Her name, loud. Knocking! Obviously, it’s knocking. Again and again, knocking on the door. Again and again and again, her name. Nic tries to call in response but this isn’t real; only another nightmare in which you scream and scream but nothing comes out.

Light and noise and bright, sharp pain. Her voice has returned but different from how she remembered it. Croaky and old. Has time sped up after all? She might be a hundred with a croak like that, with bones shattering into stabbing shards just from the careful prodding of gentle gloved hands.

Lena does not seem to have aged, though it is difficult to tell while her face is all scrunched up. Nic hasn’t seen her like this since her father’s funeral. Twenty-year-old Lena cries just like thirteen-year-old Lena, with total abandon. It broke her heart. Had done, is doing. Time is a flat circle. Flat. That was it. Of course. Closed! Honestly.

‘Time is a flat circle,’ she says and Lena stops sobbing, bursts out laughing, but then the laughing becomes sobbing so quickly that Nic isn’t sure it has ever not been.

‘Try not to speak, Nicole.’ A voice she doesn’t know, coming from somewhere above the blue gloves. Gentle, calm. ‘Concentrate on taking nice, even breaths, okay? Not too deep. I know that hurts. Shallow is okay, but slow it down. In … and out … In … and out … That’s much better. I need you to keep that going, okay? You can forget about everything else. Leave it all to us. But keep the breathing nice and even, nice and slow. In … and out … In … and out … No, we’re not sleeping now, Nicole. I really need you to work hard on those breaths for me. It’s so important that you …’

LENA

LENA

Lena spent Sunday night on a camp bed in the hospital’s family rest area. Even had the rubber mattress not farted every time she moved, even had the hospital blanket not scratched her neck and chest, she still wouldn’t have slept. Her mind was too busy repeatedly forcing her through the nightmare-scape behind Nic’s front door. Again and again she relived those first disorientating seconds entering the house behind the officers, wondering why the hallway was half the size it should be; wondering if, like Alice, she had grown gigantic. And why was Donald Duck grinning at her from the living room, his terrible white head seeming to float in mid-air? Something snagged her sleeve and that something appeared to be a mannequin arm but that didn’t make sense. None of it did. She stumbled through this space that she used to skip through, elbows colliding with unidentifiable shapes, hips scraping walls that shouldn’t have been so close or soft.