- 28 Stewart Road -

My name was Myra. I held onto it for as long as I could but I never believed in it. Now it belongs to other girls and I hope they wear it like gangsters wear theirs, on a chain around the neck ' diamond letters glinting in the light of their ego.

Nice, normal, average, pretty, you could use any word like that to describe me. I wanted to become edgy or compelling, but mainly I just remained on edge.
I tried. I tried so hard, but trying is trying and leaves little room to enjoy being.

I lived next to Sam. I only know his name because some mail for 26 Stewart Road (I lived at 28), was put into my letterbox for Sam Prichard. The surname seemed wrong though, too upright and sharp, like the white wooden stake of a picket fence and he was anything but white picket.

The letter was from Work and Income. I didn't see him leave the house much so I just assumed that he didn't work. One of the few times I saw him outside on the street, it was early morning 2 or 3am, and I was totally pissed and ugly, with my smeary make-up face, and bloodshot eyes from having just puked in a flowerbed. I wanted him so badly but he didn't look at me as he flew past on his bike, his whole being streaming like a silent scream.

My friends thought he was a loser, but they didn't have time for piercings, tattoos and saw no beauty in the youthful belligerent glare that drove me crazy.

I guess he helped to take my mind off reality in a way. And in my reality I had a big fucking problem, and on this day I had decided it was time to take care of it.


- 26 Stewart Road -

Sam is having a bad day. He is oblivious to the girl from next door, knocking, and squashing her face against the stained glass of the door.

He is busy.

The blade tears apart the membranes of his skin, corpuscles of blood are slit open, that which was trapped escapes to form a broken red line of wetness across his pasty arm.
The pain and the blood and the aching dampen the feverish heat of frustration and loathing which people, himself included, inspire within him.

His old flatmate walked in on him once, and moved out soon after. Sam was glad he was gone. He was always getting wasted and he'd had to listen to that guy getting off with dumb-ass girls or watching porn, through the thin walls. It wasn't the sex itself but the pathetic pride he possessed in aggressively parading his lifestyle to the world, seeking retaliation so that he could say that he hated people, when really he was nothing without their attention. He clung to an arrogance that this lifestyle was somehow less messed up than Sam's.

Every person has their darkness.

Later, around 3am, Sam heads out on his bike. No one is about, and the air rustles with the energy of the wind as it messes with the dry leaves and beats coldly against him.

On the way home he notices the car that he seen around a lot recently, parked across on the road adjacent. He thinks the girl is being stalked, but that's her business. He has his own shit to deal with.


- 28 Stewart Road -

Writhing and screaming under the heavy bulk of the man straddling me, I had fought with everything to defend myself. When I jerked too hard, he mocked me by spraying flecks of spittle across my swollen face.
His body moved savagely, one hand tugging at my hair and head to force my body taut and inert, while his knees pinned my hands to the mattress. My body jolted repulsively as he repeatedly stabbed me with the knife in his other hand. Every flash of the blood smeared blade struck me like lightening.

I said my farewells in the primal language of the dying, as my body exploded, a supernova, a last heightened sense of life before my being fell into itself, into darkness.


- 26 Stewart Road -

Light streams through a gap in the ripped, fly-specked netting. Sam watches from the couch, glad to see the last cop car pulling out of the drive and heading away.

The girl next door seemed ok, he didn't really know her. People made their choices in life, she'd obviously made some fuck ups along the way. It sounds cold, but why bother to act out false emotions or pity, he couldn't. Tragedies were like mirrors that strangers looked into and grieved in advance for their own deaths.

But he had to admit that he was affected. He was alive, and she was dead. It was that simple, and it was time to sort his shit out.

As Sam rode his bike down the front doorstep, he had an absurd image of himself riding across the face of the moon, like ET and felt the lead weight of gravity fall away from his life.

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