I’ve never met a human female before who can make jokes AND read.

Woman: …how many human women have you met?

Reece: Just the one, really. But I did marry her. I mentioned her before — the saviour.

Woman: …the illiterate 19-year-old?

Reece: It was fated. She was my mate. And only after she died and became High Fae through a magical resurrection ritual. Obviously. Under any othe condition it would have been strategically impossible, since my wings are not the only thing that are towering and massive. Unfortunately, it was not to last forever. I lost her last year.

Woman: I’m so sorry. Can I ask what happened?

Reece: On account of the wing situation. She survived the first birth but was impaled from within by the second…probably should have gotten some better contraception, in retrospect. Hindsight has 20/20 vision, you know?

Woman: I’m sorry, did you say impaled from within?

Reece: Yes. The wings. Remember? The genetic trait?

Woman: …..

Reece: You look worried. It’s too much, isn’t it? You think I have too much baggage. The dead family, the dead wife, the long-term sex slavery…

Woman: No, no. Not at all.

Reece: Is it the wings? You think I’m an Illyrian freak, just like my mother…

Woman: No! No! Of course not. Fatal pregnancies aside, I’m mostly fine with the wings. The fact they go away and come back somehow makes the bestiality overlap thing okay, somehow. It’s just that… I’ve never met a High Fae Lord of the Realms before. It’s just a lot to take in.

Reece: Yes. You’re not the first female to say that about me.

Woman: …..well, for what it’s worth, I think it’s amazing you’ve survived all of that. Anyway, we all have our own baggage. I should know — I just got out of a ten-year relationship, and trust me, that came with a lot of baggage too.

Reece: …Ten years?

Woman: Yeah. I know. It feels like forever. I mean, it’s not 49 under a mountain, but…

Reece: You said you got together when you were 17?

Woman: Yep. We met just out of high school. I think that’s probably a big reason why it didn’t work out, you know, you go through such a dramatic evolution…

Reece: …sorry, can I just clarify something? That would make you…… 27.

Woman: 28, actually. It was my birthday last week.

Reece: Right. Right. …Hmmm. Hey, listen, I just remembered I have this battle with the Summer King I need to get up for really early…

Woman: Battle with the Summer King?

Reece: Yeah, it’s a long feud thing. Anyway, he’s very early to rise, so…

Woman: Wait, sorry. Is me being 28 a problem for you?

Reece: No, no. Your geriatric human woman age has nothing to do with that.

Woman: Geriatric human woman age?! You’re SIX HUNDRED!

Reece: Yes, but I’m immortal. So… it doesn’t really count.

Woman: And 28 is too old for you?

Reece: Nooo, no..…it’s just…I don’t know what we’d have in common.

Woman: And what did you have in common with a 19 year old illiterate girl?

Reece: We were destined mates!

Woman: A 600-year-old and a 19-year-old illiterate girl were DESTINED to be together? Really?

Reece: Here we go again. What could you possibly see in an illiterate 19-year-old? Why are you always having homoerotic wrestling matches with your brothers? How is that going to fit in here… Unbelievable! It’s always the same questions with you people. It’s why I never date older women.

Woman: I AM 28!

Reece: Gets up to leave: It was nice meeting you, Mary Sue.

Woman: MY NAME IS MADELINE!

If you’ve been alive long enough and regularly consume Western culture (my condolences, it’s taken quite the turn), there is a good chance you’re familiar with Carrie White. Either the movie — or movies, there’s been a few now — or the book, Carrie White is the Stephen King creation that almost wasn’t.

If you don’t know your Stephen King lore: his wife Tabitha (a name to which I am utterly devoted) fished it out of the bin back in the day when Stephen was unpublished and being a super dramatic writer. I think we can all relate. Tabitha made the right call. Stephen King went on to write 67 novels and is now worth an estimated 400 million dollars. For comparison, I currently have 67 different versions of one chapter of an unpublished book titled ‘No For Real, Final Draft For Actual Realsies This Time’ in my Gmail. I am also approximately 400 million dollars shy of Stephen King’s financial success.

Now, I’m going to say I don’t think Carrie is Stephen King’s best book. It’s a bit clunky, a lot of the side characters are underdeveloped and the pacing is all over the shop. It was his first book and it reads like a first book. But he did something in Carrie that few authors pull off — he created a character who resonated so deeply that she transcended generations.

And even though I am far from his biggest fan, I think I know why he did this so successfully. King’s stories are psychologically honest — horror is an organic side effect of our humanity, not something that develops independently. The supernatural horrors are often the B plot to the A plot of human suffering. Carrie’s telekinesis is secondary to the social hierarchies and the monsters they make.

If you have been living under a rock and have no idea who Carrie is (can I come too? a rock would be lovely right now), allow me to summarise. Carrie is the shy, socially awkward and excessively abused daughter of a religious fanatic mother, and her classmates are a pack of feral gronks who seek to emotionally destroy her like they get extra credit for doing so. When poor Carrie gets her first period at age 17 in the girl’s locker room — and believes she’s haemorrhaging because her mother never told her about it — the cunt-brigade relentlessly mock her and peg tampons at her like grenades. While poor naked, bleeding Carrie has a panic attack, the supernatural B plot manifests. A light bulb breaks. Inciting event, supernatural plot activated. Doom imminent.

There are plenty of analysts on here who could give you far more detailed and compelling essays and feminist critiques on why Carrie resonates as much as she does, but my personal take is that Stephen King is almost certainly neurodivergent himself, and Carrie is far more neurodivergently coded than she is specifically feminist. Her feminine identity is certainly engaged in the plot, and internalised misogyny is ever present in the way she’s made a stranger in her own body and destroyed by other girls, but it’s not the centre of it. What makes Carrie such a compelling figure is that she’s an utterly tragic one. Her differences are not her fault, and what makes her special is never directed or nurtured. Instead, she is drowning in shame and humiliation.

Spoiler alert — the mean kids set her up to be prom queen, and after catfishing Carrie into the illusion that she could ever be accepted, they dump a vat of pig’s blood all over her. The natural progression is that Carrie kills the shit out of them. Even the handful of people who tried to help her. Not because she’s evil, but because as everyone who has ever escaped a religious cult knows, shame is a social carcinogen. The potential for destruction lived inside her, but their relentless cruelty pulled the trigger.

So where am I going with this? I’m a writer — obviously this has to be about me eventually, didn’t I warn you?

I did relate quite a bit to Carrie growing up, and still do. I was, I suppose, neurodivergent and a natural outsider — we didn’t have a diagnosis then, we were just ‘weird.’ They tried to drown me at a school camp once. They took all of my clothes and put them in a giant vat of urine, then relentlessly mocked me for stinking like it on the way home. A girl wrote me a fake letter from a boy, and when I talked to him a group of kids got together and publicly humiliated me over it. It wasn’t quite Carrie-level humiliation, but it was up there.

Luckily for the kids who tortured me and the Marconi Club that hosted our formal, I did not develop telekinetic powers. What I learned to do instead was write about it.

So that’s what I did. I went home and wrote relentlessly. About them. Stories in which things turned out differently, and people who had tortured me liked me. I filled up exercise books until we got a computer, and then I wrote on there for hours a day instead. It was dissociation, but it was also how I split the world into what I was feeling and what was actually real. What I could control and what I couldn’t.

For me, that’s what writing is. It is my own special power. The ability to take all of the noise and trauma in your head and spill it onto a page and sort through it. It’s how I shine light on dark thoughts and bring them out before they can manifest into something darker. It’s meditative, it’s healing, and it turns pain into connection. When other people read it they see themselves in it and feel less alone. It creates a collective sense of unity against the everyday horrors. Suddenly, we’re not just Carrie White anymore, our rage and contempt literally exploding and taking everyone around us out. We’re a team. We never have to be her again.

Curiously, I recently received a message about a character I write called Abigail. This person was very concerned about Abigail’s slut-shaming and her us-and-them outlook on the world. I believe this reader mistook Abigail’s worldview for mine — an endorsement of it, rather than a study of it. Abigail’s internalised misogyny is, in fact, one of the critical flaws in her character that she has to overcome to survive.

I was raised by women who hated women. They weren’t quite Carrie White’s mother, but my mother and sister were particularly aggressive examples of internalised misogyny in their everyday representation.. On the surface, they practised modern feminism like superficial grooming — Girl power! She-Ra! Girls can be lawyers too! I’m wearing a belt! — but deep down they felt safer when they had a seat at the men’s table, even if it meant climbing over or eradicating other women to get there.

These women are a part of my DNA, quite literally but psychologically too. And they are largely why I like to write psychologically messy female characters. Women who have internalised misogyny. Women who mute the noise with substances. Women who have been hurt and take their revenge too far. Women who practise avoidance like a religion, who take two steps back in their growth before they can take one step forward. These characters don’t reflect my views directly, but they reflect a sorting of views — why different people come to hold them, and hopefully, if I’m executing their character arcs successfully, how they might finally untangle themselves from them.

I have taken a leaf out of Stephen King’s book. I think in writing many of his characters, King puts his own darker potential on the page and lets it play out until he feels in control of it. Writing gives us the power to do that. Don’t keep the demons inside. Put them on a page and let them fight it out there.

We have plunged back into a time where internalised misogyny is trending again. Pick-me culture is everywhere. We’re dividing again because we think that’s what we need to do to stay alive, when actually the opposite could not be more true.

Abigail is not always an easy character to like. She is on the page fighting the demons so I don’t have to do it alone — and if you trust her and me enough, I promise you that she is going to fight the absolute shit out of those demons.

……Eventually.

.

A lot of people are feeling the disappointment of the drive-by subscriber on here. It’s not even a fling. It’s math, it’s compound interest to trick an algorithm into noticing you. It’s made something that should be intimate and vulnerable into something impersonal and transactional. Like having a one-night stand while wearing a hazmat suit. Remember Covid? Yeah, like that.

What’s particularly sad about this on a platform like Substack is that it’s supposed to be an indie community by design. We have to be each other’s village because we don’t have the executives and publishing powers pushing us into sight, so we have to lift and promote each other.

And I love that concept. I love the idea of artists and writers using what they’re best at to help other people do what they’re best at. It could be so great, couldn’t it? A less regulated artistic environment, without that icky capitalism filter on it.

I’m big on socialism, in rejecting scarcity mindsets where we’re competing for adoration by withholding it. I believe in giving what we would want in return. And you know what they say — be the change you want to see in the world. So that’s why I’d like to use some of my time on here to actually lean into that every week, but with genuine engagement. Take time weekly to actually engage with the work of, and spread the word about, the talent I am finding on here. Not just I click, you click, no catfishing with empty promises and then having a quickie before you never call them again — but actually engaging with someone’s work and telling your audience and theirs why they are somebody people should subscribe to. Also: they’ve put in the work, you got something real out of it, give something real back.

This isn’t supposed to be a pressure exercise — nobody’s going to conjure a creepy little girl out of your Substack feed to kill you in seven days if you don’t get it done. Life is busy. But if somebody does this about you and you get tagged and they take the time to leave a meaningful, thoughtful note about your work as an invitation to others, then do the same for another creator this week on here. Whether it’s an artist or a writer, use your skills to nurture theirs and tell them and the algorithm why they matter — and why you shouldn’t just subscribe but should actually read them.

I’m personally going to aim to recommend a couple at a time, not to be reductive, but because I do actually want audiences to be able to find them in a broader algorithm and cross-promotion seems the best way to do it.

I will not be an asshole about this. I will not be promoting anything I don’t genuinely feel is worth promoting. This isn’t Suckupstack. It’s my true takeaway from indie authors who might not have the contract but who have the talent.

And a big thanks to , who I am counting as a collab on this goal — whether she likes it or not, Meg — because her piece on this consumer only culture was the inspiration behind actually wanting to improve my own interactions on here as a means of changing the culture for the better.

I’d like to talk to you for a moment about God.

Okay, for those of you who stuck it out because you’re like ‘wtf is she on, did the Catholics finally suck her back in?’ - Welcome. You can stay. Although I expect I will largely be ‘preaching to the choir’ in this regard.

For those who are like “I most certainly do want to talk about God!” — I’m sorry, I’ve misled you. I wish you well on your journey. There are a couple of accountant-looking guys on bikes riding up my street right now, setting off my hellhounds. I’ll send them your way. If you’re pro-God but don’t think a church should have power over government, you are also welcome to stay.

Today, I don’t want to talk about God directly, but about those who use God as leverage. For today’s case study: the Pentecostals, and how they’re backseat driving the American government.

Let me put this disclaimer up front: #notallpentecostals. But enough of them that this faith-based lobbying has raised concerns amongst many prominent politicians and commentators from all sides. Even some conservatives have voiced concerns about the influence of these megachurches in recent years.

For those unaware, Pentecostalism is a branch of the Christian tree, but unlike other factions, it has surged at remarkable speed in recent years. In some regions, its growth outpaces the Catholic Church, measured by percentage increases per decade. This is especially true in the United States, where a combination of ideological anti-government sentiment and weak social safety nets makes it a perfect storm for Pentecostal expansion. Without universal healthcare and adequate welfare supports, America ranks near the top of developed nations in child poverty and preventable mortality — leaving vulnerable populations especially receptive to churches that step in where the state does not.

The elderly, the sick, the disabled, the less-educated, and the poor — the people most at risk — often end up on the church’s leash. Not because of coercion alone, but because survival is a daily negotiation. And yes, most of us either know someone like this, have been them, or will become them. In the U.S., being sick or disabled doesn’t just limit your work opportunities — it financially punishes you for existing.

This is particularly significant because Pentecostalism is one of the few prominent traditions to openly embrace faith healing. Have you ever seen a church party trick on TV, where some snake oil salesman claims to cure somebody with the power of the Holy Spirit, and they go from bedbound to dancing? Yeah, that’s these guys. Ministers claim to perform extraordinary feats — from curing illness to coaxing people out of wheelchairs through the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s not just spectacle; it’s a social and spiritual lifeline for people with few alternatives.

In the same way the U.S. gun system suits the NRA, the health system suits Pentecostal churches. I’m not saying they’re the whole reason the system is broken, but it’s safe to say they’re not very fucking motivated to fix it.

Another fun fact: they are highly influential in politics, both directly and indirectly. Figures like Paula White, Rodney Howard-Browne, and Kenneth Copeland have leveraged spiritual influence into broader cultural and political sway. Combined with the roughly 20–25% of Americans who identify as Pentecostal or charismatic, that’s a significant voting bloc capable of shaping elections in key regions.

Worth noting that Paula White isn’t just an outside enthusiast — she was Trump’s personal pastor, led prayers at his inauguration, and served as an official White House Faith Advisor. She was, quite literally, on the payroll.

These figures also happen to be some of Trump’s biggest advocates — promoting him like a new-earth Jesus incarnate, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, God’s representative on earth. Only now, instead of a Middle-Easterner preaching to feed the poor and forgive everyone, it’s a radioactively orange billionaire who seems to think the best way to deal with the poor is starving them, while forgiving the people who rioted on January 6th. Man. You’ve changed, Jesus.

Not to get too wildly paranoid or anything, but I think it’s fair to say we’ve seen a significant rollout of conservative religious policy influencing the broader American landscape over the last year or so. Some of the laws governing women in the Deep Red states are amongst the most punitive of any developed nation. Recent proposals that women who get abortions could have their actions classified as homicide — and face the death penalty — represent a dramatic departure from the America we knew five years ago. That was dystopian fiction material. Now it’s on the table as a very real possibility.

Here is the most concerning thing. On a basic psychological level, humans are heavily motivated by their belief and reward systems. And I personally think it’s a conflict of interest to have a prominent death cult as such an influential party in such an influential landscape. Like it or not, America is kind of at the wheel of our fate right now — and they’re heavily influenced by a church that believes paradise is on the other side of the apocalypse. I’m not saying they’re actively trying to bring it on (although…), but much in the same way they’re not motivated to support universal healthcare — are they really all that motivated to avert the apocalypse?

Now, before you think I’m religion-bashing — I’m not, exactly. I’m taking-vulnerable-people-and-using-them-for-personal-advancement bashing, and if that’s your religious blueprint, fuck you, I am talking about you.

I’ll also raise alarm at the secular movements behind Trump. Case in point: the front row of his inauguration. Several of the men who helped get him elected — some of whom were sitting in the billionaire front row at his swearing-in like the bride’s family at a wedding — also seem very keen on fully pimped-out underground doomsday bunkers. That’s a concerning trend. Not to mention the other half is trying to figure out how to live on the moon.

Feels like everyone on your oncology team has bets on the date of your funeral. Fucking grim.

I suppose my point is — and I’m not trying to be a conspiracy theorist — we have to stop believing they all have our best interests at heart. If nothing else, Donald Trump is a raging megalomaniac. He would ace the Buzzfeed narcissist test. He would be the best at that test. He would pass it more times than he’s passed his dementia test, or blacked out his name in the Epstein files. And have you ever seen what a narcissist does when someone tries to leave them? They try to burn everything down. They drive them off a cliff. The sun doesn’t rise if they don’t, so why should anybody else?

January 6th was just a taste. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting worried.

So in conclusion… Dear American citizens. We’re kind of counting on you right now to get him out of there for as long as you still can. I know most of us are just trying to get through to the next. You need an OnlyFans to buy a dozen eggs, and do not get me started on what we’re going to have to do for fuel soon. And we’re on the side of the world that’s doing better than average — we’re the ones he hasn’t completely turned on yet. I’m not saying the end is nigh (although the Doomsday Clock is), but I am saying this: nothing is more dangerous than men who gain power through fear. They will never be motivated to rule any differently. So while you still have the ability to undo this — un-fucking-do it.

Some people will say this is dramatic. And fuck, I hope you’re right. They’re the same ones who say what’s happening in America right now is nothing like WW2 Germany. And they’re right — it’s not. Because Germany didn’t have the nuclear codes. Germany wasn’t already at the top of the pyramid. America isn’t Germany. It’s what Germany was trying to be.

New? Start here!
Previously on Other Girls (Chapter 5)
Table of Contents (every chapter link)

I never even made it to the part about how I ended up with his watch.

Before my fogged-up brain could even register what was happening, Ellie was zipping around the flat, seemingly searching for something. Suddenly, she was down on the floor beside the couch I was on, peering under it.

“What are you doing..”

She yanked her Doc Martens out by their laces; then she was up, hopping into them awkwardly, all the way to the front door.

“Where are you go…”

The front door thudded shut, Ellie on the other side.

My whole body groaned with the realisation of what this meant for me. “Fucking great,” I snatched my keys off the coffee table. “That’s just fucking great, Ellie,” I continued to grumble all the way to the front door, agony blistering through my muscles and joints with every movement. “Go on, then, run through a bunch of dodgy backstreets in the middle of the night, with a serial killer on the loose. PANTSLESS!” I slammed the door behind me. “Fucking moron.”

I continued my grumbling all the way down two flights of stairs, white-knuckling the railing so I didn’t slip and break my neck. The bug-littered fluorescent lights overhead stuttered, jittering shadows down the walls and steps, making it even harder to keep my footing.

By some miracle, I got to the bottom of the stairwell, breathless and aching like I’d run a marathon. The night awaited me like open jaws with hot, damp breath. The moon was large, but its light was smeared by smog and cloud, casting more shadow than light. I squinted up and down the street for any sign of her, for any movement at all, but I couldn’t see very far.

With a beat of dread, I found myself peering into the abyss of the end of the road, where the river waited.

Fucking moron.

I was on the verge of calling her name out when a rhythmic, thudding sound caught my attention. Bang bang bang. Bang bang bang. I followed the direction — across the street, past Sticky Lane, to the corner milk bar. There she was — the source of the commotion — my sister, smashing her little fist against the wood panel of the glass door.

I stopped a couple of metres back from her. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” She beat the door again, the closed sign rattling in its dark window. “Hey George! It’s Ellie from across the street!”

“Can’t you read?” I hissed. “They’re closed!”

“Yeah, but they live upstairs.”

“You can’t just run around bashing in people’s doors in the middle of the night!”

“It’s like 8 pm,” she rolled her eyes. “Not even babies are asleep, you Grandma. Hey! George!”

She raised her fist again. This time I surged forward and grabbed her wrist. “Stop it! You cannot harass a business after dark!”

She wrenched her arm away from me. “They aren’t some business, they’re our neighbours. We’d open the door for them if they needed help.”

The hell I would have. I would have pretended I wasn’t home. And judging from the light in the upstairs window and the total lack of acknowledgement, that’s precisely what George and family were doing.

“And what help do we need right now?”

She gave me a look she’d been giving me since she was about nine, her “What the fuck is wrong with you?” face.

“The guy,” she said. “The caretaker. This is where he got the newspapers.”

“And?”

“And maybe he’s a regular, George might know who he is.”

“So?”

Her ‘what the fuck’ face flared up again. “Sooooo… he drugged you, so we need to report him, obviously.”

“Hey, whoa! You are jumping to some conclusions there! You didn’t even listen to the whole story! It was a sip, like a thimble of alcohol…”

Ignoring my protests, she went to knock again. I caught her again, by the elbow this time. “I swear to GOD,” she wrenched away, shooting me a furious look. “If you grab me one more time…”

“Have you stopped to think maybe they aren’t home?!” I lowered my voice to a hiss, suddenly aware of how much our voices were carrying. Suddenly aware of how exposed we were standing beneath the light of George’s second-story flat, and how the shadows hid the backstreets, and whoever was in them.

“Of course they are,” Ellie was frowning down at the footpath now, scanning it. “They’re middle-aged and start work at 6 am. Also, George always watches Sale of the Century after work. It’s a part of his wind-down ritual.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know,” Ellie nudged some stacked milk crates by the door with her boot, then wandered towards the gutter, still searching the ground. “Maybe because I’m not some rude cow who just grunts and puts money on the counter without making eye contact. I take an interest in other people. You should try it.”

I resented being called rude. I always said please and thank you, even if I did grunt a little. It also seemed like stupid advice, especially given that the last time I’d taken an interest in somebody it had led to this exact scenario. “I’m not rude…”

Ellie was kneeling in the gutter, picking something up. “I just have healthy boundaries with the guy I buy my milk from.. hey, what are you doing with those rocks?”

Ellie ignored me, poised to throw one at the window.

“Have you lost your mind?! You could break his window!”

“I don’t see what choice I have.”

“The choice to NOT break his window!”

“Well what’s your bright idea, hmmm?” She looked at me, still in her throwing position. “We’re just going to go home, pretend none of this happened?”

That was, in fact, my best and brightest idea, but I could tell from Ellie’s tone she would not be receptive to it. What I knew in that moment was I needed to bring the temperature down. The last thing I needed was Ellie throwing rocks, breaking windows, using heavy, consequential words like “report”.

“Look,” I said, trying to sound level and reasonable. “I’m just saying we shouldn’t rush into making accusations. All I have to go on is a bunch of murky memories I can barely piece together. Don’t you think we should have some actual evidence before we start dragging other people into this?”

Silence hung between us for a second as Ellie seemed to consider this. Finally, she opened her hand and let the gravel fall. “Fine,” She brushed her hands clean. “You’re right.”

I let my breath go. “Thank you. Let’s just go home and...”

But before I could finish that thought, Ellie had snatched up a milk crate in each hand and disappeared around the corner. By the time I managed to catch her, she was halfway deep into Sticky Lane.

I stopped dead at the mouth of the alley, the piss, vomit and wet decomposition knocking me back like a forcefield.

Ellie, on the other hand, seemed remarkably unbothered. She was directly beside the offending dumpster, stacking milk crates alongside it.

“You’re not doing what I think you’re doing?” I said, my voice muffled through the hand I was using to block the odour.

“Depends on what you think I’m doing.” Laser focused on the dumpster, Ellie planted one boot firmly on the stacked crates, long laces dangling down haphazardly.

“Something incredibly fucking stupid from the looks of it.”

“Well, you would be the expert on that,” She snarked back.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” I hissed.

As if in answer, she ascended the crates, reaching out to steady herself by gripping the lip of the rusted, filthy industrial-sized bin. They wobbled slightly, despite her bone-bird mass, thanks to a minefield of cracked cement, glass and cigarette butts beneath it.

Once steady enough, Ellie lifted the plastic lid, surprisingly stoic for somebody who could be seasick in a bathtub. Meanwhile, I was close to gagging. The rot in the air was more vapour than smell. It rocked my stomach and threatened to send me right back to where I’d started on that bathroom floor.

Finally, she answered, “Do you have any better ideas?”

The question was baffling. “Yeah. Like…all of the ideas that aren’t this one.”

“Well, how else are we supposed to get evidence?”

“What evidence?!”

“The wallet. The one you stole.”

I glanced around then to see if anyone else was around, watching, listening. Nobody. At least that I could see.

“I didn’t steal it!” I insisted, finally dropping my hand from my mouth. It wasn’t doing anything anyway. “I just…found it and didn’t give it back.”

“Literally the definition of stealing… “ she murmured, frowning into the bin. “The point is, it could have some kind of ID in it, something to tell us who this guy was.”

“It was empty!” I said, even though I actually wasn’t sure. I’d ditched it pretty quickly after extracting the money. I just knew I didn’t want her in that bin. Nor was I in any hurry to find its owner.

But Ellie wasn’t to be dissuaded. She shrugged that right off. “Even if that’s the case, maybe it has his DNA or something, a hair follicle…”

“Okay, Law and Order, it’s been marinating in garbage for days. That whole bin is just a giant biohazard of broken glass and dirty needles…”

There was also a nest of blankets I was now noticing in the corner. The kind of setup somebody came back to….

“You and your dirty needle obsession,” Ellie rolled her eyes. “You think they’re lurking everywhere. Playgrounds, public toilets, the beach…”

“Okay, of all the places you’re going to find dirty needles, this is it. I mean…” I gestured around the narrow, dark space we were in with aching, heavy arms—to the brick walls plastered with racist, grammatically incorrect graffiti, and the ground was more litter than cement. “ This is pretty much the mother ship of broken glass and dirty needles! You know the kind of people who come here! That’s why we call it STICKY lane and not STERILE lane. For all we know, there could be anything in there! There could be body parts in there!”

“Great, I’ll have something to cushion the fall into all of the glass and needles…”

“Seriously, Ellie. That bin could be full of diseases.”

Looking suddenly affronted, my sister turned to me, letting go of the bin to cross her arms. “You know what else could be full of diseases? YOU.”

Now it was my turn to be affronted right back at her. “ME?!”

“Yeah! You have no idea what happened for three days! The last thing you remember is some guy giving you a drink. For all you know, he raped you. For all you know, every guy in that place raped you…”

“Jesus, Ellie!” I gawked, horrified by her escalation. “A bit dramatic, don’t you think?!”

“THREE DAYS, Abigail!” she fired back. “THREE LOST DAYS! Don’t you want to know what happened to you?!”

A knot, lodged deep in the base of my throat, pulled tighter. “Ellie..”

But she kept going. “…even if he wasn’t involved, maybe he saw something, maybe he knows what happened …and maybe the only hope we have of getting to him is in this bin. Which could be emptied any day, so this could be our last chance to find out who he is.”

She grabbed the bin again, this time preparing to launch herself. A surge of panic compelled me further into the alley. “Enough!” I snapped, grabbing her by the hem of my hoodie. “We are going home.”

She yanked free, steadying herself as the crates quivered underfoot. “YOU go home.”

“And LEAVE you here alone? Have you so much as glanced at a newspaper recently?”

Ellie’s face transformed into a mask of outrage. “Have I? ME!” She huffed a laugh. “You’re the one who was flirting with the River Ripper three days ago!”

“Oh, so now he’s the River Ripper?”

She ignored me and started to climb in.

“Ellie!” I grabbed her again. “This is stupid, even for you!”

She turned, holding onto the bin with one hand, slapping me off her with the other. “Stupid?!” She glared down at me from her milk crate podium. “Let’s talk stupid! Stupid is stealing some rich guy’s wallet when you have priors, and you know what happens if you get caught! Stupid is accepting a drink from some random when every single week, a new woman is turning up dead in the news! What, you think I want to crawl through trash in the dark? You think this is what I came home for?! For all of your lectures over the years and the first time you go out and decide to have SOME kind of life, THIS is what you do?! I mean… what were YOU thinking? Do you have any idea what could have happened to you, how clo….”

Suddenly, her voice snapped like a violin string and her eyes filled with tears. The fight left her body like a spirit, and she was at once smaller, meeker. She wrapped her arms around herself—bracing herself—like something had just caved inside her and she was holding together what was left.

Just as quickly, guilt went off in me like a bomb. She was right. Of course she was right. This was me, all of it was me. I’d been stupid, I’d been reckless, and here she was—not for the first time—paying the price. And the worst thing, I didn’t know why I’d done it. Not just talking to him, but taking the money in the first place. Why hadn’t I just walked straight back into the milk bar, dropped it into George, and made it someone else’s moral responsibility?

“Ellie…” I channelled my gentlest voice, the one I’d used in the past to summon her out of nightmares with. In that moment, she looked like she was halfway out of a nightmare—shaken, bleeding tears, staring off into nothing. “Ellie, will you look at me, please?”

She half turned to face me, jaw set tight, her eyes still averted elsewhere. I glanced at her hands, her fingers digging into her own arms, pinching, at her damp, blotched face.

“I’m here, okay?” I soothed. “Nothing happened. I’m alive. I’m fine.”

She finally met my eyes, lips trembling as she dug her fingers in more. “But what if you weren’t?”

I felt her fear like a punch, like it was my own. But hadn’t it been? Isn’t this what I’d been feeling for weeks? Every time the sirens had wailed in the distance, every time a news bulletin announced another dead girl, time held its breath and held me down too, in a place where she was both alive and not alive, where life was the same and never the same again.

In a desperate bit to reassure her—to reassure me too, I suppose—I said, “Listen, I know for a fact that that did not happen.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I woke up in my jeans.”

Her face went from bleak to confused. “So?”

“So…they’re so tight they might as well be a chastity belt. There’s no way he could have raped me when I was wearing these jeans.”

Like an eclipse, she went from teary to slate cold. With one final glare, she resolutely turned to the bin and hoisted herself right in.

“Ellie!” I called out, my voice high with shock. “Oh my God, Ellie, get out of there now!”

No answer.

I moved closer to the bin, trying not to think about how bad it smelled. “Ellie!”

Still no answer.

This time, I slammed my fist on the side of the bin, “Ellie!” I beat harder, surprised by how weak it was, barely making a sound. Anxious, I resorted to her full name, the way I had to sometimes when she needed a parent more than a sister. “Eleanor! Eleanor Marie Byrnes, you WILL answer me right now, or I WILL come in after you!” When that didn’t work—it rarely did—I reverted to sister. “And when I do I will THROW UP in your hair!”

I should have opened with that. The threat of being thrown up on prompted her to answer me. “Relax, I’m fine. All the body parts broke my fall.”

I didn’t have a chance to answer before she said, “Just so you know that’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said, by the way. And considering you’ve been saying dumb stuff to me your whole life, I have a lot to choose from…”

“What are you talking about?”

“The jeans thing,” I heard her moving around in there, the rustle of bags and the clinking of bottles. “It’s dumb. And it’s victim blaming.”

I groaned a little. It was one thing to be stranded in a grotty alleyway, waiting for someone to return to their hovel of blankets and maybe kill us, but entirely another kind of torture to be here while my sister sermonised feminism at me out of a bin. “How is that even victim-blaming? And can I even victim-blame if I’m the victim?”

“Victims blame themselves all the time! My lecturer said women internalise misogyny all the time. And we think we’re keeping ourselves safe, but actually, it’s how the patriarchy makes us responsible for the violence they commit against us. So we have to carry the responsibility of keeping ourselves safe so they don’t have to change their behaviour…”

Too exhausted to keep standing, I disassembled her milk crate tower and sank onto one. The broken glass crunched under me as I settled against the side of the bin.

“Ellie,” I interrupted, keeping my breath shallow so I wouldn’t have to smell everything so intensely. “I’m not blaming myself, I’m just saying it’s logistically impossible. Besides, you know me. I always have my guard up.”

“Well, maybe you let it down for a night.”

“I didn’t!”

“Look, I’m not blaming you, okay. It’s not a crime to flirt with a guy at a bar. It’s not even a crime to sleep with him.”

“I’m not like that!”

“If you mean fun and interesting, don’t worry. I already got the memo.”

“I’m not a slut.”

“Really?” More glass bottles crashing together. I winced, imagining her getting cut up by them. “Not even for Captain Von Redford? Everyone would sleep with that guy. It would be rude not to, honestly.”

“I will not engage with this anymore.”

“Oh, please, stop pretending you’re so above it all. You think I don’t know about your little porn addiction.”

“My what addiction?!”

“You know, those smutty little books you carry around with you. I used to wonder about you, I even thought you might be a lesbian for a while there until I found one of your little pocket pornos, and it turns out I could not have been more wrong about your sexual preferences.….”

“Firstly, they are not porn; they are books.”

“Yeah, in the way way Penthouse is a magazine.”

“They’re called romance books.”

“Porn adjacent, whatever you want to call it, the point is there’s evidence of heterosexual libido ….”

“Just because you read about something doesn’t mean you want to do it. I also read murder mysteries, but it doesn’t mean I want to go out and murder somebody.” Actually, that was a lie; in that moment, I very much wanted to kill my sister. “Besides, why would someone who looked like that be raping women?”

“What about Ted Bundy? He was good-looking; women wrote him letters in prison, one of them even married him and had his baby. And he raped and killed at least thirty women. In fact, I think it was more than that…”

I zoned out, half-judging the kind of woman who falls in love with a man who is capable of violent and terrible things as my eyes scanned the alley. Just as I suspected, there were no glowing green doors to be seen. No regular doors for that matter, except for the screen door that backed onto George’s shop. I glanced back at the blankets in the corner, my stomach tightening as I thought about who might come back to them at any moment, when my thoughts were interrupted by a high-pitched scream from within the dumpster.

“Ellie!” I jumped up, heart thudding. “Ellie, what is it?!”

“Ewwwwwwww. It’s so SLIMY!”

“IS IT A WOMB?!” My heart beat faster. “Ellie, is there a womb in there?!”

“No! Ugh. Gross. It’s just old cabbage. Thank God. Never thought I’d be so relieved to be covered in rotten cabbage….”

Better than the alternative, I thought, noticing my temples throbbing again. Irritable with the burgeoning pain, increasingly desperate to go home, I groaned. “Come on, Ellie, why is it taking you so long?”

“Well….. it’s pitch black and full of garbage is why the fuck it’s taking me so long!” she snarked.

“Ellie! Stop fucking around with cabbages and get the hell out of there!”

An icy wind whispered against my skin, leaving goosebumps in its wake. That watched feeling crept back, stronger now. I glanced over my shoulder at the empty mouth of the alley, then up at the windows again. Still nothing. But the prickle at the back of my neck wouldn’t leave.

I waited, but Ellie was quiet again.

“Ellie?”

I knocked a little more urgently, because I was imagining the worst-case scenarios. Ellie cut by glass and dying, Ellie stuck with needles, Ellie suffocating under an avalanche of cabbage. “Ellie!” I smacked on the bin, hard enough to make my hand throb this time. “Don’t make me come in there and throw up on you!”

“Excuse me.”

But the voice wasn’t coming from the bin this time.

This time it came from behind me.

Chapter 7 starts in 3,2,1

If you want to find out how this works out for them, hit the subscribe button.

I am a 41 year old woman. I think. Sometimes I think maybe I’m 42, but I’m too perimenopausal to do the math right now. Close enough.


I am married and I am a mother of three. I have a child with a significant disability and I am tired of people romanticising what that’s like, for him and for his family.

I have a handful of female friends who are sisters to me. I have sister in laws who are sisters. I have an actual sister I cannot relate to at all and we haven’t spoken in five years. It’s for the best.

My parents are dead. Both of them had very ugly, unceremonious deaths. My mother is still unpacked in my garage and one day when I process what happened to her, I suppose I’ll figure out what to do next.

I studied counselling and then realised after I had a massive HECS debt that I’d been groomed my entire life to be the emotional support for others and did not want to do that for a living. That said, I’m glad I have those skills. It means I have the skillset to be support for people when they need it. I just have no deisre now to monetise those skills.

I have a couple of conditions that are classified as disorders, but most days I think the world is disordered and I’m having a perfectly rational reaction to it and the people who are fine are the ones we need to study.

I also have endometriosis. I’m having a flair right now. At one point, it was so debilitating I couldn’t walk. The gyno I saw about it told me it was all in my head and that I didn’t have it. It took 7 years to get another doctor to believe me enough to cut me open so I could prove I wasn’t imagining it. If you find I write about medical gaslighting, you’ll know why.

My beliefs, the things that guide my relationships and anything you’ll read on here:

I am a Catholic in remission, which means I don’t believe in any of it anymore but I still have shame and I still love the Virgin Mary. I am also what you’d describe as a progressive. I started my life in government housing and have an uneasy relationship with people who either look down on the poor or swing too hard in the other direction and romanticise them. That being said, I think we should outlaw owning a super yacht until every human being on this earth is fed and safe, and that billionaires are inherently immoral.

I am definitely a feminist and I am furious every day that the world is run by mediocre men. I have no patience for hypocrisy. When people tell me they’re an empath I am immediately wary of them. I believe that the standards we accept for others we ultimately accept for ourselves.

I am Australian but like most westerners, spent a lot of years mindlessly consuming American propaganda in the form of sanitised sitcoms and media and have only just realised in the last ten or so years what an absolute tyre fire that country is. I think if your children aren’t safe at school and you can’t afford healthcare, you basically live under the duress of a civil war country every day and it shows.

I have zero tolerance for White Nationalism dressed up as Christianity. I have zero patience for homophobia and transphobia dressed up as Christian values — your entire premise is a virgin birth and a man coming back from the dead, and you want to nitpick about biology, do you? Yeah. Okay then.

Finally, I am grateful to be in a position where I can write at least some of the time. There is a very real genetic and environmental disposition to raging, death-inducing alcoholism in my family history and if I had never learned to write it out, I know that would have been me too. It still could be me. I shouldn’t be too cocky. I’m not above it, I’m adjacent to it. The day I forget that is the day I’m done for. And I can’t do that, because my children can’t go through what I did.

So if this is a dealbreaker, so be it. If it makes you more comfortable, great. This is not about echo chambers, but about aligning authentically on non-negotiable values and no longer being ashamed of where I came from. I’m too old to pretend to be somebody I’m not, and however old you are, whether you know it or not yet, so are you.

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Previously on Other Girls (Chapter 4)
Table of Contents (Every episode)

For a door that had glowed so brightly from the outside, it was pitch black on the inside.

At first, I was too busy spluttering and gasping for breath to notice or care. All that mattered was that it wasn’t underwater. At least not yet. And not yet was good enough.

The rain raged beyond the factory walls, muted but no less relentless. At this rate, the flood would swallow the building whole, along with me in it. At best, I’d bought myself some time. No idea how much—just more than I’d had a minute ago.

I’d only just started to trust the floor under me when I caught a whiff of something sour and chemical. I figured it must be old machinery—that I’d been castaway into one of the many asbestos-condemned, dilapidated factories around that way. But as I tasted the smoke in my mouth, as the dry heat sapped the moisture from my skin, there was no denying it. The dull rumble wasn't just rain.

If I hadn’t been so utterly fucked, I would have laughed at the sheer irony of it. From the flood, into the literal fire.

Just as I was thinking it couldn’t get any worse—and for the sake of perspective, I was in that exact moment weighing up the pros and cons of drowning versus burning to death —things did what they always do when you think they can’t get any worse. They got worse.

Another cough. Another splutter. Not mine, this time. This one came from the shadows.

As I struggled to make sense of the noise of opposing disasters, my gut just about dropped out of me. It wasn't a raging inferno underneath a Biblical flood that I was hearing. Or not just that. Boots on wood. Voices. Men. And a whole crowd of them, from the sound of it. Talking, coughing, grunting. I picked up their scent beneath the sulphur: alcohol, sweat, must and urine.

I still couldn’t see them. Some comfort in this. If I couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see me.

So why, then, did I feel like I was being watched?

The possibility of surviving a burning building was one thing, but being confined in a dark building with a pack of lawless, drunk men who smelled like they collectively hadn’t bathed in 100 years? I decided to check back in with the flood’s status. But just as I was about to turn around, it pulled me back in.

A lute. It was strumming this sad, nostalgic melody that I couldn’t quite recognise, and yet it pressed my insides like a bruise I couldn’t remember getting. It was magnetic; it lured me out of my survival instincts and back into the shadows. But they were lifting by then, receding into cavernous, rough stone walls. And at the centre there was a grand chandelier, massive, iron, the sort you see in movies and history books, in the dining halls of medieval castles. It simmered with candlelight, dropping wax like it had been melting for centuries. The voices found their bodies beneath it. Men, not just a pack, but multitudes of them, clustered around tables….”

“Hey! War and Peace!” My sister interrupted, snapping me out of my dream submersion, back into the gritty light of our living room. “The abridged version will do!”

“You asked me about the dream!”

“The watch guy, Abigail! I want to hear about the watch guy. I don’t need to hear about the ambience and the lighting and the lute, whatever the fuck that is.”

“You know, it’s like a guitar. But..more whimsical.”

“Is the watch guy playing the lute?”

“No.”

“Then how is this relevant?”

“It’s relevant because I have to walk through the details so I don’t get lost and confused!”

“Walk a little faster, will you?”

“I’ll get there a lot faster if you stop interrupting me! Now, where was I? Oh, right. The chandelier. So there’s this chandelier..”

“No! You were past that! We’re up to the men at their tables….”

“Right, the men…”

What really stood out was how they were dressed. Each one appeared to be in military uniform, but from no particular place or era. There were redcoats from colonial Britain, Japanese soldiers in sepia tunics, and men in brass and feathered helmets—something Roman, or biblical. Blue berets, red berets, steel caps. Dingy Soviet grey, Civil War navy, and the unmistakably violent red of Nazi armbands. All of them, together, drinking, so absorbed in the tables that they didn’t appear to notice me at all.

I was so caught up in trying to figure out what kind of deranged costume party I’d just walked into, it took me a moment to realise somebody was staring right back.

Not one of the men, though. A woman. The only other woman, from what I could see, was standing at the far side, behind the long mahogany bar. She appeared about middle-aged, and was in her own kind of period costume—peasant blouse, corset, braids—the whole medieval barmaid works. A massive stone fireplace roared off to the right, giving one half of her face an eerie glow and casting the other into shadow. It made her look half-fire, half-decay.

And neither the fire nor the decay looked happy to see me. In fact, she looked like she was about to grab a broom and bash my head in like the drowned rat I was.

I half waved at her, in an attempt to show her I came in peace. She did not wave back. If anything, she only looked more outraged by my presumption.

If looks could kill.

But they can’t, can they? Floods, on the other hand, fairly notorious for it. And despite her contempt, I still felt somehow safer, knowing there was another woman in the room, especially now that I could see the bar. This wasn’t some kind of drug den or homeless encampment; it was clearly some kind of business establishment. With a barmaid. A weird business? Sure. A very mean-looking barmaid? The meanest. But there was a formality to it, something I felt like I had a chance of negotiating my way through at least.

I wondered if maybe I hadn’t wandered into a private function, that’s why I was getting the looks I was getting. So I’d explain myself, and the flood, and surely once she understood I hadn’t just barged in and there was an imminent threat outside, everything would be fine.

I started to squelch in her direction - my boots were still pretty waterlogged, even if the rest of me was drying quickly in the heat - weaving through the labyrinth of tables, holding my breath as I went to avoid the rank odour of so many unwashed, sweaty men in an enclosed space. I tried to keep as small as I could, cringing every time I unavoidably brushed a chair or shoulder again - but they were all so engrossed in their card and dice games I didn’t so much as get a side-eye. But when I looked at the tables, I didn’t see the usual pot of chips, money and jewellery. Just weird, useless shit. Feathers, combs, a spool of red thread at one. A smattering of Romans, Nazis and redcoats appeared to be playing for nothing more than a scrap of dirty white fabric. Nothing remotely valuable, nothing that explained the intensity with which they all played the game, like Russians playing chess in a world tournament.

I was glad to be through them once I was, glad to breathe again. Although if I’d hoped the barmaid’s contempt for me was a trick of the light, I was sadly mistaken.

“Who in the fuck are you and how did you get in here?”

Her aggression hit like a hammer. It took a moment to recover. “…I’m Abigail….I came in through the door.”

“What door?” she demanded, like she didn’t believe in such things.

“The one back there…” I gestured behind me, over the heads of the men, but that part of the tavern was shrouded in shadow, and I couldn’t make it out anymore. I looked back at her. “Listen,” I put my handbag down on the bar, which, like the boots, was still damp and heavy. “I usually wouldn’t come barging in here, but…

“You need to go back to wherever you came from.”

“I would love to, the thing is, it’s flooded out there. And I don’t mean like..get your gumboots and some buckets, I mean I’ve never seen anything like it, it’s like ..one minute I was just standing there in the alley, and the next the light just vanished, and I was completely underwater. I mean it was up to here…” I chopped my hand over my head with emphasis. “I seriously almost drowned. Like..whatever happened out there, it is unprecedented, it’s probably on the news…”

She leaned in over the bar then. Up close, I could see she wasn’t as old as I’d thought. Her face was hollowed and ashen, but unlined. She was probably about my age. But when she spoke, it was with the authority of a much older woman. “I said get…OUT.”

Baffled, I just stood there with my mouth hanging open, hand suspended over my head. “Did you not hear the storm?”

But now that I mentioned it, I couldn’t hear a thing outside. No rain, no thunder, no wind. Just the men, the fire, the lute. It was still playing the same tune, looping…

“Listen,” I shook my head. “I’m just trying not to die.”

But she wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was looking past my shoulder. “All is well, Bee,” a voice came from behind—deep and commanding. “The lady is my guest tonight. Kindly ensure she wants for nothing in the way of refreshment.”

It could have been any number of them. There were easily a hundred men in there, and every time I looked back upon them, there seemed to be more. I couldn’t quite pick up the accent either. Not quite British - it was more musical than that -more cultivated European than straight up English. Could have been one of the Soviets, the Romans.

….Even one of the Nazis.

And yet somehow I knew it wasn’t anyone other than him. The man with the watch and the newspapers. I’d heard him speak briefly in George’s shop, just thanking him, but it had left an impression. Everything about him did. A voice for radio, a face for the silver screen. Some people really do have it all.

Speaking of things which people had, I remembered I had his money in my bag. On account of my near-death experience, I’d almost forgotten why I was in the alley in the first place - but with my him standing inches behind me, I was suddenly very aware of it.

The question was…was he?

It seemed too great a coincidence that he’d be the one to approach me at random. The sheer bad luck of it seemed extreme. Even for me.

Recent poor judgment aside, even I knew that sticking around to drink with the guy you just stole from was high-risk behaviour. I’d had enough adrenaline for one night.

But before I could reject the drink and find a way to excuse myself - maybe just find and hide in a bathroom stall or something until the flood receded and it was safe to slip out - it was already being poured. The barmaid’s face hadn’t softened, just settled into that tight, obedient look as she pulled the tap and let the dark red wine glug down into a dented tin, miniature goblet. I was watching the wine rise toward the rim when I heard her say, “You should have taken your chances with the flood.”

With that deeply unnerving final remark, which the European either did not hear or was ignoring because he did not comment, “Bee”—a name which truly suited her because there was a sting to everything she did and said—slid the odd cup across the bar towards me, and disappeared via two swinging oak doors into the back.

Suddenly, it was as if the sound and air were sucked out of the room. The only thing I could hear was my own heart as I sensed him getting closer. Hoping I was wrong, that this wasn’t the same man from George’s shop, that I wasn’t possibly on the verge of being arrested…

“Thank you,” I threw him a polite smile, but barely turned my head, not wanting him to be able to commit my face to memory. “You really didn’t have to do that.”

His dark mass filled my periphery, taking up all the space and light and air. “Of course I did,” I’d noticed he was tall in the milk bar, but now he seemed unfathomably huge. Or maybe I’d just forgotten the last time I felt that small. “It would have been unchivalrous to let you drown.”

Any hope I’d had of a case of paranoid mistaken identity was crushed as I saw a man’s hand wearing a ruby studded signit ring set down a stack of newspapers on the bar, near my bag.

I bowed my head slightly, encouraging my hair to fall and conceal as much of my face as possible. “I do appreciate it, especially the not letting me drown part,” I tried to be vigorously polite. “It’s just .. I have somewhere to be, so I can’t stay.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, placing his own crystal glass down between my newspapers and my bag. It looked and smelled like whiskey. “I misunderstood. I was under the impression you were pleading to stay.”

“I was…but someone’s expecting me.”

“Captain Nemo?”

“Sorry?”

“Nevermind. It was a joke. Not a very good one. Clearly.”

“…It’s my sister. She’s expecting me, and she’ll be worried….” I made a point of glancing very briefly at him—to try and appear natural—then at my watch, although I was too panicked to actually notice the time. “I should at least see if there’s a path home, or at least try to find a phone..”

“Should I be terribly offended you’d rather drown than have a conversation with me?”

My stomach dropped, and my entire body started to scream with that silent alarm, like when you’re walking alone at night, and you hear footsteps behind you. Get out, get out, get out. He could have you arrested, he could dismember you, either way, GET OUT.

“I’m sorry, it’s not personal, it’s just….you know…” I eyed my bag, ready to grab it. “Women aren’t supposed to be accepting drinks off strange men right now, and I really do have someone expecting me…..”

“Please. I must ask you to stop.”

My heart just about did. I froze up, an animal caught in headlights, bracing myself for the worst.

"It is I who must apologise to you; I never should have imposed. I mistakenly assumed that you might feel safer with company in such an unfamiliar place. In my attempt to be gallant, I have had the opposite effect, and I hope you will forgive me. Please know that you are welcome to stay here, and I shall see to it that you are unbothered by myself or any other until you feel recovered enough to travel on.”

It was such a sincere apology. Not just his words, but the warmth of his voice. It was enough to take the edge off my paranoia, enough to make me doubt my theory that this was some kind of setup for stealing his money.

Maybe he hadn’t seen me take the money. Maybe, just maybe, he was a decent human being.

"You are, of course, right to be cautious. One never knows; any common criminal might have walked in off the street and taken the seat beside you.”

My paranoia flared right back up immediately. He was cat and mousing me. Playing with me. He had to be. It was too pointed a comment. He knew. Obviously, he knew. How could he not have seen me? He’d come from the same place I had; he’d ended up in the same place I had. He seemed to know about the flood, which had happened exactly three seconds after I had stuffed a wad of his cash into my bag.

“Once again, thank you.” I reached my hand out for my bag, keeping one eye on him while never quite looking at him, like avoiding looking at him could save me from what came next. “But I think I just want to get home.”

And you know, it might have ended there. Maybe I could have lost him in the crowd, run back to safety, lost him before there were consequences. But what happened instead was me failing to see his glass so close to my bag….

It happened so quickly. The crash of the crystal, the flood of scotch, him moving quickly to rescue his stack of newspapers from the spill.

“Shit!” In my startled state, I forgot myself and looked straight at him. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking and…”

But my voice drifted to nothing as I registered something.

The first thing I noticed was that his hair was fairer than it had appeared in George’s shop. Less of a tall and brooding Captain Von Trapp up close, more of a sun-kissed, All-American vintage Hollywood star. But the most striking thing was how groomed he was, how put together he was.

“You’re dry,” I thought out loud.

“Well…” Captain Von Redford said, glancing down at himself, and then at me with a grin that was disarmingly warm and genuine. “I was….”

My eyes followed his to the wet patch of his shirt, clinging to his stomach. It was the only damp part of him, though.“I thought you got caught in the storm as well?”

“Oh, no,” he leaned over the bar with the confidence of somebody who knows where things are , and plucked a rag from behind it. “I was fortunate enough to be well inside by that stage,” he explained, laying the rag over the puddle. “You were actually the first I heard of it.”

The tension started to drain out of me. He couldn’t have seen me take the money. This wasn’t some grand plan to have my arrested.

But the guilt set in where it had been. It had been a lot easier when he’d just been some rich caricature minus the monocle, hauling around sacks of money in Poorville. Almost like he’d had it coming. But now that he was being a basically decent human being and so gracious about everything, I felt kind of bad about stealing all of his money and desecrating what was clearly a very expensive suit.

“I really am sorry,” I scanned the bar for some napkins, those cardboard coasters, something to help clean up the mess I’d made. But there was nothing on it besides his papers and his overturned glass and mine, still standing, untouched. “I’ll pay for the dry cleaning…”

“Please, accidents happen…”

“It’s the least I can do”—it really was, especially when you consider it was just me handing his own money back to him. I reached into my bag, expecting to find a wad of slick, waterproof Australian notes, but instead my fingers sank into something softer, limper. Money, sure, but distinctively foreign money.

Distinctively his.

I buried the evidence further down in my bag and found the two ten-dollar notes of my own cash I had left. That one hurt, having to part with the only money I had left in the world to make things right, but I guess that was my penance for taking his money.

Although I had just almost drowned. Surely I was karmically caught up by now. At least over this.

When I looked back up, he wasn’t at my side anymore. He was on the other side of the bar, shrugging off his jacket. As he uncuffed the wrists of his shirt and rolled his sleeves up, I got caught up looking at him … his broad largeness … which that suit had really undersold. Unlike the suit, the sleeves were slightly too tight in the biceps. Or maybe just tight enough, depending on how you looked at it.

My eyes drifted to the bottom of a tattoo he had on the cleft of his elbow, a flash of ink I couldn’t make out the design. I almost forgot the money in my hand, what we’d been talking about. “Let me buy you another drink, at least.”

“I told you,” he ducked down, grabbing another rag from another unseen place below. “It won’t be necessary…”

“I won’t feel right if I don’t.”

“Very well,” he scooped up the damp rag and wiped the remaining few drops with the dry one.“If it will unburden your conscience.”

“What do I owe you, ten?” I hoped not the whole twenty. It was all I had until payday.

He tossed the wet rags behind him. “Fifty.”

“FIFTY?!” I gawked at him, appalled. My conscience wasn’t that burdened. “I spilt a glass of it, not the whole bottle!”

“That is by the glass.”

“What is it, liquid gold?!”

He grinned, bringing a crystal decanter up on the counter with amber liquid glowing inside it, and reset his glass, which fortunately hadn’t broken or chipped. “Closest thing to it.”

I’d veered away from guilt and eased back to resentment. I mean, sure, he’d bought me a drink, but he was drinking half my rent by the glass. It seemed grossly unfair that I should starve for a week so he could have yet another glass of gold.

Feeling a lot less good about it, I put the two of my blue legal tender notes on the bar, which looked as ridiculous and fake as Monopoly money in the rustic setting. “I’m sorry, this is all I have,” I said, feeling the familiar sting of shame over my poverty now in addition to everything else I was feeling.

“Put it away,” he lifted the decanter and poured himself another. “Your money isn’t any good here. Besides, I was careless about where I put my glass. I should have taken more care with it.”

I left my money there on principle, but was secretly grateful that I knew in time, after some soft insistence, I could slip it back into my bag and not feel too bad about it. If he was drinking scotch by the fifty-dollar glass, he could afford to take the financial hit more than I could. “Just so you know, you could get about twenty bottles of wine for fifty dollars.”

“You could,” He smiled as he finished pouring, a dimple cresting at the side of his mouth. “You shouldn’t. But you could.”

I laughed. Not the forced, polite laugh I usually offered like a sacrifice to men if I ever found myself trapped in a conversation with one. It caught me off guard, given how tense I’d just been. But there’s something about being in the presence of somebody that good-looking. It’s intoxicating. It makes you a little giddy, a little stupid. And that dimple made him seem younger, more approachable. Not to say I could pick his age. He had a spark of lines at the side of his eyes and the confidence that leaned into maturity. He could have been anywhere between thirty and his mid-forties, but with the dimple, closer to thirty for sure.

“I’d be careful just helping myself to that if I were you. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Bee.”

“That would suggest there is a right side of Bee to be on.”

“She’s that mean to everyone, is she?”

“Oh, I jest, I jest,” he put the decanter back under the bar. “Bee’s not so bad once you get to know her. She’s just not used to walk-ins.”

I took another pass of the place. The men were still odd, the lute was still doing its lute thing, familiar, repeating. What was that tune? At a nearby table, they were playing something like a large marble. I studied it for a second and then looked back to him. “I take it this is kind of…invitation only then?”

“Rather exclusive, yes.”

“Is it new?”

“Oh no,” He rested his large, strong forearms on the bar and leaned in, closer to me, to my height, so we were face to face. “We’ve been here for a long time.”

I’d started to wonder if the flood hadn’t washed me into a place I’d never been before, a different direction, because I was positive there wasn’t a single place around here that wasn’t a gutted-out, burned-out factory. It was like the ghost-town end of an industrial town, certainly nothing like this existed there. Surely it would have stood out, at least the patrons would have. “Do you own it?”

“Not quite. I am somewhat of a caretaker.”

Still leaning, he picked up his scotch, swirled it. Once again, I got caught up looking at him. Usually, people get less attractive up close, but the opposite was true of him. He had a nerve-wracking kind of beauty, like he was made for it, not just slopped together by genetics and chance like the rest of us. I wasn’t quite sure how to process it, because I’d never seen anything like it in real life.

I found myself looking for a distraction, in case I started drooling. “So..all the papers. What’s with them? Going to build yourself a papier-mâché ark?”

He half smiled. “I believe in a diverse media intake.”

“Trying to get closer to the truth?”

“Further from it, in my experience. But it is useful to see who is saying what, don’t you think?”

I wasn’t getting any less nervous. So instead of acting like a normal person, I rambled some fact I’d heard, maybe because he looked like he’d read every book ever written, and I wanted to seem smarter. “You know, I heard on the radio last week that one guy controls about sixty-percent of the media in this country. In the world, maybe. So I don’t know what kind of diversity you think you’re getting.”

“Oh yes, I know him quite intimately. We go way back.”

“In media, are you?” I asked, figuring he might be an anchor or even an actor. That would make sense. The teeth, the hair, the bone structure, the striking blue eyes. He belonged on the other side of a screen.

“I did work for the Herald at one time, in my misspent youth. But by the time I was working with him, I was more in... mergers and acquisitions…” he paused, as if suddenly realising something, and looked at the scotch and to me. “Sorry, I am being quite rude. Would you like some?”

No, I’d like to eat this week, I thought, but instead I said “I don’t like scotch”—which was also true.

“You don’t like cheap scotch. Which is more than sensible. But this is something else altogether. This is history in a glass. Aged in a barrel for close to fifty years, but more importantly than that, the age of the barrel, which was thrice that.”

“Was it made from the wood of an enchanted tree?” I said off-handedly, because making feeble jokes was the only way to mask the anxiety.

“Ah,” I swear his eye actually twinkled. “The magic comes later.”

He picked up the crystal decanter, turning it slowly in the light, watching the amber liquid catch the firelight. The movement was steady, almost rhythmic.

“But if one is to be conscientious about the retelling,” he continued, his voice dropping into that low, resonant frequency that felt like it was vibrating right in my chest, “the beginning lies in Scotland, sometime around the twelfth century. A small number of monks made the arduous journey north and arrived in the Highlands with an optimism that was, in retrospect, quite heroic….”

He went onto explain the origins of scotch at some length then. I can’t remember it word for word, something about friars and mountains and grain. I didn’t mind, though. He had a voice you could luxuriate in, like a warm bath. I would have listened to him read me the Dow Jones.

But the part that stuck was this:

“What distinguishes Scotch—what gives it its particular gravity—is the barrel. A single cask will have known many whiskies over the course of its existence, and it does not forget them. Each spirit leaves a residue of itself behind, so that what one drinks is never singular, but cumulative. Layered. Inherited.”

He picked up the glass and swirled it once, watching the liquid move. The scent of peat and oak and something ancient wafted up between us, thick enough I could almost taste it.

“The whisky acquires the character of the barrel, certainly—but the barrel, in turn, is shaped by everything it has contained.”

He held the glass out toward me slightly, his eyes never leaving mine. It felt like the air in the tavern had grown denser, warmer, like the walls were leaning in to hear him.

“Influence,” he said, a small, knowing smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Is never one-sided.”

By this time, I’ll admit I was too caught up admiring him to realise he’d actually finished speaking. When I realised he had and I hadn’t clocked on, I hurried to compensate. “Sounds like the carpet in my apartment.”

He was kind enough to laugh at my weak, gross little joke, which I did appreciate.

“You’re welcome to try some of mine if you don’t wish to commit to an entire glass.”

Usually, I wouldn’t. But I think…what’s the harm? It’s a small sip. Tiny. I’d been watching him the whole time, but he hadn’t put anything in it. It’s not like he was going to drug his own glass. Besides, how many other times in my life would I get to taste an insanely expensive vintage scotch? More importantly, how many times in my life would I get to spend time with a man like this?

Still, I didn’t want to appear too eager.

“I don’t know. I don’t want to have to sell a kidney if I take too generous a sip.”

“How about your name?”

The name came out of me, involuntary as breath. Muscle memory, I suppose you could say. “Esmerelda.”

He pushed the drink across the bar.

Chapter 6 begins in 3,2,1…..

Chapter 2 - Death Rattle

Chapter 3 - Flicker

Chapter 4 - The Rabbit Segue

Chapter 5 - The Caretaker

Chapter 6 - Sticky Lane

Chapter 7 - Chaperone

Chapter 8 - Void Again

Chapter 9 - Last Words

“I don’t need an emergency room.”

“Of course you do! You collapsed!”

“I got dizzy and lost my footing.”

“Yah. It’s called collapsing.”

By this stage I found myself perched on the edge of the sunken couch, elbows on my knees, fingertips pressing firmly against my eyelids - as if the pressure could somehow push back on the pain expanding behind my eyes. I sat as still as possible, concentrating on long, slow breaths to calm myself. It was the only thing I could do to feel like I wasn’t about to be swallowed by the earth.

But with every breath I took, I was increasingly aware of how flat and heavy the air was—not just its usual staleness, but the ghost of every tenant who had ever lived there. Sharp, alkaline smoke leaching from the couch, the unmistakable, biting sting of old cat urine trapped in the floorboards from some tenant a decade ago, and just underneath that, something else—rancid and sweet, like fruit on the turn.

Ellie, on the other hand, was skittering around the flat like a bird trapped in a glasshouse. First at my side, then in the kitchen. Opening cupboards, closing them. “You know you were out for a whole minute.” Her voice was high, thin, teetering off an edge. “And you almost hit your head on the way down.” Pipes shuddered, followed by the loud, high shriek of the tap. Nearly as loud as the ringing in my ears. “Can you imagine if you’d hit your head on the way down?”

The screaming of the taps wound down, then stopped. In the walls, of course. Not in my ears. That raged on. As did Ellie’s frantic soliloquy. “You could have cracked your skull open. You could have died instantly. YOU could have lost an eye…”

I tried my best to sound calm and reassuring. But it’s difficult to sound reassuring through broken glass—my voice came out with a shredded quality. “Unfortunately, hospitals are for injuries that have actually happened, not hypothetical ones. Anyway, it’s a migraine. And they can’t do anything for a migraine.”

This much was actually true. I knew from experience. The thing about migraines is they aren’t deadly, and emergency rooms are for conditions that can actually kill you, not to relieve you of wishing you were dead. The less true part was the certainty that it was a migraine, which was more of a hopeful theory at this point—preferable to the alcohol theory because migraines happened to me, not because of me. I wasn’t at any risk of questioning or lectures over a migraine.

Or so I’d thought. “I mean, you’ve been getting these since you were what, twelve?” She gusted past me. “Since when do you collapse with them? I’ve never seen you collapse bef..... OH MY GOD! WHAT IN HOLY HELL HAPPENED IN HERE?”

I realised “here” was probably the bathroom. I’d left it in a bit of a state.

“It’s fine,” I murmured, trying not to smell that too. “I was just a little sick earlier.”

“A little sick?” I heard her voice from the bathroom, followed immediately by a wet, jagged retch. Ellie was a sympathetic vomiter - and there was plenty to be sympathetic about in there. “That’s like saying Linda Blair was a little possessed in the Exorcist…” I heard the bathroom cabinet open, another gagging sound. “It’s like saying Europe had a little bit of Black Death… okay, where the fuck is your fucking aspirin?!”

“I think there’s some in the cupboard over the fridge,” I managed, trying to project my voice, but it came out as barely more than a rasp. “It probably won’t make a difference, though. Aspirin doesn’t cut into a migraine.”

Also true. It was the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a limb that clearly needed a tourniquet. But it didn’t stop Ellie from whizzing back towards the kitchen to find them.

“Since when do you throw up with migraines?”

“People are sick with migraines all the time. It’s a common symptom.” I wasn’t sure that this was true, but it sounded true.

“Not for you, it isn’t,” I heard the aspirin’s foil blister pack pop. “And if you’re suddenly getting new symptoms, don’t you think you should look into that?”

It’s not that she wasn’t making valid points. I knew she was. It’s just that they weren’t welcome. Not only because I felt at odds getting sensible advice from a girl who had given me carpal tunnel from the sheer amount of times I’d had to hold her hair back while she threw up chemical-blue alcoh-pops—although that was a big part of it. But because I’d already done a lot of work side-stepping the holes in the migraine explanation. The collapsing. The throwing up. Those were new, yes. But the thing I kept steering away from, the thing I couldn’t quite look at directly, was the time. I’d lost days to migraines before—to fitful sleep, to the muting of painkillers, to the vacuum of a dark room. But I’d never lost time. Not like this. Not wide-awake time.

Not during migraines, anyway.

Which meant I was back at my original theory. I’d made a bad decision, followed by six to twelve more bad decisions after that. I usually remembered the first bad decision, though.

I was back to thinking about the pills in my bag when I sensed Ellie beside me. Sliding my fingers from my lids and onto my temples, I cracked my eyes open and saw her over me, clutching a glass of water in one hand and two aspirin in the other. I took them, and very near choked on both, coughing and spluttering and gasping for breath.

My little choking performance did not reassure Ellie of my wellness, let me tell you. “I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn about this!”

“Because I know what’s going to happen! I’ve done it before, you know. Dragged myself and my raging fucking migraine into an ER, all to sit on a hard plastic chair under burning lights, usually next to someone’s screaming baby. And after about three hours of that…” I broke into another coughing fit, emptied my glass of water, steadied my voice and my breath. “…they finally call me in, give me a pregnancy test before they tell me there’s nothing they can do for me and send me home to bed. If it’s all the same to you, I might skip the pregnancy test and just do the bed part.”

There really was nothing more inviting in that moment than my bed—a dark space, a place to hide out for just a few hours. Just until the worst of it was over, just until my head was quieter and I could stand to let a bit of the outside in again.

She finally relented, leaving me for the kitchen. “Fine, but if you collapse again I’m calling the ambulance.”

I wasn’t in danger of collapsing because I was in no danger of standing up in the state I was in. As Ellie opened and closed cupboards in the kitchen, I carefully leaned back into the couch, for the first time actually scanning the flat for clues of what might have actually happened to me. It was largely as I’d left it—the unwashed dishes of the week were still piled by the sink, a couple of wine bottles amongst them—but I remembered those. And it’s not like I would have gone out to drink. I didn’t have the money, or the energy. Besides, women weren’t supposed to be going out alone to bars lately. Not unless they wanted to wash up somewhere with their insides on their outsides.

But then I remembered the bar. The Scotch. Captain Von Trapp, swirling it. “What distinguishes Scotch—what gives it its particular gravity—is the barrel….”

“Abigail!” Ellie’s voice yanked me back to the surface. I looked at her blankly. She was opposite me, the kitchen bench between us, holding my bottle of tequila in one hand, and the giant box of cornflakes I usually stored it behind in her other.

“What?”

“Is it possible?”

My eyes drifted to the tequila, assessing how full it was—about three-quarters—as full as I remembered it. “Is what possible?”

“Could you be pregnant?”

That snapped me out of my haze. “No. Why?”

“Your classic pregnant lady symptoms. Throwing up, fainting, mood swings—although nothing new about those….” She put the giant box of cornflakes and the tequila on the counter, and then ducked under it, retrieving a bowl and glass from the cupboard beneath. “I’m just saying, if you were in a movie, the audience would know you were pregnant by now.”

“Well, I’m not.”

She opened the box of cornflakes and poured them into the bowl. “You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure! Who isn’t sure about that?!”

“Sometimes people don’t realise, even when they’re really far in. Like, there was that midday movie we saw with the prom queen.” She went into the fridge, selected orange juice. “It was based on a true story, remember? She had no idea, she was still getting her period and everything. She just thought she was putting on weight on account of all the canned peaches she’d been eating, and then she gets cramps at the prom -which she blamed on the peaches - and then she had the baby in the toilet… do you remember? She called the baby Peaches.”

Bewildered, I watched as she poured orange juice onto the cornflakes - a former childhood delicacy of hers - and grabbed a spoon. “How is this related to me?”

“Well, she had a kidney infection, remember?” She shovelled some in her mouth, chewed, and kept talking through the debris. “And she took antibiotics and they negated the pill….” Suddenly, she stopped chewing, frowned at the bowl, and pushed the cornflakes around with her spoon. “These cornflakes are past it, by the way.”

“It’s not possible.”

She did something utterly disgusting, the kind of thing you can only do in front of people who have no choice in loving you—she just spat the chewed-up cornflakes into the bowl and ditched them by the sink. “Trust me, they’re stale as.”

“I mean it’s not possible that I’m pregnant.”

I didn’t really want to go into all of the reasons why this was irrelevant to me, least of all with my kid sister. I was slightly more tempted to have a go at her about cracking into my tequila first thing in the morning, which she was doing in that moment—glugging a generous amount into the glass and seasoning it with a dash of orange juice.

But I knew interrogating her wasn’t a good idea. That might lead to defensiveness, which might lead to an argument. I didn’t have the energy for that. What I needed was a harmless diversion. A distraction. A segue.

“You know, speaking of weird stuff…” I said, as Ellie returned to the living room with her drink. “I had this really vivid dream last night. It started in George’s milkbar, and there was this guy there I’d never seen before with this old-fashioned watch…”

If I’d wanted to distract her, mission accomplished. I was as good as a ghost. She was staring at the muted TV like I wasn’t there anymore.

“Ellie?”

She sipped her drink and glanced at me. “What?”

“Rude is what! I’m telling you something and you just started watching TV!”

“It wasn’t intentional,” she sighed. “It’s just... a reflex. A defence mechanism.”

“Against what?”

“Death by boredom.”

“How do you know it’s boring if you haven’t heard it yet?”

“Because it will be,” she shrugged. “It’s not your fault, it’s just how it is. Dreams are like babies or pictures from a holiday. They’re only ever interesting to the person who had them. Also, dreams never make any sense. But neither does having a baby, if you ask me…”

“It is interesting!” I declared, certain in that moment that it was. “And it makes sense!”

That last part was a straight-up lie. It made close to no sense. That’s how I knew it was a dream and not a memory—because even though it was vivid enough to resonate like an actual life event, too many things about it didn’t add up.

“Fine,” she gave a laboured sigh. “But listening to this counts as your birthday present.”

“Trust me, it’s interesting.”

She did not look convinced.

I persevered anyway. “So it starts like a normal Friday night. I stop into George’s before close to get some spring rolls. I’d meant to go to the shops, but the store was closed by the time I got around to it, and I remembered he does the two for the price of one after six….”

Glass in hand, Ellie circled back to the kitchen.

I glared after her. “You said you’d listen!”

“And you said it would be interesting. I think it’s safe to say two people have been lied to here today.”

“Forget it.”

I knew I sounded petulant. I was. I wanted to tell somebody about my stupid dream. It felt necessary, like I had to say it out loud. Like it was the only gravity I had, because everything else between now and when I’d gotten dressed the previous morning was gone. It was all I had.

“Calm down, pity party for one.” Ellie finished her drink in two more gulps and was onto making herself another. “I can listen and drink at the same time.” Once her glass was refilled, she hopped up on the bench next to the kitchen sink and window and looked back at me. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

After I was confident she was too busy drinking to interrupt, I went on. “…So this guy in front of me, he doesn’t look like he’s from around here. For one thing, he’s like... movie-star good-looking, and he’s clearly loaded. I could tell from the suit he was wearing, and not like those secondhand jobs the guys around here wear for funerals or court… this one was tailor-made. And he has this really posh accent, and this old-fashioned pocket watch, like the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland….”

Ellie was looking like she was zoning out again.

“Ellie!”

”What?”

”You’re not listening!”

“I am. You went to George’s, and there was a rich guy and a rabbit in there.”

Annoyed, I snapped back. “Why would there be a rabbit there?”

“I don’t know. Seems about as likely as a rich person in Smithfield.”

Valid point. This suburb was gritty, smoggy, industrial. The kind of place people get stuck in. Rich people have mobility, choices. And when you have those things, you don’t stand still in Smithfield. A rabbit who could read time was about as likely as Uncle Penny Moneybags hanging out in the local milkbar.

But as I’ve said, a lot about it didn’t make sense.

“So annywwwwaaay…” I persevered against her tide of indifference, utterly determined that this dream had value for a reason not even I fully understood. “George hands this guy all of these newspapers, like this massive stack of them, and then he leaves, and on my way out, I look down, and there’s this like… big, square wallet thing. I figure it must belong to the guy since he was the only other one in there, so I picked it up thinking I’d catch him and give it back… but then I look up and there’s no sign of him. There is, however, this big, Neanderthal-looking police officer on the opposite corner, and he’s looking dead at me. So here I am, holding something that doesn’t belong to me, so force of habit… I decide to dodge him and slip into Sticky Lane. I figure I’ll just ditch it in the bin there… but before I do, I open it up and see it’s loaded with money. Well, there’s no point in throwing the money out, and it’s not like I had any chance of getting it back to him…so I took the money out and threw the rest of it into the bin…”

Ellie’s eyes had started to glaze again.

“Stay with me,” I urged. “It gets better.”

She looked like she definitely didn’t believe me.

“It starts to rain.”

“Please, don’t tell me anything more. I want to wait for the movie when it comes out.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m kidding,” she laughed, taking a sip. “Keep going.”

But I couldn’t. It was too late. The green door, the flash flood—they were the last things I could get a solid grasp on, and as for the rest, I couldn’t find any way to explain it that sounded as real as it felt. She was right. Dreams were stupid and boring.

I hated it when she was right.

“Fine,” I relented. “Maybe it doesn’t make sense.”

She gave me a bit of an “I told you so” shrug and finished her drink in one swig.

After all her snark about my dream, I couldn’t help myself from making just one snarky comment back at her. “You know, traditionally, people drink their orange juice without tequila in the morning.”

“Why call it a tequila sunrise, then?”

It was a cute enough joke that it cracked through my irritation, and for the first time that morning, I very nearly smiled.

“Besides,” she put the drained glass down on the counter. “It’s not morning.”

“What are you talking about?”

”It’s night.”

”No it’s not. It was sunrise fifteen minutes ago.”

Ellie leaned over and tugged at the string, yanking the blind up to reveal a reflective black mirror of our apartment room instead of the day outside. “It was on its way down, not up.”

Fuelled by scepticism, I got up from the couch - not too quickly, and keeping close to furniture just in case - and navigated towards the kitchen window to investigate this allegation myself. I slid the window up and partially leaned my head out into the September night. The sky was a dome of indigo haze, the only illumination from a few streetlights.

I drew back inside, shaking my head in bewilderment. “But… that would mean I slept for…” I wasn’t sure, but it was math I couldn’t easily do in my head. I looked back at Ellie, slow-blinking, and then at her discarded bowl of stale cornflakes. “Wait, if it’s nighttime, why were you eating cereal?”

“You have weirdly rigid ideas about what time you can eat things. Cereal and tequila are both very versatile….” Suddenly, she was gasping and looking down at the floor in horror. “OH MY GOD!”

“What?!” I jumped back instinctively, reacting to what I assumed must be a rat or a cockroach - wouldn’t be the first time.

“My boots!” she cried. “What did you do to my boots?”

I focused my attention to the suede boots on my feet, for the first time really noticing the patchy unevenness of them. They were waterlogged, the fine suede darkened into a bruised, muddy brown, salt-stained.

For a split second, the sight of the sodden, dark material made my throat constrict. I felt a phantom surge of cold water rising up my chest, filling my lungs until they felt like they’d burst, like I was trying to breathe through wet wool. I couldn’t draw air; I was under, I was deep under…

The invisible weight vanished as I felt the weight of guilt and confusion instead. “I’m sorry, I….” I should my head, not sure how to even finish the sentence. “I’ll pay for new ones.”

I said this even though I couldn’t, at least not for a long time. They were the nicest things Ellie had ever owned. She could never have afforded such boots—they were the type you found in obscenely priced department stores full of willowy mannequins, the kind we only went into for free perfume. She claimed she’d found them in an op shop. I wasn’t sure if I believed her, but I had no proof to the contrary.

Also, my foot was only half a size bigger, so it suited me to believe her.

Ellie wasn’t wasting any time taking me up on my offer. She was already reaching for my bag.

“I meant eventually,” I snatched it back from her, and held it possessively at my side. “I barely have 20 bucks on me right now.”

“Great. That should be enough to get a cab to the hospital with.”

“For what, revenge for your boots?”

“No, as medical treatment for whatever the fuck is going on with you.”

“Ellie, we’ve been through this already. They can’t do anything for a migraine…”

“Will you quit it with the migraine shit? This is not a fucking migraine! I’ve seen your migraines before, but I’ve as sure as fuck never seen the bathroom look like that before, not to mention you’re all like... demented or something.”

“What do you mean ‘demented or something’?”

“You forgot about me coming over on your birthday.”

“I didn’t forget! But it’s not my birthday!”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it isn’t….”

This went on for longer than it should have, until Ellie turned suddenly and walked out of the flat. She returned mere seconds later with several rolled-up newspapers, which she proceeded to rip the shrink wrap off.

I shook my head, bewildered by the accumulation of newspapers. “Where did you …”

“Right here, look,” she slapped one down on the coffee table in front of me. The first thing I saw was imposing black print about a winning sports team; in far more modest print below that, something about one of the dead girls with the word ‘curfew’ in its heading.

But it was the date that really gripped my attention. Monday, the 20th of September, 1999. Three days after my last waking memory.

“Abigail?”

I looked up at Ellie and found her eerily still - she had my bag in one hand, an antique watch and some stray notes in the other.

“Okay, I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but… do you want to tell me more about this dream?”


Chapter 5 starts in 3,2,1……

.

At first, nothing.

Through the cracked bathroom door, I could only see a sliver of the living room... the edge of the couch, the coffee table, a hint of the front door. The fluorescent light was on, blinking erratically. The whole space spasmed with it, light and shadow bleeding together, making it impossible to see what else might be alive in there.

Clutching the hairspray like it was my only hope - because it was - I inched the door open to see better, cringing as the hinges betrayed me with a long, loud creak.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

My whole body seized at the sound of the gruff, male voice. In the half-second that followed, my mind fractured into possibilities:
Lock myself in.
Run.
Beg.

“Don’t worry, mate,” a second male voice responded, even rougher than the first. “She’s not getting away from me this time. Not once I get this chain on her.”

Run. Definitely run.

“Did you not hear me the last time? The only way you’re taking that boat out again will be over my dead body, gottit?”

……What?

Far more emboldened by confusion than courage, my finger still poised on the hairspray nozzle, I peeked my head through the gap.

And there it was. The television propped up on the kitchen counter, a twisted wire hanger wielded above talking heads. Not a duo of rapists awaiting me with chains, not the Ripper and co. Just two actors I semi-recognised from an Australian soap opera.

The scene cut away to an ad, a woman lathering her hair and singing about it. I laughed, a sharp, breathless sound, and let the canister drop to my side, heavy and useless. I sagged against the doorframe. The flat was empty. I was alone. I was safe.

Never so relieved to be wrong.

The panic slowed to a low hum. Until, that is, I heard it. The familiar creak of the loose floorboard, at the foot of my bed. From the room behind me.

I spun just in time to see a hooded figure manifest in the shadows, mere inches from where I stood. I shoved the hairspray out at eye level and jammed my thumb down. It gave a single, pathetic hiss before the plastic trigger snapped clean off under my finger.

I shrieked, pegging the useless can at the head of the shadow, scrambling for the exit. A short shriek answered mine.

“Ow! ABBY. What the fuck, though?!”

I stopped dead at the front door, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I looked back tentatively toward the bedroom. “...Ellie?…Ellie, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me!” My sister emerged into the half-light of the living room, a shapeless blob in an oversized hoodie. One of mine, missing for as long as I’d been missing her. She had half her face obscured by her hand, looking every bit as indignant as she sounded. “Who else would it be?”

I shook my head, unable to process her. Her. Here, alive. In my living room. Finally, I managed: “What are you doing here?”

She pinned me with her visible eye. It was her bad one, the pupil hazy and misshapen, but she hadn’t lost her ability to death-stare with it. “You mean apart from getting nearly bludgeoned to death?”

“I thought you were a murderer!”

“And why would a murderer be in your bedroom?”

“To MURDER me, obviously! The question is why would YOU be in my bedroom? How did you even...”

I stopped. I saw the answer dangling from her fingers.

“For fuck’s sake,” I said, lunging forward to snatch my handbag back. “Is this why you’re back? To rob me?”

“To ROB you?” The side of her face I could see was caught between outrage and amusement. “As if you have anything worth taking!”

“Then why were you going through my bag?!”

“I was looking for matches! I thought you might have some in your bag. You didn’t have to hit me.” She winced. “In my good eye.”

My irritation gave way, grudgingly, to concern. Ellie has a penchant for the dramatic - family trait in case you haven’t noticed - but if a rusted can had scratched the good eye...

I checked that my bag was still zipped, it was, tossed it on the couch, and looked back at her with a resigned sigh. “Let me look at it then.”

“No.” She angled away with defensive, childish pride. “You’ve done enough!”

On the TV, the newsreader’s detached voice pierced the room. “Police have recovered the body of a woman from the Hawthorn River today…”

“For fuck’s sake, Ellie, it’s not like I did it on purpose.”

“Felt pretty on purpose!”

“….the fifth discovery in what police believe may be a series of related deaths…”

“Suit yourself.” I took three steps toward the TV and muted the solemn-looking newsreader. “Enjoy your eye patch.”

Eyepatch was the magic word. She dropped her hand, crossed her arms, and waited for my appraisal. The eye itself wasn’t bloodshot and her pupil was clear, unlike the cloudy one beside it. No obvious injury to her face either, not unless you counted the masochistic silver bar that speared her eyebrow. That made several now, counting the stud in her nose and the ring in her lip.

I resisted the urge to comment. Commenting about Ellie’s choices never ended well.

“Take your hood off and come into the light so I can see better.”

We took a few steps into the centre of the room, under the strobing fluorescents. She pulled the hood down, revealing silvery lavender hair. Electric violet the last time I saw her. I also noticed her face was a little fuller. A relief. At least she’d been eating properly.

“Will you quit moving?!”

“Sorry, but your mouth smells like a possum died in it.”

“Sorry,” I matched her sarcasm. “But I haven’t exactly had a chance to brush my teeth.”

“Since when, June?”

I resisted the urge to hit her harder and on purpose this time, and pushed her hair back. She winced. “Ow! Be careful.”

“You know, for somebody who literally pays people to punch holes in her face, you sure are being precious.”

“They don’t usually launch them at me in the dark.”

“I can’t see anything. Are you sure I even hit you? Maybe it was the wind.”

“Yes, I’m sure! You fucking sure did! Right here!” She jabbed her finger towards her temple, muttering, “Fucking wind, indeed….”

Finally, I saw it. A vague red splotch at the corner of her brow, more like a faded birthmark than an injury.

“I’ll get you some ice, but I’m sure it’s fine.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s not even bleeding.”

“That you can see…”

“I think you’ll live.”

Me, on the other hand? Debatable.

Now that the adrenaline was gone, what was left in its place was harder to name. Not just pain, though there was plenty of that, skin-deep to bone-deep. Every step toward the kitchen was a small negotiation with gravity.

Something else was underneath it. A wrongness. A low, kneading pressure in my stomach that had nothing to do with pain, or hunger.

What the hell had I done to myself?

My brain went to the pain pills in my bag. The good kind. The kind that covered on all fronts of wrongess. I only had a few left, reserves for emergencies, and I was already trying to decide if this counted.

I surfaced from my thoughts to find I was staring into the open freezer, face cold, no memory of having crossed the kitchen. The only thing in it was a bag of freezer-burned peas.

Ellie’s voice wafted in the background. “…and he never woke up, so you know, you shouldn’t assume.”

“……who never woke up?”

“That kid. With the cricket ball to the temple, remember? They thought he was fine because there was no lump or anything but he went to bed and he never woke up.”

I grabbed the peas and closed the freezer. Ellie had reclined on the couch, bare feet pushed against the arm, perfectly at home. As if she’d never left.

“Catch,” I said. But they didn’t even clear the bench. They landed on the edge and slid off with a pathetic splat.

Ellie turned to look at them on the floor, then looked up at me, brows arched. “You right, there?”

The honest answer was clearly the fuck not. But that would mean follow-up questions, to which I had no follow up answers for. I’d lost half a day, and my head was splitting; I had to assume I’d drunk myself into oblivion. Which would mean a long and tedious lecture about personal responsibility, accountability, good decisions. She’d surely have it memorised, she’d been on the other side of it often enough.

I was in no mood to be on the receiving end this morning.

“I’m fine,” I said.

The room bent with the light. I gripped the edge of the bench.

“You don’t look fine.” Ellie stood and came around to the kitchen. “In fact, you look almost as bad as you smell. Which is almost as bad as your bedroom. Still got that dead guy smell in there. Open a window and block the vent to Novak’s apartment, already. I have no idea how you sleep in it.”

“Did you just come back to insult me?”

“Not just that.” She frowned into the fridge. “We have plans, remember? Speaking of which, do you have eggs?”

“…what?”

“Eggs. You know, those round things that come out of a chicken’s butt.”

“No, no eggs.”

“What about flour?”

I shook my head, confused by the flour and by the fact that she was apparently awake before midday on a Saturday. That was unprecedented, unless of course she’d never been to sleep in the first place.

“Ellie, can you back up for a second. What plan are you referring to, exactly?”

She looked at me like my brain had fallen out. “Ummm… the same plan we have every year. For your birthday. I even rented The Sound of Music on the way here.” Her frown deepened. “You do remember, don’t you?”

Of course I did. Midday takeout in our pyjamas and Julie Andrews, every year without fail. It’s just that after the last time I saw her, I wasn’t sure we’d ever have a standing plan again.

Also - it wasn’t actually my birthday.

For the first time it occurred to me that maybe I was catching her on the end of a bender. It might explain a few things. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Yes, lunch and a movie,” I said, keeping my voice patient. “On my birthday. I mean, since when are you running early anywhere?”

“Okay,” she sighed sharply and closed the fridge. “Can you not, please?”

“Can I not what?”

“Being all snarky and pedantic.”

“How am I being snarky or pedantic?”

“Since when are you running early anywhere?” She mimicked in an unflattering deep voice, like she was doing an impression of a very annoyed bear.

The argument was picking up heat and I could feel my anger rising to meet it, but underneath that, something else was rising too. The room tilted. The light strobed. I took a breath, gripped the bench tighter, made my body and voice as steady as I could:

“The point is I don’t hear a word from you for weeks and suddenly you just show up at some ungodly hour and act like I’m the one who is overreacting.”

“Without a word?!”

The light dimmed. Brightened. Dimmed again.

“Your phone has been disconnected. And then, when I called the motel they said you weren’t working there anymore either...”

It was coming in waves now. The light, the tilting, the cold sweat breaking across my skin. I closed my eyes. The argument kept going without me.

“I mean, if I can’t call you at home or at work, how am I supposed to call, Abigail? What was I supposed to do, send a messenger pigeon, or a telegram. Oh, maybe I could hire a sky writer…”

Quiet.

Then, softer: “Abigail? ….. Abigail, will you look at me?”

I forced my eyes open. There were two of her, blurring together.

“……Abby?”

The fluorescent light gave one final, violent flicker.

And went out.

And then so did I.


Chapter 4 starts in 3,2,1……

I used to believe you burn in hell. But now that I’m here, I think it’s the coldest I’ve ever been.

I was barely thirteen when I first heard of this place in all its gory, pointy detail. Still a kid, even if I didn’t feel like it back then.

And yet, I was still the oldest one there—not counting the gargoyle-like nuns guarding either end of the pews like the Gestapo, or the yellowed, hollowed priest so ancient he was like a relic unto himself. As he delivered the news of our fiery damnation with the monotone inevitability of a weather forecast, it sometimes seemed like he might just dissolve into dust on the spot.

But as for the other kids—captives, really—their shoes didn’t even graze the ground once they were seated. I can’t imagine they understood half of what was being said to them; they didn’t know enough about the world to even fathom the sins they were being accused of.

Not that it mattered. The message still got through loud and clear. Even a five-year-old knows that it hurts to burn.

And burn they would. Because that’s the kicker about the Catholics—the thing I thought was actually pretty rude about it all. Sin isn’t even a choice you make. It’s something you already are, a sort of celestial debt we’re all born into. Not one of us, not even those who were still in the thumb-sucking stage, was inherently worthy of His most lofty standards. This is all thanks to some heritable disease called “Original Sin,” an innate sort of corruption that courses through our blood and stains our souls even as infants, making us too unclean to pass through heaven’s gates.

And all of this because, supposedly, thousands of years ago, somebody ate something God told them not to—and it’s been repeating on humankind ever since. God, as it turns out, is not just the master of creation, but also the master of holding the world’s longest grudge.

Our mission was to work the debt off. Their mission was to make sure we did.

Unfortunately, I made a habit of accumulating more debt, not working it off. So here I am.

But as it would turn out, they were wrong about a few things. Especially about this place.

Everything was fire with them. Fire this, fire that. But you know what? Not so much as a flame since I’ve been here. Maybe it’s in the back, in some other department I haven’t seen yet? It’s funny, though. Fire, it turns out, is not the worst thing. Fire would, logically, mean some kind of light, and there is a definitive lack of that here.

A lack of everything, really. The priest did talk about darkness, but my former sense of the dark was something that cloaks and hides things. But there’s nothing to hide here. The light isn’t missing. It was just never here in the first place. All those years they had me believing hell was the worst place to be because of what would be here. As it turns out, it’s actually the worst place because of what isn’t.

Speaking of things that aren’t here: how about the vast majority of people? The Catholics left me with the impression this place would be pretty densely populated. The atheists, the heretics with their fake gods, even people who believed in the same God just a little bit differently. That’s a lot of people, isn’t it?

And yet, you’re the only other person here. Still, I’m not entirely convinced you’re not just some figment I cooked up as a coping mechanism to keep myself from going totally crazy. Which would be ironic, if you think about it. Because if it’s gotten to the point that I’m hallucinating a Scotsman in the dark, I’m probably past the point of crazy, aren’t I?

“For the last time, I’m not a hallucination. And I’m not Scottish. I’m Irish.”

“Yes, but a hallucination would say just that, wouldn’t they? Well, maybe not the part about being Irish. But definitely the part about not being a hallucination.”

“I don’t know what to tell you except everything I’ve said before.”

“Well, if you’re not a hallucination, then what’s the alternative? Satan?”

“Why is that the alternative?”

“Makes a certain sense, doesn’t it? Who else would you be? We’re in hell, there are only two of us. I know I’m not Satan, so by process of elimination, somebody has to be.”

“I don’t think anybody has to be Satan…”

“Fine. Then you admit you’re a hallucination.”

“This isn’t an either-or situation. There are other options besides hallucination and Satan.”

“Fine. Prove it.”

“That I exist, or that I’m not Satan?”

“Well, let’s start with the existing in general part and go from there.”

“And how do you propose I do that?”

“Hmmm….. how about you tell me something I don’t already know?”

“Such as?”

“Well, I don’t know. That’s the point.”

“…..”

“Fine. What about geography? I was always terrible with geography. Like the capital of Armenia. I know it has one, but I have no idea what it is.”

“Yerevan.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“….”

“What?”

“…it’s just... it sounds kind of... made up.”

“Words usually are.”

“All right, fine. Let’s try something else. What about you say something I know I would never say? Something so utterly out of character that I know there’s no way I could be saying it, and it must be someone else.”

“How am I to know what you’d never say?”

“Well, if it’s well out of character, I wouldn’t know. Have a go. Can’t hurt.”

“Very well then. Is giorra cabhair Dé ná an doras.”

“That’s gibberish.”

“It was Irish, actually.”

”Well now I know you’re not real. The Irish speak English.”

“Not always.”

“Great. We’re back in Yemen.”

“Yemen?”

“The capital of Armenia.”

“Yerevan. Yemen is a whole separate country.”

“That’s the point, I don’t know that! I don’t know anything here. I don’t know Yemen from Yerevan, or Irish from gibberish. I can’t test the truth against what I do know anymore than I can test it against what I don’t know. I can’t just take your word for it when it could be my word. I need something solid. I need... evidence.”

“Maybe this isn’t a place and time for evidence, but one for faith.”

“Well, the only thing I’m worse at than geography is faith. Trusting the wrong people is why I’m here in the first place.”

“That’s why most people are down here.”

”Even you?”

”Especially me.”

“Did you used to believe in God?”

“I did. Still do.”

“Even here and now?”

“Especially here. Especially now.”

“I didn’t. Well, not really. I half-arsed it, you know? Kept God for back-pocket emergency prayers, but mostly I didn’t buy into any of it. Truth is, I would have identified as closer to an atheist than a Catholic.”

“If you don’t believe in God, then why are you so certain of Satan?”

“I haven’t met God. What did you say before?”

“When?”

“Before. The gibberish…Irish, I mean. I never did ask what it meant.”

“It is a proverb. It means: God’s help is closer than the door.”

“Well, you sure had me pegged.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d never say anything so churchy and optimistic. Not out there, and certainly not in the bowels of hell.”

“Wait. So if you’re not sure of anything else—of what’s real and what isn’t—can I ask then why you are so certain, above all else, that this is in fact hell?”

“Oh, well, that one’s easy. I remember exactly how I got here. It all started with the night they found my sister in the bin.”

Next episode