Gravel crunched under the tyres of a car. The letterbox slapped against the metal fitting.
“Post’s here,” Dad called from somewhere in the house.
A knock at my door.
“Ky? Are you awake?”
The door creaked open.
A noise of sympathy.
“Okay baby, I’ll get you some breakfast.”
I forced myself to drink the juice. The tea was stone cold, but I drank it anyway. I threw the toast to the crows.
I went back to bed.
When I opened my eyes, it was dark again.
Shadows crept across the floor.
The radiator ticked quietly.
Gravel crunched under the tyres of a car. The letterbox slapped against the metal fitting.
“Post’s here,” Dad called from somewhere in the house.
No knock today. The door creaked open.
A whispered conversation took place, hurried, in the space between here and out there.
“Love,” Mum’s voice bled from the doorway, the warmth in it burning.
“Rebecca called. She told us about… about your fella. I know you don’t feel like it now, but I need you to eat and drink something, okay? I’m going to leave this here. It’ll stay good for awhile. But you need to get something in you. I won’t crowd you, but I will be back later.”
Dad mumbled something, but from the muffled ‘omph’, it sounded like Mum had elbowed him in the stomach.
The door shut and the snick of the lock echoed throughout the stillness like a gunshot.
I blinked, watching the sharp lines of the sun as it drew borders across my carpet, seeing with detached interest as the warmer delineation stretched across the floor the longer I stared.
I closed my eyes.
The lines across the carpet had moved halfway across the room when I opened them. The tray Mum had set inside was firmly entrenched in no-man’s land.
Recalling that she’d be back, I pulled myself out of my bed and over to the tray. Muesli. Juice. Another cold tea. No telling how long it had been there, but I drank it because she had made it for me.
I chewed mechanically, the muesli crunching in my mouth, despite the milk. An admirable amount of implacability of texture that drowned out the thoughts in my head. I was grateful for the muesli. I had no idea what it tasted like. Nothing.
I went back to bed.
The nights were worse.
They say that, don’t they? Nurses, and doctors. They say that patients feel pain worse at night, and as I lay there in a dark that was so dark that I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed, I considered this as a way to ignore all the ways I hurt. Maybe it was the sensory deprivation that came from the night. The world was quieter than the thoughts in your own head.
Though it hurt, I found a kind of solace in the ache. It reminded me that it hadn’t all been a dream, because really it also had been a dream. The sort of story you made up. The story of the prince who falls in love with the ordinary girl and whisks her off to his kingdom in the clouds.
But I was still just an ordinary girl. And he was still gone.
