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House of Sighs Forty-Eight
FORTY-EIGHTLiz stood. When did I take my shoes off? I don’t remember doing that.She didn’t remember a lot of things anymore. It was good to be numb—it was like “getting wet”.Her mother rifled through bags in the study.Where am I? Liz glanced around. If that’s the study, then I must be in the living room. I know I’ve seen that sofa before. It’s comfy. I’ve wrapped my legs over the arm of that chair before.Reggie doubled over in the small room, surrounded by torn-open garbage bags bleeding Christmas tinsel. In her hands were two handmade tree ornaments. Little, worn Santas, their faces bent inwards.A memory of the family at Christmastime. It was one of the years that her father hadn’t been there. He came and went. Sometimes he said he needed a holiday from them. In this memory, Liz and Jed put those ornaments on the plastic tree. Everything smelled of mothballs. They weren’t happy, but at least they weren’t crying or bleeding. This was the children’s barometer: the yardstick
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Forty-Seven:
FORTY-SEVEN:Bled WhiteSantorini was white, as though an artist scraped away Fira’s colors to rediscover the canvas underneath. Empty streets and not even the sea made a sound.Diana fell in love with the city on her travels before landing in Australia. It soothed her, made her whole again after her mother’s death. Now, she felt like Dorothy coming back to the Emerald City only to find it home to vandals and all her friends turned to stone. There was no queen with a hundred heads here though. Only silence.She wove through the narrow streets. At the bottom of an incline, she turned and looked up a thin, cobblestone street. Diana saw him then.Him.The brother.The one with the eagle tattoo on his back.He walked towards her, his pace steady. Face contorted. She couldn’t tell if he smiled or screamed. Terror gripped her.The ground underneath their feet shook and the brother stopped.Behind him, there came a gigantic tide of blood, meat, and paint. It rushed towards her. He b
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Forty-Six
FORTY-SIXDiana opened her eyes. The smell awoke her. Next to her Michael pressed his face towards the sliding window, sucking air into his lungs.“Ooof. He’s getting bad,” Julia said.Michael closed the window again.“Why don’t you leave it open?” Diana asked, sitting upright. Her body ached, bones cracked. Her bladder felt at bursting point.Sarah held a handkerchief to her nose and inhaled the eucalyptus oil in its fibers. The scent reminded her of home. “There’s about a billion fucking flies wanting to get in here, best to keep them shut, methinks.”“You know, for an old woman you swear like a sailor,” Julia said. They smiled at each other.“Oh, my God!” Michael said.Everyone whipped their heads to the house.The father stood in the side yard, having come out the back door without them noticing. His stillness sent a universal chill through their bodies. They waited for him to move, or to maybe draw an axe from the shadows and run at them. But there was none of that, just
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Forty-Five
FORTY-FIVEAs Michael neared the deformed bus door, he thanked a God he wasn’t sure he believed in for air that didn’t reek of septic tanks and abattoirs. He sucked in a hot breath and thought, Man, that feels better.He had an issue, and it was a big one considering their circumstances. Michael needed to pee. He’d contemplated using the corner next to the driver’s upturned chair. Only no, that wasn’t an option. The bus was on a slant and the stream would run across the floor and down the steps. It seemed undignified, like a dog. He almost laughed. This isn’t the time to be coy, he said to himself. You’re not a prisoner by choice, you know? A shake of the head, decided. The corner just wasn’t going to cut it; he would piss out the door instead.Before going to the front of the bus, he told the others what he was going to do. They tried to talk him out of it, explaining the risks of being seen. He convinced them that he could manage to do it without drawing any attention.“Can’t you
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Forty-Four
FORTY-FOURJulia’s heartbeat quickened. “The things we’ve seen today,” she whispered. “The things we’ve seen.” Flicked hair behind an ear.Diana didn’t reply, deciding instead to let the observation fester in the air.They held each other for a long time. Their humming soothed those about them like icy water on a burn. It eased into melody.Sarah lifted her haggard face.The sound of the ocean withdrew from Michael’s ears, replaced now by that soft, sweet singing. A sigh fled his mouth with mocking ease. He listened to the women and rocked along in his seat. It wasn’t a song, rather undulations of pitch similar to trees blowing in the wind, sometimes in sync, sometimes creaking together, but beautiful all the while. Oh, to be outside, Michael couldn’t help thinking. To be free from this fucking place. Running happily through the bush he loved yet which refused to love him back. The Australian scrub was like that, he knew—as they all did. You could chart it, photograph it, romantic
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Forty-Three
FORTY-THREEJed jumped up and down in his bedroom. Shook his head from side to side. He turned to the wall and drove his fists through the plasterboard. Over and over and over, not feeling a thing. Plaster fell onto his mattress in clumps.His bloodied hands.“Murderer.”
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Forty-Two
FORTY-TWOHeavy silence followed the song’s slow death.Michael said the one thing they all were thinking but nobody wanted to give in to. “I wish we weren’t here.”Jack glanced up from the corpse for the first time in ten minutes. For a moment when he saw the limp-wristed kid, he saw nothing but meat and gristle superimposed over a scrawny body. A moving wet mouth spilling wishes Jack refused to acknowledge.“Oh, would you shut up, mate?”Michael tensed. Threat emanated from the man. “I’ll say what I want.” He knew he was being challenged, and knew that it was imperative he not back down.“Yeah, that’s right. You’re all talk, aren’t you?” Jack smiled. Putting someone in their place always felt good.“Stop it,” Sarah said.Jack turned to Michael, pointing. “You and me. Let’s move the body to the front of the bus. Get it as far away from us as we can.”“I don’t want to touch him.”“Come on, kid. I’m sure it’s not the first time you’ve grabbed a dude.”“Jack, please,” Sarah sa
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Forty-One:
FORTY-ONE:The CryingJack was ten years old again, there in his backyard.He dropped the bloodied scissors and the blades pierced the lawn in a V. Glanced away from his father. Saw the white slash left behind in the sky by the airplane.Jack’s dad had him by the collar of his shirt. A cooking apron covered the old man’s chest; it was smeared with fingerprints of grease and barbecue sauce.“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” his father said. “You look at me when I’m talking to you. Don’t you blubber on me, boy. March yourself in that house now!”Jack propelled through the air as a thick finger jabbed into the back of his neck. “Did you do it? DID YOU?”In the memory, Jack couldn’t recall if he answered yes or no.Kimba the cat ran underneath his feet and Jack almost fell again, caught by his father, who proceeded to slap him around the ears. “Did you do it? Did you do it? Jesus, boy.”They stepped inside the house and the stench of cooked onions wrapped around them. It m
Last Updated : 2021-09-09
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House of Sighs Two & One
TWOEat the part that hurts, said the voice of the flies.Eat the part that hurts.ONEOutside, fog yielded to the winter wind and moonlight beamed through. That same rush of air swept over the James Bridge Motor Motel to rattle its eaves, blowing dirt against its windows. The night’s breath, so very much like a sigh, eased the door on the second floor shut. Ungreased hinges creaked, creaked, and trapped the new fathers within.Somewhere out there, time moved on. But not here. Not inside room eleven.
House of Sighs Three
THREEAiden came around to face his partner head on, Danny’s silhouette outlined in blue and pink. He could see every hair on his head, the fine peach fuzz along his arms, all of it highlighted in vibrant detail. Seeing him, Aiden thought, was to observe a painting, an oil on canvas titled ‘Man on Bed Holding Baby’.The itsy-bitsy-spider within Aiden’s throat bit down. Muscles tensed. Terror filled him and froze, painful cracks appearing in the ice as he brought his hands to his face. Things like this didn’t happen to people like him. This was something from a horror movie, or maybe, tomorrow’s headlines.I’m a good person, Aiden wanted to scream. I—we—don’t deserve this. It’s gone too far. Take it back.Take it back!Too late for that now. Aiden Bonner was in room eleven of the James Bridge Motor Motel, with the carpet beneath his feet and the stink of copper tainting the air. He was in room eleven with Danny as he brought the child to his face to plant a kiss on its cheek. Reali
House of Sighs Four
FOURThe woman who’d made the emergency call had collapsed at the entrance to another room on Kaaron Brennan’s right. Long, red hand streaks also palmed the door there. Blood lathered the handle, grew fat at the bottom of the knob, dropped to the puddle by the woman’s severed ear.Ploink.Ploink.Ploink.Brennan wanted to cry. She didn’t, and kept her pain inside.Stenciled across the ajar door were two words. It must have taken a caring, steady hand to inscribe that lavender printing so well, even going to the effort to put a little heart above the ‘I’. A mother’s touch, if there ever was one.“Timmy’s room,” Kaaron, who had two kids of her own, read aloud.Later, there would be time for weeping. That time was not now.
House of Sighs Five
FIVESneakers wisped over carpet. Aiden was tempted to reach into the dark, but he held off for the time being, letting his eyes adjust instead. The room sketched into form one shade of blue and pink at a time.Aiden found his partner sitting on the bed with his back to him, lit in neon glow.The quiet hotel room. Quiet, except for a curious suckling sound.“Danny?” Aiden said and took another step. His chest seized when he saw a shape on the far wall near the kitchenette, where the drawers had been opened.Just his shadow.You bloody fool, he could almost hear his mother say, leaning over to scold him as she did when he was a kid, bringing with her a wave of scented lady sweat and bush smoke. Pull your shit together.Aiden longed to have her here with him now, even if only to condemn him. That, at least, would be something. He felt so disconnected from his people, from his land. He couldn’t wait, one way or another, for this Hell to be over. Besides, he did need to pull his shi
House of Sighs Six
SIXNull relented and nodded, stepping up to his partner’s side as they inched to that doorway. Brennan smelled blood in there, in the pit of nothingness.They forced themselves through the arch, the quaking beam of Null’s flashlight revealing an upended phone on the floor, and farther ahead, the soles of two pale bare feet.Brennan didn’t want to see. Yet it was her job to see.It wasn’t that the woman’s clothes had been torn away. The comfy looking Sunday garments had bloomed off the slippery corpse, shed like the scrim of a cocoon. There was no beautiful butterfly here, not here in this dark house on Queen Street. Only cuts on top of cuts.For all Brennan knew, she stared at eighty stab wounds. Or more.“Good God in Heaven,” whispered Null. These were the quivering tones of that boy in the third grade, the one who feared his teacher’s yells because he hadn’t done his homework again.If only there was a way to wind back the clock and erase this sight from her mind, to go back
House of Sighs Seven
SEVENBlue and pink neon light illuminated Aiden’s way.He listened to the buzz of electricity from the MOTEL sign at the carpark’s entrance; it sounded like a hive, bee stingers rasping together. Another gust of wind blew through town to rustle his fringe, to stir the foggy cauldron obscuring the sky, stretching it thin in places to reveal the quarter moon beneath. He sweated. And he was scared.Aiden stopped.He thought of his flight from Brisbane to Bangkok and the black-and-white movie he’d watched on the way. It’s A Wonderful Life, it had been called, and while it featured numerous set-pieces, one particular scene returned to him now. In it, Jimmy Stewart’s character said he would lasso the moon and gift it to his gal to win her affection.And earn her love.The fog rolled in. Everything turned blue and pink once more.To think that he—or any man—had ever set their sights on the moon and thought it a three-dimensional thing worth dragging to Earth for the sake of someone sp
House of Sighs Eight
EIGHTAn ambulance pulled up as Kaaron Brennan entered the house. Never once in her six years on the force had she ever drawn her gun with the intent to shoot; she was more terrified now than she’d ever been. Null was by her side, covering blind corners. Every door she kicked open revealed empty rooms, rooms of unfinished business. The paperback on the bedside table with the bookmark tucked within, the mobile phone blinking messages received, a scented candle that had never been lit.Death in the details.Blood caked thick where the hallway branched into a T intersection, kitchen on her left and living room on her right. There was no mistaking which way the action had progressed; gore led to weeping MasterChef contestants.The door hung off its hinges on the other side of the room. Darkness beyond. Null shone his flashlight to reveal handprints on the architraves, swipes of blood resembling red, drooling smiles.Footsteps and flashing beams outside the window, past the television.
House of Sighs Nine
NINEAiden thought he’d dreamed the coming and going of sirens. He lifted his head from the pillow, muscles giving a kick. The musty motel air made his eyes itch.The television was on, evening soap operas playing out their inevitable dramas.Those sirens sounded so real.He fumbled for the remote and switched the old unit off. Beautiful faces shrunk down to a dot, bleeping into oblivion.Aiden propped himself up with one arm and looked to the window across from him, brow furrowed with concerned tension lines. He strained his ears, blinked his quiet shock away, and registered the fading screech of police cars. Or maybe an ambulance.Legs swung around to touch the carpet.He licked his lips. Dry.Aiden was at the point of crawling off the mattress and taking himself over to the kitchenette to drink water straight from the tap like he used to when he was a kid, but he stopped in his tracks. And he stopped because of a fresh sound, one that couldn’t be confused with another.The
House of Sighs Ten
TENIt took sixteen minutes for the police to arrive, and considering how long it took for the authorities to respond the day of the James Bridge massacre, this wasn’t too bad a turnaround. Some things had improved in this part of the world after all.Units dispatched from Maitland, further up the valley, their journey quickened by the expressway killing the town, skidding off the exit, kicking dust, their red and blue blinders like fireworks in the fog. They sped down the main drag and took a sharp turn, not bothering to stop at the traffic lights. Cockatoos feasting in the tree above the bus bench were startled into flight, feathers twirling and the branches tumbling into the gutter as they took to the air, screeching as though they were the chased ones.Units mounted the curb out the front of 15 Queen Street. One by one, lights bloomed within the surrounding houses. Rubberneckers took to their windows, clutching nightgowns, cupping faces to the glass.Officer Kaaron Brennan hit
