She turns in the air and catches a glimpse of them, the children, watching her fall. Then she lands in the bushes, branches clawing at her, then rolling away into a drift of leaves and twigs, her shoulder hitting the ground, and the pain is immense, exploding from her arm. Things go black for a moment, and when she opens her eyes again, the children are all around, and she sees the worry on their faces. She goes to speak to them, though she knows not what, and instead screams.

The little boy she knows is Matthew, the boy she has known for so many years, kneels down beside her and takes her hand.

Help me, she says.

The bigger children gather around, watching. The pain comes in waves, in torrents, screaming from the bones of her. She screams too.

From inside the house, she hears walls and ceilings collapse. The children wander away from her vision, towards the flames and smoke. She turns her head to see them return to the house, through the collapsed front door, to where they belong, where they have always been, where they will always be.

There, in the doorway, the girl she knows best of all, looking back at her. The girl in the plain white dress, dark hair falling around her shoulders, clutching a tangled bundle of scarlet ribbons to her belly. She does not burn. The flames do not touch her.

Nothing can touch her.

1: Sara

1: Sara

Sara Keane was kneeling on the kitchen floor not long after six thirty in the morning, scrubbing the flagstones, when the old woman hammered on the front door.

The stains. The brownish-red stains that were so faint she couldn’t be sure they were there at all. Was this the third or fourth morning she had woken in the house? Time had become diaphanous, slipping by without her noticing. Days became weeks as she looked the other way, weeks turning to months before she knew they’d been lost to her.

She had not slept since they moved in. Not real sleep, not the warm dark that brings light, but the dim hinterland where bitter memories surfaced to torment her. Each morning, the chattering of birds outside the window banished the last hope of sleep before dawn. Each morning, she came downstairs in the milky-blue early light, passing the stacks of unpacked boxes.