Lightning-struck, Sarah lay awake in bed. Harry’s podgy feet were nestled in her armpit, his head tucked perfectly into Amelia’s neck. Amelia’s own feet were resting on David’s cheek. Real lightning had been raging for hours, prompting the children’s sojourn into the parental bed, though it was not unusual for them to end up there unprompted. The curtain of the bay window was drawn back slightly and outside, an otherworldly darkness beset the summer dawn. Sarah didn’t know how long she had been awake. Amelia had been the first to come in, sometime around 4am, Harry shortly thereafter, and it was during the alert wakefulness that followed that her plotting had begun. A storm brewing. Atoms crashing. Friction exploding and finding its target on Earth. Sarah appreciated the emblematic appropriateness of the weather, the supernatural might it enabled her to imagine, as though she, a god-like judge, was the source of the obliteration in the air.

Sarah craned her neck, trying not to disturb Harry’s feet as she searched for the time. The clock on her bedside table showed 5:55am. She often seemed to see a run of repeating numbers like that. When she looked at the time, it would always read 11:11, or 12:12, or some other strangely conspicuous combination, and after a while she had googled it. One explanation was simply that the repetition made the number visually pleasing, so that it was more consciously noted than other permutations, and not really more frequent at all. But there was another account that described spirit guides and guardian angels, using these numbers as a way to grab human attention and impart something important to the viewer. And when Sarah read that, she had immediately thought of Eliza.

When they were children, her sister had often talked of souls and spirits. The two of them were soulmates, they had decided, connected, and throughout their younger years, caught up by the stories of their mother’s ‘interesting’ friends, they were forever dissecting coincidences and strange happenings. Once, Eliza had even wanted to make a Ouija board, but Sarah had vetoed that. Instead, they had decided that when one of them died (imagining this to be far further into the future than in fact was the case), if it was possible to come back, if it was possible to haunt the other, if ghosts were real, then the dead one should knock over a specific blue vase in their mother’s study, and then the surviving one would know. A few months after Eliza’s accident, Sarah had remembered this, and rushed home to her parents’ house, heading straight for the study, but when asked, her mother said that that vase had been broken years ago.

Most likely, the numbers were just the visually pleasing thing. Still, Sarah reasoned, if Eliza was trying to find a way to connect, 5:55 was a good way to do it. Especially in the middle of a storm sent from the beyond. Especially at the moment that Sarah had decided to take action, take revenge, not only for herself and Amelia, but for Eliza too. What was Eliza’s message though, blinking through the clock? A blessing, or a warning shot?