'I loved your house' she said to me when I first encountered her. I was filling a prescription at the pharmacy after faking a migraine to the doctor, which ironically induced the familiar clutching of the skull that preceded days of agony. There was the familiar queasiness and the sensation of the world being all a shimmer.

'Codeine, codeine, you're the nicest thing I've seen' - lyrics from a bluegrass band twanged in my skull. I was in no mood for talking. Every sound felt distant yet insistent, forcing me to respond when I had little capacity to do so, and the pharmacy itself was uniformly, unnaturally bright, with its shelves of happy cures for unhappy malaise.

The women looked familiar, but in the way of many of the middle aged women in town, wide hipped and tired, saggy chins and overly make upped. I rued making eye contact, having forgotten to shuffle into this oft visited community space with averted gaze and quick step, signifying I had no time for gossip, or had something urgent to attend to. I would rather put my head on the hot train tracks than live through the excruciating hell of small talk, let alone whilst clutching a packet of foil wrapped painkillers as a guard against the dark pain to follow. I had to give my head a rattle just to rearrange the furniture in my skull little so that a response seemed ordered.

'Oh?' I said.

'Your house. It's for sale?' She smiled helpfully, walking a step toward me as I stepped back. If she noticed my rudeness, the only tell was a quick flash of her faded blue eyes. I wanted to say something, anything, but the words felt heavy in my throat. I was in that strange space where I needed relief and a good cry as much as I needed composure as a weapon for keeping the suffering at bay. It was enough to acknowledge her without granting her intimacy, and this was something with which I was well versed. Being polite and terse was a survival mechanism.

Weeks later, I would not be polite. I would be dreaming of people entering my comfortable home and taking books from the shelves as I screamed and swore at them to make appointments and looked fruitlessly for my phone to call the police. The thundering on the roof would escalate, a possum perhaps or a late Spring rain hammering at the tim, until I would wake in abject fright, the dream running noisily like a snapped cassette tape. I had no shortage of white pills to put me back to sleep as I'd been pharmacy shopping, pretending each purchase was a one off for a singular pain. Darling codeine provided small comfort in the devil's hour, or the god's one, depending on how I experienced it.

The second week I noticed the irises on the counter, arranged in a clear glass vase. She was working there, I realised, her tight uniform embroidered with her name. I felt a disquiet as I rattled off my phone number for the pharmacy points, her quick long nailed tapping at the keyboard showing in my address on the monitor, which is how of course she connected the sale of my house to my face. A rubber necker, I thought, with no plans to purchase, only to satiate curiosity.

'The irises are lovely' I offered, feeling uncomfortable for treating her so coldly the week before. They were deep burgundy, the colour of blood left to deepen in intensity as it dried. They were the decadent colour of velvet bedrooms, of the inside of thighs, of tempranillo in the afternoon sunlight. I had never liked them, but my garden was full of them. Each time I dug them up to give away, I missed enough for the wounds to reopen mid Spring.

'They're yours' she said. I looked at her sharply, shocked. 'I didn't think you'd mind - there were so many of them.' I remembered the evidence of rabbits, perhaps, or the elderly possum that skulked under the weeping birch. Again I could not reply, vacillating between the need to deny her and to be polite to an old woman who had essentially only picked the flowers I did not care for. She had been to the last viewing, clearly, and perhaps every one of them for months. I felt a keen discomfort in my belly, took the offered change and the tablets, and left the claustrophobic, fluorescent lit cave of the little pharmacy on the main street where the tongues of stolen irises wagged blackly at me.

The following week, she pushed a photograph across the counter, a sepia toned image of a dour faced women in mourning attire. 'Turn of century, that is' she offered. 'Recognise the windows? The verandah?'. Indeed, they were the windows of the house my late husband had inherited from his grandmother, the one I had always hated. I remembered them even now rising loftily, their painted timber frames softened by the morning light, fragments of stained glass bleeding light across the timbered floor. This was charming for me the first time I had entered, yet in time I learnt the glass also held shadows, deep and waiting.

I clutched the photograph, nauseated and paralysed. In the subject's visage I saw my husband's hollow eyes, the dark rings there, the tightly coiled violence of him.

'Where did you get this?' I asked, turning the image over. 'That's my husband's grandmother. Look. Her name. How did you...?' I stared at the ring on the long dead women's hand. It was on my own finger, engraved on the inside with forget me knots and ivy. 'Forget me not, I cling to thee', my husband had said on our wedding night, tossing me brutally on the night shadowed sheets. I had tried soap and oil and ice to remove that ring from my finger but still it burrowed into the skin, making the digit thinner there, whiter.

'Oh, it's nothing' she said. 'I volunteer at the Historical Society. A little digging gets you places, my dear. I'm sorry to hear about your fella.' Her voice was warm, I suppose, although the kind of temperature of water left over night and found with a thin veneer of ice curdling the surface. 'Did he suffer long?'

I looked up, startled. The manner of my husband's passing was town gossip, but no one spoke about it at all out of respect for me. He had suffered for days, crushed by his car that had rolled down an embankment after sliding on black ice. On the freezing ground, his bones turned into knives that worried at his own skin until the circling ravens came to feast, and alerted the search team to the wreck. By then it was too late, and though he spent a week in the ICU, his body could not possibly recover. He had left home that night to see one of his many lovers, the ones I had known about and allowed because it had kept the beast from my own reluctant door. She was there, at his bedside, wailing.

'You're Angie's mother?' I said, meeting her insensitivity with my own. 'That was nothing to do with me.' I said though at at times I thought it was, her daughter's untimely death on the train tracks the manifestation of my rage. I would not, however, accept any kind of remorse for the part they believed I played in the matter. I felt a sharp pain in my jaw, breathing raggedly to dispel the tension there, and snatched the packet of codeine from the countertop.

'I didn't say it was, dear. That's all said and done, and don't you let that get in the way of us. We all have to live together in this town, despite any goings on we may have lived through'. She smiled widely, and beckoned the customer behind me forward. I felt relief, as if the broad sweep of a spotlight had missed me in the long dark grass.

That afternoon I dug out every last iris bulb, burning them on a fire that smouldered and sizzled and sent a blade of steel smoke into the twilight. Retreating indoors as the dark hit the windows, I stared at the real estate photographs online, wondering if others could see the warning in the windows that I never did. At last I would email the agent to lower the asking price.

Some histories would never leave town, but I certainly would.

Well, I ain't your baby, I ain't your baby now
Them holy rollers got kicked right out of town
It's dark where I've been stayin'
Don't you worry, come on in
Well, I've finally found a friend
I've found a friend
Codeine, Codeine
You're the nicest thing I've seen
For a while
For a while
Well you hold my hand as I step into the room
And all these people, they'll all be fading soon
Well, it's whisper time remembered
Through armored thorns and knives
And it's all that I've got left
To hold onto.
Codeine, Codeine
You're the nicest thing I've seen
For a while
For a while

*Images by AI.

`With Love,`

Are you on HIVE yet? Earn for writing! Referral link for FREE account here

Well it worked really well, had me hooked.

Totally unconnected but I feel compelled to tell you the story of the mysterious Australian guy who knocked on our door not once but on two separate occasions many years apart to tell us he used to live in our house and specifically upstairs. What? Just upstairs? I proceeded to tell him that he’d knocked on our door some years before looking for someone. He had no recollection and was on a short visit to trace a relative before flying back to Australia. Then he just vanished, freaking Tina and I out.

We had found out at some point along the line that our old house had for awhile been divided into two, which might explain the mystery Aussie.

It’s always baffled us.

For Sale

With Love,

`With Love,`