Summer After
We still all lived together, after it happened. We learnt to creep through the house at different times: my mother favoured the morning, my father the afternoon. I ventured out of my bedroom only in the deep of the night. When the house was like that – still and cold – it was like nothing had ever changed.
I noticed one day that my mother had started humming as she moved through the hallways of our home. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed it before. How long had her singing been a soft soundtrack to my mornings? Now, I could hear it so clearly, the way her voice floated under the door. It sounded like sifting. Like icing sugar. It was an Austrian lullaby she had sung to my sister and me when we were very, very little. It should have been comforting, but when I heard those slices of German drifting through the house, I knew it was a warning. Keep away.
The amount of time I felt I could spend in the communal spaces of our home was limited and so I began to eat like a babysitter. My plate was a kaleidoscope of the smallest quantities of almost every type of food kept in the house. Three string beans. Four M&M’s. One limp slice of bread. One heaped tablespoon of Milo. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to eat—it was just easier for the game we were playing of pretending each other didn’t exist. I did not want my father to stumble across an empty container of Fruit Loops. I did not want my father to stumble across an empty container of Fruit Loops and remember that I was still there, and my sister was not.
During the daytime, I sat in my bedroom with my only window open and the full sun streaming in. I let it hit my face, felt its warmth glazing my pale, perspiring skin. I sometimes wondered how long I would have to stay there to grow a melanoma or how long it would be until a patch of freckles cropped up on my cheeks.
Sometimes I would pass time by counting the leaves on the tree outside my window. Inevitably, though, a breeze would rush down the street and the tree would shake its rustling body. Not today, I imagined it was saying. The tree did not want to be measured or catalogued or judged. And I did not resent it that.
My only other hobby that summer was the photos. I had a big box of them under my bed. Most days I would drag them out, sliding the plastic tub softly along my hardwood floors so as not to be heard. The photos were always the same. Nina, 10 months. Our first home – THORPE STREET. Anna’s first day at school. Nina and Anna in the bathtub. Anna’s Year 8 piano recital. I never changed my process:
Take photos out.
Arrange photos on clean floor, equally spaced apart.
Look at each photo individually.
Trace cheeks and smiles and glittering eyes in photos with pad of finger.
Do not cry.
One night, after performing this photo ritual, my father and I crossed paths as he was slinking back into his den for the night and I was emerging into the kitchen for my night-time feed. I was expecting that we were going to ignore each other but when he got close to me, he grabbed the flesh of my arm hard.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I replied, looking down the hallway to where he had left the shopping channel playing on the TV. I hated the shopping channel.
He frowned at me. “Your face.”
I tried to wriggle out of his hold but he gripped me tighter.
“What?”
My father shook his head and let go of me, finally. I rubbed the spot on my arm where he had grabbed me.
“It’s nothing,” he said, shuffling away from me. “Your face is wet. That’s all.”
Fiction story by Ciaran Greig
This article appeared in the The Gavel #1 ‘The Among Us Issue’ (2021) Publication