And then James stopped silent in his talking, froze still and just quiet as ice. Dads hand was coming towards him across a carpet and if you stared at the carpet close up you could see it bore those strange repeating patterns of dead leaves and faces drowned in brackish water that were popular some years ago. All was slow and quiet under the bed where James was made. And in the quiet of slow time James stopped his sobs and spoke again.

He asked:

“Who can sing a song to un-frighten me?”

And when he asked that the gun hand stopped snaking for a moment. Paused, in recognition.

And he asked it again. The stink of vinyl mattress. A voice from under the bed. From where he lay there thru the gap J could see like the whole world framed like in peering thru a letterbox. He could see mums feet and legs, all crossed at an awkward angle and he could see a pool of blood slowly collecting in a lazy eddy by the chipped formica bedside unit which (the blood) he supposed to be coming from Olivia. He knew then they both were dead and Harry too.

“Who can sing a song to un-frighten me?”

*

James lay still and watched the gun hand withdraw, blank, repentant. And he lay silently under the bed. Face pressed right to the carpet. And after a time of absolute silence he heard his dad move a little and begin to sing. A soft slow reluctant song at first with words he couldn’t hear. And the song got louder after a time. And the words a little clearer. The song: Serenity. What they call a ‘traditional’ song, whose many ‘authors’ were probably long legally deceased and all copyright long since long expired.

Something about love. Something about loss. About desire. And again about desire.

And somewhere in it, like some statutory requirement, a single little line about hope.

And then James heard his dad sit down on the plastic/wicker chair and he heard the gun click and then he heard the gun fire.

The shot like thunder. Then silence. No more singing. And then he knew it was over.

*

Only when the singing was over, in the silence that follows a great gunshot was it clear to James that the TV was still on. Its voices chattering.

He lay under the bed many hours and watched the light in the room shift from blue to black to red and yellow and then to clear again. The TV flickering through cycles – news, adverts, a drama, adverts, updates on the chaos of the census, adverts again. And sometime deep in the night/morning there was a science programme. A TV voice that spoke of suns and stars and radiation.

*

A soothing, dreaming TV voice. Dawn came and James dozed in the crawl space under the bed where he was made. Asleep in a room full of corpses.