Eaves of gum trees shielded me from red sun. Blue gum chopped down into piles to burn. Empty space from which we could never return. Wait in the house as the fire surrounds. Take the children’s bread and toss it to the hounds.

     In my dreams, I’m plucked from my bed and made to stand inside a clock. With every tick, my chest tightens, and with every second passing, the weight of the extended hand makes me shorter. I am the cause of the clock – of its loud ticking. I’ve done something wrong, and with every wrong thing I’ve done, she hurts more and more.

     I’m awake now, standing before a coffin; light pine, millennial wash. It’s raining, and my mother is dead. I once ran away barefoot down a rural highway, numb as I am now, desperate to be away from my mother as I am now. I wonder, if I undid my black canvas shoes, if there’d be ugly red blisters and the heat left from skin hitting bitumen. I look down at my hands, counting ten fingers. I can feel them all behind me, sitting in their fold-out chairs and feeling their hearts beating as if we are all part of the same organism. We were dogs in a cage set against each other, and now the master is dead. It’s like an old wooden wardrobe. You overlook the mould until it covers your things, and you’re forced to throw it all away. My mourning dress is moth-eaten, and my socks are still damp.

     He’s stepping on floorboards, and I can hear them like they’re piano keys, playing a foreboding song. We all wait in our beds, puppy-eyed, eating every sound. The house’s walls are sepulchral, and it wants you to know. Mother would confide in me, a sad smile flattening her cheeks. She would tell me all the horrible things her parents did, how we kids have it so much better, how her mum let a man keep accidentally walking in on her in the shower. I wanted to laugh, to giggle, guffaw. Wanted to shake and slap her, rip her limbs from her body, and point out the holes in the walls. Its intrusive reruns of scenes from in that house cast in a new macabre light, revelations that I wouldn’t realise until now, my brain playing these sick games with me as I attempt to fall asleep. I can never scrape off his phantom hands on my body, no matter how much I scratch at the skin. My body was never given back once it was taken — how they talk and watch and never listen.

     My mother murdered me every night, would sneak into my room and smother me. She’d mark you with her teeth, rip holes in you and act like she hadn’t. She’d snarl horrible things at you, pinch you so hard, black-dotted your vision, and then ask with that sad smile why you never hugged her. Every child she had, I’d have to watch them slowly know and then create their saviour. And sometimes, sadly, it would be her. She’d hit them, and they’d crawl back to lick her hand, and she’d hit them again.

     She was right, I do have a sickness; my nightmares have climbed from my ears and call to me, standing at the foot of my bed. They make careful footsteps and justle doorknobs. They unhinge their giant gaping mouths and perfectly mimic screams, shouting, and crying. It’s our voices carved into my eardrums, like the screams of a cage match — of an audience. My experience of that house distorts my vision and races my heart and pulls my nerves like tearing cables. I can never escape it; I know the others, in their own ways, are there too. Like the smell of smoke after a fire clinging to your skin, in your pores, under your nails, like the blood from a crime scene. That house, that farm, and her.

     “Don’t you fucking touch me!” I’m screaming at him as mum ransacks my room for the phone hidden in my waistband. Mum turns from inside my room and almost cracks a smile. She’s snide and belittling, “Oh please, he’s never touched you.” He winks at me and I feel sick. He does not care if she sees. She has chosen not to.

     I’m tangled in his body, and I’ve taken a chunk of his arm, leaving a kiss of deep purple. I’m feral. I don’t sit like a lady, and mother said to lock her in. I was so apoplectic. I could feel it crawl up my throat, and I never thought twice. I could unleash myself on someone. Mother never mentioned how she’d corner me, how she’d pick a favourite and someone to kick. How she’d set them on you and called you rabid when you fought back. She liked to feast on your skin that way. Point out your deepest insecurities, knowing where they were, for she was the one who so carefully planted them, kept them bleeding, fresh. She fed off our fear and our willingness to please. Our collars have aged us prematurely like the weight of it loosened the skin off our bones and caused our skin to sag; if I turned around to look back at us in our seats, I wouldn’t believe we are so young.

     I have always been the strongest one of us. The one who pushed back. The abused dog that finally attacks its owner. The day I was undone and raised my cut wrists at her in proof, she took me to a doctor for the first time and acted like my sickness was my own. “She’s always been sensitive.” Her sad smile creases the makeup around her mouth, opening caverns that reveal the sun-stained skin beneath.

    I remember the first time I saw a dead body. A farm mutt — dying in a cardboard box. I was crying as she shivered until finally stiff. A specimen, like she was positioned that way as if sighing. A wax figure. I began to feel pity that my mum looked so dreadful in death. The ones who dressed her up only accentuated her wrinkles and her tight lips. I could almost imagine her top lip raising, her purple gums flashing. Maybe that’s how all dead people are. Heavy set, like they were shrinking into themselves as if sat on, deflated. I could have cried, but I was more curious about what the world would look like afterwards. After we’ve said our goodbyes, and the clouds have cleared, and the dogs have been retired. As she was lowered into the ground, I did not feel bad for killing her as the heavy clouds did open to blue skies, and we all heard the thud of a dozen metal collars hit the dirt.