A perfect blue that darkens, liquefies, lit from below. It’s coming. The thump of Madonna. It’s coming. Her heart snags and gallops, her breath catches on the jag in her throat, but the film is speeded up, zipped through: there are the boys, gathered round a doll, a thing, a collection of meaningless parts. Jerking like idiot extras, they expend their dark energy. She isn’t there but above them, drinking their histories. Now she knows them: guiltless babies, marinated in manhood, confused by pornography, and in each of their cores, a fear of being shamed. And each of them now, by this unravelled act, imbibing an essence as toxic as taipan venom, a poison that shadows the daughters and wives of their futures. She slows time to watch them carry the poor, poor dear to the edge of the pool and swing her into the blue, as if they can wash away what they’ve done, and she’s sorry for them, for the misery they will know, and forgiveness is easy as breathing. All emotion washed free, she sees only a story: a culmination, and a beginning. The water that was blue is clear, and the image drains away.

For a moment she’s back in her body: the clinical light, the astonishing noise. No thought, no feeling: she is almost clean. But there is something else, and it pulls up in front of her mind’s eye, opens its doors with a hiss. She steps again onto the bus. The atheist charter. So easy to join them: just sign on the trip sheet, Humanities noticeboard. She gives them her tenner, her backpack heavy with The Project. Stowed in an overhead locker. No questions. They don’t know her, bar Rick, the mocker, the fucker. The anger puffs into light like a photo flash. But she’s going with them. They’re going with her. To meet God. So they’ll see He exists. Because He’s her only, her only… Fear, rising like the head of a cobra, widening its threat, and the panic that had her running down the bus to the just-closing door, mumbling, I forgot, I can’t go – this fear and this panic are suddenly, simply, turned off. A switch, and the current has vanished. She is calm. Calm and cool and deep as a lake in the quietest mountains. So calm that when she hears the explosion her only thought is release.

‌2.

Psychology

‌

Alarm

Logan wakes with a start. Nothing but the tender tick of his wife’s clock, her noiseless breathing, and the absolute darkness held at bay by the curtains.

Something is wrong. His breath is ragged. T-shirt soaked. As though his body squeezed out its own water to chill him awake. What does it know? The clock adds its evidence: 4.27. Is he due in court? Has he forgotten some vital piece of testimony? He allows the day of the week to surface. Sunday.