Closing Both Eyes

Chapter 1

Blood thirsty sirens called like wild animals, squealing and roaring as if my hometown was their little play jungle.  Play jungles are dangerous, people die; a shawl thrown over my shoulders, knitted lazily by my mother kept me sheltered by the eleven o’clock nightly breeze, drugged by the after dark, fresh chill.

I stood shoulder to shoulder with my bigger sister, Larissa, pressing her weight against mine to assure I was present and out of harms reach, though the night screamed danger, I wasn’t sure how we could distant ourselves from it if it ever chose us as the next victims.

I look out, too many people were crowding and lurching about to be able to know what was going on clearly.  People in uniform, people crying, people in their pyjamas and people running and walking, hurrying off in different directions, talking, screaming over the noise, turning heads away, turning heads to see.  I was just at the back looking in, protected by Larissa, even though a solid twenty year old would seem old enough to protect herself, there was no age limit to the way Larissa loved me.

A stretcher pulled out of the driveway, male voices ordering people to back away as the body was wielded into the ambulance.

The van doors of the ambulance are shut and sirens went off once again, accelerating through what should have been the silence of the night.

“What do you think happened?” I whispered loudly to Larissa, as we watched the vehicles drive off into the night.  Thought I don’t know why I was whispering, just about all the other noises bellowing down our street were people asking the same thing.

“Dunno” she tightened her thick poncho around her tall, broad shoulders.  “Things happen” I saw her face was adrift, boring out into the distant road, the sombre tar, damp and glossy with old and dying raindrops.

“People don’t just die” I add, as she tugs motherly at my skinny arm and turns to leave.

“I didn’t mean that” she said as she walked her high class walk, picking a pace I couldn’t match.  “I don’t mean people just die, I mean, things just happen that can make people die.”  She didn’t look at me when she spoke, only ahead, I was glad our house was only a few down, and at the same time praying we didn’t live so close to a bloodshed house.

“Do you think he was murdered?” I ask; she smiles broadly, white teeth baring as she bent her head down and sniggered.

“Those things don’t happen in our neighbourhood…”

“Anything could happen anywhere, especially murder” I anxiously push on, deadly curious about the mystery death.

“We might see it on the news” she says softly as we turn into our driveway, her keys jiggling about in her hand as she fiddles with them.  I pick my feet up and stand close to her, enough to smell the rich perfumes and products lingering off her, as I looked at out front yard, bushes and fences, a playground for any sort of psycho.

“I think you should just curl up and go to sleep” she suggests, locking the door behind us as I quickly reach for the light switch that lit up out house with an orangey glow.

Clear of danger.

I unwarp myself from the shawl and wished my sister a good night.  As I climbed the stairs with steady steps, I turn to see my sister.  She was tainted with some form of pain I couldn’t recognise. 

“You going to bed Rissa?” I ask, stopping on my way up.

“In a second” she replies, and I give up and walk away.  Strange nights like these can have strange effects on people.  I, for example have checked every room in the house and dived every corner, Larissa handles herself in a more sensible way, like she’s always has.  Instead of talking about what could have happened in the house three down from ours she bottles up her worries and sends the rest of world to bed, so she can worry all by herself in the corner, with the front door locked behind her.

I curl into the thick blankets, folding them back over me.  My head slammed into the pillow, I uneasily felt cold mist through the sheets and shear through my flesh and blood. 

Something didn’t feel right.

It wasn’t the fact that Larissa was close to moving out of this house we’ve shared for years, leaving me with a big, empty house and a mysterious death issue only a few doors down my cold, little street.  It was that these things didn’t add right, the taking place of a riddled death so close to Larissa’s departure sent me chills.

Suppose I’ll just have to keep the door locked and the blinds drawn, not to see the police and the yellow tape, and pretend like nothing happened at all.  Like my father used to say, things looked better when you couldn’t see them anyway.