Member-only story
FICTION
The Ninth Night [Excerpt]
If you had the chance, what would you say to your loved one before they departed the earthly realm forever?
For the fifth morning in a row, when she walked into the kitchen to brew her first pot of coffee, the fluorescent light was on.
The first time it happened was the day of the accident. When she returned from the hospital at 11am, and walked zombie-like back into the house, the kitchen light was blazing. It didn’t strike her as unusual, though. After all, when she’d received the phone call it was nearly four in the morning; she must have switched the light on when she’d been frantically searching for her car keys, and forgotten to switch it off before she ran out the door.
The second morning she was hungover. Having spent the previous evening watching home movies and polishing off two and a half bottles of cheap Malbec, she’d stumbled drunkenly into the kitchen in the early hours to throw the empties into the recycling and run the wine glass under the tap. Clearly she’d been too inebriated to care about switching the light off. Understandable, all things considered. By the third day, though, she had started to wonder if there was something else going on.
