In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan

along this street or the next or the one after that that would be any better or worse than where he was just then, out in the open with a dog day stirring awake and a sky above thick to the very heavens with snow. Not in a hurry, but moving just the same, walking, because movement felt right, felt like an answer, of sorts.
    Now, three years and some change later, he is still walking, still moving. There are days when the answer seems very close, as close in fact as the ghost that he is always chasing, and there are other days, the dog day Sundays full of bitter cold and blowing wind, when he knows that he will never catch up, but that the chase is all he has and all he will ever have. Dog days when all the world feels weighted against him and when crying helps only a little and only for a while. Lately, he has taken to talking, and Melissa, who had always been such a good listener in life, is no less so now in death.
    This isn’t any kind of town for the likes of you, she used to say. Not for the likes of you.
    She was correct about that but not all the way correct. He walks and watches her dance, her smiling face light again and full of love, happy with the movement of life. Then, just for a moment, he is caught up in a gust of fatigue, and he stops and closes his eyes, squeezes them shut, and sees her lying dead in that doorway, her pathetic breasts and stomach clotted with an apron of dried blood, brown at first, a dirty shade, but then, as the light slowly waxed, a colour of sickening maroon. Her eyes are wide with shock, her mouth yawning some feeble plea, and the only thing remotely resembling a smile now is that gaping black rictus grin of a throat wound as it gathers in the first stray spittle of the snowflakes. He is standing in a quiet city street with his eyes clenched shut, but in the swollen blackness of his mind he is really standing just a few paces away from that doorway, back with the other gathered watchers who are happy to gaze past the yellow-and-black warning tape and the shoulders of the policemen hunched against the cold, and no one bothers to notice him at all, even though he is crying, and even though his fingers are caressing the blade of a small knife that is concealed in his coat pocket, caressing until his touch grows heavy and the flesh is pierced. When he opens his eyes again to face the world, the morning seems to have lost a little of its edge. A gloom has settled, heavier than feels right. He takes a moment to study the street, taking in the familiar shapes of the crawling traffic, the granite and sandstone building fronts and the few unhurried passers-by. And ghosts too, just ahead, at that corner, or across the street in that boarded up doorway. He takes a deep, shuddering pull of breath and the fatigue falls away, leaving him, the perfect dog for this perfectly ugly Sunday morning, free to walk again, his destination nowhere.

Syzygy
    Melinda was leaving me.
    â€˜I doubt that either of us will ever forget today,’ she said, over breakfast. The arrangements were already set, her new man, Jonathan, was coming by to pick her up at noon, and now that we’d reached the actual brink, a sort of calmness had settled over us.
    She was referring to this business of the eclipse, of course, using the significance of one event to heighten that of the other. I wanted to say that we hardly needed anything as dramatic as a shifting of the heavens to help mark down today as a permanent memory, but one glance at her strangled the words in my throat and I busied myself instead with reaching for and buttering another slice of toast.
    Everything worth saying had already been said, we’d laid out the apologies and the accusations, tossed and turned them until they were burnt through on both sides, and we both knew that there was no way on from here other than the way we were taking. Still, I suppose that there had to have been some good moments during our time together, and it was for the sake