Lyrebird

It was getting late. The sun had gone down, the birds had all gone away and my motorcycle was still sitting out at the front of the house, where I had extrapolated that every night was born with fear. I felt light headed, and I had been through the whole day with nothing to eat. Some time after I went to sleep, I woke up, dreary and not knowing the time. Sarah was in her bedroom.

I went up to the windowsill, where we had stood just a week beforehand, humming over aristocracy and butting heads with each other. It seemed like a lifetime ago, by now, but together with every thought that we had we spared enough time to plan for something. It was just as Sarah had meant to say, that freaking out wasn’t going to help us, but remorse was a worse thing to feel.

The year faded on. It wasn’t until drastically longer after that when I unconsciously turned on my notepad, that I encountered the thought of a vampiric, super egoic killer ever again, let alone Andrew and what had happened to him. I found my article which had submerged from the internet and it popped up in The Times errant newsletters, in my junk email.

“It was in the moments that I cried that weren’t hard enough,” it said. “Those foreign, open opportunities…” I was reading this when the door opened, and Sarah came walking through into the loungeroom at my house, where we had settled down some months after her disclosure to the event had worn through her.

I wasn’t making things worse by reading it to her, so I closed the notepad. “I thought you were still in here,” she said. “What was that? You shouldn’t hide things from me, you know that.” I shouldn’t have opened it, in hindsight, but I never do. I usually just let the emails flutter away like paper.

“It was nothing,” I said. “I’m just thinking about things, like where Andrew went and after all that time it wasn’t that long ago.” Pale, I hid my eyes from her and tucked my face away behind my coffee, anxious about the thing again. I usually took a prescription for my episodes, which lasted around five minutes.

“Let’s just go,” she said. I developed a sense of worry about her, too, in the abnormality that I was going to head straight in there and find out what happened to him in the face of it, where I didn’t identify anything from the beginning. It was just rough, but the police had not found any trace of the people who had torn through our lives at all and seeming endless, the pain had not stopped.

I was errant in the middle of my thoughts, cuing on to a belief that something was going to go wrong again and in the five minutes that passed, I argued with myself about how to tackle the man whose voice had been crackling through my ears over the phone. This in the end was my life, ruined, all but for Sarah who had chosen to stay with me through all but a little faith, and who had decided to come and stay at my house where we had lived all year.

It was in the end sad that a reaper had somewhat taken over my family, but Andrew was never coming back. It wasn’t until after four weeks had passed that we found the police had phoned us back. “Hello?” I asked. “It’s Kiara,” said the lady on the phone, who had briefly reminded me of the night he was taken. “I think it’s over now, Bailee. There’s no sign of him anywhere.” The pain eased, but then it shot back up my back.

So, we had moved in here, I thought. A little hiding place near the altar where we didn’t find anybody overhearing anything. I accused The Times of having something to do with it, and so far as yet their response was inadequate. “We hired you for your own reasons Bailee,” they said. “There’s nothing inappropriate about sitting down and interviewing somebody. Get a real idea.”