But what if there is a message waiting for her when the phone recovers reception? Maybe Kristina has left her a message. Maybe she is on her way, maybe she will come tomorrow. Would it make a difference now? She thinks about the phone call, days ago now; how she still didn’t come.

Leah gets up and stands a while at the window. She’s still a little unsteady on her feet after days in bed drifting in and out of dreamless sleep, and she feels a deep ache in her womb that travels all the way up to her heart. Her reflection is mirrored in the little grid window and Leah studies her sad, bruised face and its mournful expression. She finds it easy in this moment to access the empathy for herself that Kristina always speaks of.

She stands at the window a long while looking out at the beautiful night with crystal clear skies awash with billions of stars. She’s about to put clothes on and get ready to go when she hears a sound. Footsteps approaching. A muffled cough. A series of firm knocks on the door as knuckles strike the thick timber.

46

Kristina

She’s buried in fresh snow which I brush easily away from her face, but the back of her body is welded to the ground by older layers of snow that have hardened into solid ice. There is nothing but a fleshy crater where the left side of her sweet, familiar face was. Her right eye is intact but grotesquely rolled back in her skull. The rifle points its cruel black mouth straight at her.

On impulse, I touch her hand with my own, as though my touch might make her leap back to life, but she’s cold as ice and as hard. I scream, and it is my screams that suck me from these impossible moments, back in time and into the blank patches of my consciousness. It isn’t Leah I’m looking at, it isn’t Leah at all anymore, there’s nothing Leah about these mangled remains. I can smell the bitter, rotting-egg smell of gunpowder trapped in the pit of my brain – it must have been there all along, stored away. I can see the strange maroons and grays and purples hidden inside skulls, blasted open and exposed, like the vivid wet cores of smashed melons. I know these images; they were just removed from my consciousness like words with correction fluid, invisible but nonetheless still there underneath, black on white.