‘If you’re walking at night and you feel somethin behind you, don’t look back. Don’t run. Sing if you have ta.’

Drag. Puff.

‘Stay out of them caves at night. And if you go in em in the day, don’t never take nuthin from there. If you kick a stone loose, put it back.’

Drag. Puff.

‘Keep your feet covered at night. Or you might find somethin ticklin em. Them things like children best and they’ll wake ya if they can. Then they’ll take ya and we never see yas again. They never give back what they took.’

We knew these things because Nan made sure we knew them. She still told us every time we were out by the river like this. It was our way.

‘Have you ever seen one, Nan?’ Laney asks.

‘Well now,’ she says, turning to look at us. The firelight moves strangely on her crinkled skin, making her beloved face look spooky. ‘Sure you wanna hear them stories? Ya not sleepin with me tanight.’

Her warnings are always the same, but she lets us sleep with her anyway.

‘Yeah, please Nan,’ we say together.

‘Good,’ she says, nodding in approval and looking back into the fire. ‘Because you’ll need these stories one day, granddaughters.’

She looks lost for a minute while Laney and I sit, waiting to have the shit scared out of us. From somewhere behind her I see a flicker in the dark, like when a wallaby jumps between trees, moving fast. A brief flash of red dances and I frown at it, trying to see. Probably light in the wallaby’s eyes, but it looked too small for that. Turning to ask Laney, I have a second to register the glint of gold and a strange pendant around her neck before clawed, furred hands wrap around her throat.

We both gasp as it pulls her backwards out of the firelight.

‘Laney!’

I spin to Nan, expecting her to move, but she’s still looking into the flames.

‘Nan!’

She finally turns to look at me with shining red pupils. Stumbling, I feel hands grab hold of my shoulders.

‘Be ready, granddaughter,’ she whispers as I’m ripped back, screaming into the dark.

The Day Of

The Day Of

Rolling out of bed is like getting a present, the morning chill a gift this time of year. Soon the world will be nothing but inescapable heat, so intense that the tar on the roads will bubble. I stretch, trying to shake off the weird unease in my heart, like I am forgetting something important. A heaviness sits in my gut that makes me fight to remember what I’d dreamt, but I give up when it refuses to come out. Stepping lightly over the worst of the creaking floorboards hidden under pancake-flat carpet, I drag my feet to the morning’s most unpleasant duty.