Nic gathered up the letters, took them to her room and shoved them in her school bag, too desperate to get away from Mum and Michelle’s screaming to find a better place for them in the moment. She zipped up the bag, pushed it under her bed and then walked out of the house. No one tried to stop her. Probably didn’t notice her leave. She walked and walked. The world had turned upside down and inside out and no one out here cared. As she walked, she found it got better, the feeling of being tossed through space. Seeing that the trees still grew upwards out of the ground, and that the sky was still very far away and showing no signs of falling any time soon. It helped to feel her feet connect with the earth, her lungs fill with air.

She will do that now. Not as easily, granted, but still. She makes her heavy way to the hallway, each clunk of the crutches on the hardwood floors reverberating through the house, shaking her bones. Clunk clunk clunk down the hallway, the promise of traffic noise, trees and shrubs and walls and garbage bins and telegraph poles and dogs and birds and cats and rats all filling the space, softening the blows, crowding her in.

The betrayer-in-chief and her assistant gape from the living room. Living room, but who could live there? It’s a tomb! They’re firing off questions and orders, telling her what she can’t and should do. She ignores them: clunk clunk clunk. The B-i-C stomps her way across, tries to bar the doorway, but she is a coward in the end. Nic doesn’t have to touch her, just keeps clunking forward and the girl moves, crying if you can believe it. Her, the cause of it all, the one who got her way, crying as if a grown woman leaving her own house for a walk outside is a personal attack on her. And him, well, he’s obviously chosen his side. He won’t even lift a hand to pull the axe from her back.

The door is already open; the children who have taken over her house have a bizarre obsession with fresh air, as if the place could hold any more of it. It’s all air. Nothing but. And yet they don’t want her to go out in it! Nonsensical. She would like to slam the door closed behind her, shut them up in the air-filled tomb of their making, but she would have to break her stride—clunking as it is—and risk falling, so she pushes on, grateful when the racket of outdoors drowns out their yowling.