COVER PAGE

Ewa Ramsey is an emerging writer and arts administrator based in Newcastle, New South Wales. She has presented short fiction at the National Young Writers’ Festival, won a commendation in the Newcastle Short Story Award and been a finalist in the Newcastle Herald Short Story Competition. Ewa has also written for PC&Tech Authority and worked as an editorial assistant and pop-culture writer and reviewer for Atomic magazine. She is currently Operations Manager for the Newcastle Writers Festival and on the board of the National Young Writers’ Festival.

DEDICATION

For all the real-life Morbids, everywhere

AUGUST, ONCE

AUGUST, ONCE

There was glitter in my hair. When I moved it sparkled, fell, onto my hands, my lap. Stung.

There was glitter and silence—so loud it hurt my ears. And a smell I knew but couldn’t place. Hot. Rusty. Sour.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Are you okay?’

Nobody answered.

I looked down. My neck hurt and at the corner of my eye, I saw my hair. Pink, like fairy floss, full of glitter.

‘Hey,’ I said again, louder. Still, nobody answered.

There was just silence. And glitter.

So much glitter.

So bloody quiet.

1 TUESDAY, APRIL

1

TUESDAY, APRIL

‘It’s been three years,’ Donna finished in a shaky voice. ‘And I still wake up every morning wondering if today’s the day.’

Donna was new. Under the fluorescent lights of a nondescript community room in Surry Hills, above a health food co-op and across the corridor from a tax accountant, she looked beige. Her beige-blonde hair hung over her chest, ends crunchy with frizz and bleach, and she wore a beige-blue cardigan, skinny beige hands poking out the ends, fingers curled around each other in her lap, fading into her beige-brown pants.

Like all of us, Donna thought she was going to die. She had woken up one day, three years ago, convinced that the train she caught to work every day was going to derail and she’d be decapitated by a dislodged green leather seat. She was so convinced, she stayed home from work. The next day her fear of trains had passed, somewhat, but there was a strange pain in her calf that Google told her might be deep vein thrombosis. It wasn’t, of course, but it could have been. The day after that, she had a headache that could have been a brain tumour, and that fear of train derailment was back, even stronger.

And so here she was.