He hadn’t taken more than three fast steps when something hard slapped the top of his back. The sound of glass hitting timber and the realisation he was surrounded by jagged shards of the door’s thick yellow glass. One near his bare left foot was as long as his arm. Feet frozen he reached behind him to touch the place he’d been hit. Tender but dry. His shirt was unripped. Must have been struck by a flat edge.

Lena screamed and he turned as fast as he could without lifting his feet off the ground. Swivel, swivel, swivel. She stood with her hands clamped together over her chest. He couldn’t see why she was screaming, told her to calm down, but then the blood started running through the cracks in her fingers and he saw the dark patch spreading fast over the centre of her pale pink t-shirt.

It was her left arm, cut deep and ugly when it went right through the slamming door she was trying to stop. It was her arm and it was bad, but just her arm. Still, when he remembers that afternoon he feels the panic, the certainty that she was clutching her heart, that the blood in her hands, on her shirt, was heart blood. It was only her arm, he told himself, told others—the letdown at the end of the dramatic story—just her arm. Only that. Only that.

For over a decade he’d hoped that one day he’d be able to see the scar and not re-experience the five seconds in which he was sure he’d killed her. Hoped and wished and tried and ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Good joke, universe! Now when he saw her arm he would think instead of her grinding on top of a waxed and spray-tanned college fuckboy. And so would everyone else she knew and lots of people she didn’t.

What the actual living fuck was he supposed to do?

The blister pack in his hand offered a suggestion. Yes. Good. That’d be a start. He swallowed two of Aunty Nic’s Endones with a handful of water straight from the tap. Crawled under the blankets on the lounge. Scrolled through Facebook, clicked on a link about a species of antelope nearly wiped out in a month. Bacteria living in their guts ever since the species existed, got too warm and killed the lot of them. Almost the lot of them. It could happen to us. Who knew what lurked inside us waiting for activation. He texted Lena, fast, without thinking, before he faded out to blissful nothing.

NIC

NIC

‘It’s really not as bad as you think,’ Will had said when he brought her home the second time. ‘All the important things are still here. We just cleared out the older, junkier stuff.’