Half-Sick of Shadows by David Logan

punishment for something I never did.
    When I asked if I could stay with Sophia, Father said I would do as he said, and Mother added, by way of unfathomable explanation, that Sophia would be a young woman one day. Although I didn’t see what Sophia’s becoming a young woman had to do with anything, I held my tongue.
    My new room gave me a phobia I had no name for. Perhaps there’s no better name for it than small-person-in-big-brothers’-former-bedroom phobia. Which isn’t as bad as big-brothers-in-dead-granny’s-bedroom phobia. My new room contained an odour of older brothers who broke wind too freely and washed too seldom. Sophia slept on the other side of the wall to my right. The junk room was to my left as I lay in bed. It had been reserved, since the beginning of time, for our future toilet – or bathroom, as Mother had taken to calling it because we were going to have a bath too.
    I had difficulty getting to sleep in my lonely room. I awoke in the wee hours almost every night. Getting back to sleep took ages. Sometimes I got out of bed, wrapped in my sheets, and looked out of the window. When the moon hid, I saw almost nothing. When the moon came out, I saw the cemetery and miles and miles of fields stretching to the horizon.
    Sophia and I lay side by side with only a solid wall between us, which we knocked secret codes on and hurt our knuckles.
    Before Granny Hazel died, we were regular churchgoers. We went once each year, on Christmas Day. I hated church. It’s no place for children or people with brains. Aged eleven months, I watched Mother staring down at me, cooing ‘Ma-ma, Ma-ma’, and my first words back to her were I hate church.
    After Granny Hazel died, Father stopped going, which meant that the rest of us stopped going too. I never knew why Father stopped going; there were no signs that he had fallen out with God, but, obviously, he must have done. I don’t blame him. I’d have fallen out with God too, if He’d killed Mother – and if God and I had been on friendly terms in the first place.
    It was a Sunday. The day had been overcast and night came early. Evening approached candle-lighting time. Drizzle dotted the window, in morbid contrast to the scene within.
    Gregory: jumping in the air, clapping his hands, jigging around the living room in a most non-adult and unsophisticated way. Sophia and I looking on, astonished that he should greet bad news with such delight. Edgar: cross-legged on the rug in front of the fire, ha-ha-hawing and clapping his hands in imitation of his older brother …
    The promise had never been a secret. Neither Sophia nor I knew of a reason why the promise should have been kept from Gregory. Father never said that we had to keep it a secret. When Gregory started leaping around we wished we had kept it to ourselves.
    ‘I’m glad you think it’s so funny,’ I muttered loud enough for only Sophia to hear. I felt like punching Gregory in the head. Had I done so, he would have been imprisoned for my murder.
    Sophia knew no such fear. ‘I’m glad you think it’s so funny!’
    He stopped abruptly and acted deadly serious. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong: it isn’t funny, little Soapy Soapsuds; far from it. It’s a curse!’ he announced. ‘You’re cursed! You’re cursed!’
    ‘What’s a curse?’ asked Sophia.
    The living-room door opened. Father came in. We held our tongues and our breath. Father looked behind a cushion, scratched his beard – some of it had grown back. Having scratched his beard for half a minute, and inspected his fingernails, he left the room and closed the door behind him.
    I had hoped that in Father’s depression, because of his mother’s death, he would do himself in by swallowing a tin of rat poison, or sawing off both hands and squirting blood all around the outhouses … Although he could only saw off one hand, unless he could saw with a foot, and I doubted he could. He might have sawn off both feet; or both feet and a hand. Alas, he