And it hadn’t been a dream.
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.
A void.
That’s how it felt.
In a strange, detached sort of observation, I knew that it would be normal to cry; to do those things they did in the movies – sit on the sofa in my pyjamas, eat a tub of ice cream, not wash my hair, or maybe even sing into a hairbrush.
Most of all, it would be normal to cry.
Once, when I was a kid, I fell in the garden of our old council house. I had somehow managed to get a rotten, old piece of wood lodged in my ankle. We went to the hospital to get it taken out but because it was rotten, it was too fragmented to take out in one piece. The doctor had needed to cut into my ankle to remove the splinters, so he’d numbed the entire area, and I’d been able to watch as he methodically pulled out shards of wood from an ankle that only distantly felt like mine.
That was how this felt.
I saw the source of the pain. I understood that somewhere, it must hurt, but I couldn’t feel it.
I didn’t feel much of anything. I was… removed.
I was like a passenger in my own body, disconnected from my feelings. Instinctively, I knew it wouldn’t last, knew it would hurt more the longer it went on.
Mum sat next to me on my bed and tentatively, she put a hand on my knee.
“Kaiya,” she started, speaking softly, as if she was trying not to scare me away. “I know this hurts and if you want to t-”
“I don’t.” My voice was rough, like a strip of wool dragged over splinters.
“Okay, love.” She nodded. “You should call Rebecca, though. She keeps calling the landline phone. It must be costing her a fortune.”
How could I tell her that I couldn’t? Because Becka was a part of the story about the prince and the castle, and if I called her… maybe… maybe I would start to feel it.
“Where is your phone, anyway?” She asked, looking around. “She says she’s been trying to call you for days.”
I looked over to the bedside table where it sat, a blank piece of glass, where it had been since… since.
Mum picked it up. “Oh. It’s off. Is it broken?”
How could I tell her I haven’t bothered to charge it in days? How could I explain that turning it on meant seeing… nothing? Meant understanding there would be no messages, or missed calls?
Absently, I rubbed my chest and my fingers brushed against my necklace, the little golden swallow. All of me froze, except for my fingers which clenched around the little bird as if it were a lifeline in a turbulent sea.
Mum’s eyes flickered over my face before her mouth pinched, and she put the phone down.
“Okay, baby. How about I run you a bath, hmm? I have some nice bath oils in that hamper I won in the raffle last week. How does that sound? Here, you take off those pyjamas and put them in the basket for the wash and I’ll run you a bath, yeah?”
It was all posed as a question – a series of options amidst the chatter of an ongoing life – but it was clear there was no real choice in any of the words she used, so mechanically, I nodded.
When she left, I did as she asked and took off my pyjamas.
Dimly, from the bathroom down the hall, I heard the pounding rush of the water filling the large, claw-footed tub, but having received no further instructions, I just stood there, paused.
It could have been minutes or hours later when Mum came back into the room.
