Some memories don’t stay where you put them. Some slip through the cracks between breakfast and the next breath of fresh air. Some are between familiar faces and a name you used to say every day but can no longer remember. Some go quietly into the corners of your mind where no-one visits anymore. Others resurface with no warning; they appear as clear as if they never left in the first place.

Salt stings your eyes. You wipe your grubby hand across your forehead. Dirt smears your thigh as you dry your hand on your trousers. You grasp the pick with both hands. Your arms strain on the backswing. Thwack. Fast. Powerful. The crunch of metal on gravel lingers in the fetid air. Again, you lift. Thwack. Dirt crumbles. Forward, you move. Progress. 

God died. 

He had needed a miracle. He demanded medicine, so we prayed and chanted and placed leeches on his stomach. He screamed for a hospital, but none of us understood the word. He groaned, his last breath rumbling against his rib cage. Outside, past the trees, I glimpsed an echo that had been left behind by twin lights. In the morning, we buried God next to Lucy.  

The stillness of the bedroom unsettled me when we first moved in. The window has been locked and painted shut, and there is a long, thin crack in the door that looks like a painful wound. At the end of the bed is a hole in the floorboards about the size of my open hand, which the tenant before us had tried to patch over with layers of clear sticky tape.