The rooms have grown darker since Laura died. Today even the kitchen is charcoal grey. It is not my imagination. I have not succumbed to metaphors. I have seen it happen day by day. And today is the seventh day. Blackness leaches through every egg-blue strip of wallpaper, into every flower-nubbled cornice, across every honey-brown floorboard. It has become ordinary, this seeping darkness, like watching a housewife roll out pastry. Like watching another of my photographs swim into monochrome life.

At first, I thought it was a sudden fit of rising damp. This is still what I tell my Jessica today. ‘Just mould, petal,’ I murmur as I butter her toast soldiers.

I do not turn to look at her. I know she has stopped believing me. She stopped believing long ago. I am no longer her god. Laura’s death saw to that. Every time she peers into my blinking eyes, she sees only lies, a frightening treacle of lies.

‘Daddy, I’m scared,’ she whimpered the morning after the funeral, when the darkness first slithered into our house. ‘Is this what happens when someone dies?’

Children her age, they see cause and effect everywhere. Jessica thinks our hobbling, tweed-skirted neighbour Miss Cramond broke her hip because, really, she wanted to be in hospital, fussed over by nurses. And so she also insists there is more daylight in these summer months because this is when children have their school holidays and the sun understands that children must make the most of these days with their weekend- and holiday-fathers. The world is a jigsaw to her; our darkening house is just another piece in her jigsaw, her kind-hearted, eight-year-old jigsaw. And so, Jessica insists, our rooms grow darker because my twin sister died, my blind twin died.

‘It’s cause Aunt Laura’s not here,’ she said the second day, when a plum-black nest hatched in the crimson wallpaper behind the piano, the piano that Laura played for Jessica every Sunday morning. ‘The house is sad, Daddy. Take a photo! Take one of your photos.’

This is how Jessica disowns her grief – she daubs it like finger-paint onto the darkening walls around her.
‘She’s come back to be with us, Daddy…’ she suggested the third day, when the dampness spidered across her rose-pink bedroom walls. ‘She misses us.’

‘Stop your nonsense, Jessica!’ I snapped. ‘Your Aunt Laura’s dead! She feels nothing. She’s ashes now!’ I pointed at the charcoal-grey urn that I had put by the fireplace.

Jessica glared, turned on her heels and marched out the room.

The fourth and fifth day she sulked in her darkening room, just as Laura would do when we were young.
Yesterday, the sixth day, the builder came. He probed the walls with his stethoscope fingertips as though they housed a heart. He would need to make further investigations, he said, and left, while I stood in the corner sweating blackness into my shirt.

Today, the seventh day, the day she returns to her mother, Jessica wonders if it is my fault. She knows I am a liar and she wonders if I lie to protect myself.

I place the boiled eggs and toasted soldiers before her and she finally comes out with it.
‘Aunt Laura blames you, Daddy!’ she sings in a nursery-rhyme voice, as though in the playground. ‘You made her die!’

‘What!’
Her lower lip trembles.
I try to smile at her.
‘Darling, you know that’s not true.’
‘You made her blind!’ she sobs.

My gaze drifts towards the blackened door, suddenly scared of my child’s sky-blue eyes which want to wash over me, to expose pictures too long hidden. The action of light upon a sensitive surface: photography at its simplest. My Jessica at her simplest.

‘It was an accident,’ I say, finding my bedtime-story voice. ‘Your Aunt Laura knew that.’

Over thirty years now since Laura blinded herself in my makeshift dark room under the stairs. In she ran one dishwater-grey afternoon, the day of our eighth birthday, and upturned a tray of developing solution. I should not have left it lying there, of course. I should have padlocked the room. I knew she was always prying, always jealous of her twin brother’s ‘cave’. ‘An accident waiting to happen,’ everyone said. But nobody blamed me. Neither mother nor father. Not even Laura. I was a child, after all. Nobody blamed me. At least, not for the accident.  Persisting with my cameras and my chemicals: that was my sin. Living off the dark room was my crime.

‘It’s your dark room…’ Jessica murmurs, stroking the hot egg with her finger.
I notice her pink canvas foot peep into the corner of my eye and sweep a circle across the floorboards.
‘It wants to take over the house.  Like Aunt Laura said…’ she grins.
A circle of black and silver ink flowers under her foot.
‘What?’
‘You’d turn the whole house into a dark room if you could. That’s what she always said.’

Laura always exaggerated my love of the dark room. The dark room was her obsession, not mine.  She wanted my cave to be hers too. She thought we were peas in a pod, a dark, sweet, suffocating pod. I wanted air.

It was always the camera that fascinated me. An eye that you can build to your liking: a prosthetic eye.  Clean, permanent, and objective. An eye you can telescope, widen, soften, or sharpen, as you like. An eye that suspends a moment forever.  Some days I cannot stop. I take photograph upon photograph.  I salvage moment after moment.  Sometimes, I cannot tell whether it is my eyelid that blinks or the shutter that snaps.

My dark room, however, is only a means to an end: flint to a fire. Laura never understood that. It was never a dwelling place. Never my cave. She misunderstood. I never meant to banish her. Or only temporarily. Only for the sake of my photographs, my monochromes, which demand all absence of light. Still, Laura misunderstands and distorts. She presses her lies now upon my Jessica. She foisted those lies upon her, when I was not looking.

I have often wondered if Laura meant to do it – if she wanted to make her world a dark room. Sometimes, I think yes. It was deliberate. She wanted to cling to my arm forever. She was to blame. The sin was hers – if there was sin.

‘Is she right, Daddy?’ Jessica’s voice pulls me back. ‘Are you making the whole house your dark room?’
‘Stop it, Jessica! Just stop!’

Jessica’s lungs snatch for air. I can almost see them, poppy-red, through her lemon T-shirt. I turn from my little girl, my angry, bereaved little girl who wants to punish me. I stare at the box of light from the window. Silver fingers of rain swipe against the glass. I close my eyes, but I still see Jessica. Hurt flushes like sunburn to her cheeks. Her eyelashes clog.  She blinks and a tear buds on her underlid. She hates me. The family tradition continues.

‘Go to your room, Jessica.’

I walk into the living room and lift one of my prints from the table. I hear Jessica’s footsteps follow.  I peer at a tear-shaped smut on the model’s cheek – a careless blotch I had not noticed before.

‘Make sure you’ve packed everything in your case. Okay?’

Jessica says nothing. She does not move. She has Laura’s silent way of crying, an insinuating kind of crying. They were always alike. And always so close, right up to that last day when Laura glided out in front of the school bus, the morning of Jessica’s eighth birthday.

‘We’re like twins, Jessie and I,’ Laura would laugh. ‘Another pair of twins.’  I would stare back at her unseeing eyes, set in those milk-like scalds of skin, and wonder if she could sniff my revulsion, my dog-breath revulsion.

‘She’s just like me, when I had eyes,’ she would sometimes, murmur when Jessica trounced through a doorway or cartwheeled across the floor. ‘When I had eyes,’ – that was always how she put it, how she described her eight years of sight, as though I had somehow gouged the pebble-blue eyes out of their sockets, as though they did not remain in her ravaged face always seeming to look everywhere at once.
It was not my fault she lost her sight. She was the one who ran in there. She invaded my dark room, her hands all sticky and treacherous with baby-pink, birthday-cake icing. It was our eighth birthday and she thought we should spend every moment together.

‘It was our birthday, Tony,’ a soft voice murmurs, hot in my ear.
I swivel towards Jessica and she grins back. Sugar-pink saliva dribbles from her lips
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Come into our dark room…’ Laura’s voice sings.

The print falls from my hands. I watch it sink into the transparent floor and settle. I hear the lap of the developing solution. The black lines and curves begin to swim. The purple-black eyes and hair fade to an albino-silver. Black turns to white. My print becomes a negative.

It’s my imagination, of course. I am grieving like Jessica, of course. I am only a child… I was only a child. I see the hallucinations of grief. It is understandable. It was understandable. The human eye is unreliable, not a camera. I must not succumb, for Jessica’s sake. This is our living room. The little girl is Jessica. Laura is dead. Ash and dust.

I blink and look towards the fireplace. I nod towards the silver clock – the clock that was once gold.
‘Pack your case, darling! Your mother will be here any minute to collect you.’
‘Come to the dark room,’ a voice whispers. ‘It’s your turn now.’
Crumbs of pink icing trickle down my throat.

Jessica stalks towards the fireplace, picks up the urn and turns towards the door. I watch her plum dress and pink ribbons spangle as she glides through gashes of sunlight. The urn is suddenly iridescent. The only colours in the room are hers and she is taking them away. She will bundle her confetti of colour into her suitcase and smuggle it away to her mother’s house.

I watch a trail of black and silver footsteps rise up beneath her padding shoes. The smell of hypo drifts across the room, a smell I always loved.  It is too late now for sponge and water. She has fixed those footprints to the floor. This room is photographic paper. I know this without dabbling my fingertips in the trail she has left behind her. I need no proof of touch.

Jessica spins towards me when she reaches the door. Her eyes are bluer than ever before, even though she stands in shadows. She is now immune to the absence of light.

‘I’m never coming back!’ she yells. ‘Never, ever!’
She wrenches open the urn and sprays the ashes across the room. They swarm and chatter: charcoal bees. The black door slams shut.  The keyhole flickers white then disappears.
‘You’ll never see her again,’ Laura croons.
A shutter snaps. Black threads float across my vision. Beads of silver splash into my cornea.
‘It’s your turn now, Tony.’

Darkness rushes in. I see Laura again.  We are in the dark room. She sprints in again through the unlocked door. She sparkles in her plum, sequinned dress. I see her giggle, arms outstretched – a comic Frankenstein’s monster – as she stumbles towards the developing tray. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ she sings. I feel the cold red linoleum beneath my backside as I crouch in the corner of my dark room, holding in my hot breath. I close my eyes and wish away my pest sister. I wish her not to see me. I wish the darkness to swallow her up.

‘Your turn now in the blind room,’ she whispers.
I stumble towards the corner as the cave turns another degree darker.

Carol Farrelly lives and teaches in Edinburgh. She holds a DPhil on the novels and readership of Thomas Hardy. Her first short story was recently published in Scottish literary magazine Random Acts of Writing.

He wakes up with his hand clasping a red silk ribbon, the kind you would find holding back the hair of a small girl. His hair is wet. He wakes up next to the river with a pocket full of ribbon and the sound of water. He takes his hand out of his pocket and opens his eyes. He hears a barking in the distance, behind the sound of river water passing. The man remembers staggering, stone drunk, towards home and falling asleep in the woods by the river. There is a small sign remembering the farmhouse that used to stand on the banks of the river. He remembers drunkenly thinking last night that the ghost of a house was as good as a real roof. He rolls his eyes at himself, smirking, as he gets up to walk home before work. Dropping the ribbon, he looks for the dogs he heard barking.

The man notices during his shift that his hearing is off, as if water were trapped in his ears. He shakes his head and notices his hair is wet.

After work he goes to a house where there is music and drinking. He talks to a girl in smirks. Alone, and late into the night, the man walks home. He stops on a bridge to piss in the river. He puts his hand in his pocket and finds a red silk ribbon. His drunken senses are confused as he sways forward and falls unceremoniously into the river. He hears a girl’s laughter and stands up to look. He can’t see her, even though the sound moves closer. He starts to swim clumsily towards the shore.

He wakes up with his hand wrapped in a red silk ribbon. He blushes and scolds himself while sitting up. He remembers falling into the river and a girl laughing at him. He vaguely remembers seeing the girl after he reached shore; he remembers the girl being very young, but it must have been a dream. He staggers to his feet, tossing the red silk ribbon at a patch of moss next to the river. He shakes water from his hair and walks along the river road home. On his walk he can feel echoes of the girl’s laughter.

That night he stays home and falls to sleep early. Deep in the night he is woken by the barking of a dog. It is a furious barking and he opens his door to see if anything is wrong. Not seeing a thing he walks outside. It’s a beautiful and warm summer night with fireflies lighting the tops of trees. The man walks to the end of his road and keeps walking. He decides it’s a perfect night to just walk. The barking is unimportant but persistent as he moves down the river road. Underneath the barking and slow sluicing of the water the man can hear footsteps. He waits to let the footsteps overtake him but they continue, and come no closer. He stops and sits on a park bench next to the river. Pushing back his wet hair he sees a small girl just beyond a break in the thin line of bushes that separate the sidewalk from the bench. She stands still, watching him. He calls to her as she reaches behind her head to untie a ribbon.

He wakes up with a red silk ribbon tied tightly around his wrist, angrily cutting into his skin. He vomits and angrily tosses the ribbon into the river. He spits up more water and stumbles clumsily away from the riverbank and the old farmhouse.

At work, filling a glass of water, he turns and vomits violently into the sink. He stands to look up, tries to smirk, and explains he had a late night out. He is sent home. In his bathroom the man vomits up more water. He reaches into his pocket and finds a red silk ribbon. Throwing it into the toilet he watches the water slowly wrap around the ribbon and carry it down. He vomits again. The man wakes up next to the toilet, covered in vomit-water. He stumbles awkwardly out of his front door. He is dizzy and so thirsty he can barely move. He staggers towards the river and drinks until his stomach feels as dense as cement, as taught as a water balloon. He hears a girl’s laughter behind him and turns to see her untie a red silk ribbon from her hair and step forward. She quickly loops the ribbon around his neck before she pushes his lolling head under the water. He struggles weakly against the girl. The man drinks river weed and muddy water as he dies, his neck wrapped in a red silk ribbon.

He wakes up with his neck wrapped in a red silk ribbon, the kind you would find holding back the hair of a small girl, the kind of girl who would have lived in a farmhouse next to a river, with busy and bedraggled parents and a few dogs, who would drink from the river’s cool waters. He could picture this small girl, hair blowing softly behind her, as she chases a man towards a river, through vines and low bushes, her dogs barking at the river’s edge. He could see the hands of the girl untying a ribbon from her hair and looping it around a man’s neck, holding him underwater as he shakes frantically to breathe, as he takes in water and river moss through his nose and mouth. The man clasps the ribbon and all he can see is this girl; he pushes his desperate face beneath the cool waters of the river to breathe in weed and mud. As he murders himself he can see, resting in the red clay, the tiny finger bones of what might, once, have been part of a small girl, the kind that would have lived in a farmhouse next to a river.

Charlie Geoghegan-Clements lives in the south-eastern United States where he is learning that nothing said about friends is ever true. His recent publications have been in Versal and Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web.

Do you remember that picnic we attempted? It was a Saturday in late May and we took the car thinking at some convenient spot we would be able to pull off the road, unfurl our blanket, and have leisurely salmon sandwiches and white wine in a dappled glade awash with bluebells. But it wasn’t like that. The country lanes were too narrow to park, the fields were strictly off-limits, and every village in England is trimmed with double yellow lines. Where was it we got to? Was it north Essex, or Hertfordshire? I don’t know, somewhere out in the environment for sure. After scootling around for an hour getting tense we fetched up at a pub. The kind of pub which is full of townies, and if not real townies, ex-townies, people who had moved out of town and were still having a go chasing the rural idyll. Or real townies like us who just thought it would be nice to spend a day in the country.

Most of the pub’s food had gone so we lunched on crisps and alcohol. Probably too much alcohol. I downed a couple of pints quickly, just to relax after the chasing around in circles. And with our feelings running a bit freer some home truths started to escape, like steam from a badly clad pipe. And then I came back from the loo and you said you wanted to leave me. And I said ‘Oh.’ For a while I didn’t say anything else because it suddenly became clear that what you had said was right, you should leave me. A lot of unstated resentments suddenly crystallised; a host of little antagonisms had found their form. Yes, you should leave me. So I said, eventually, as you were fixedly looking at the other customers, ‘Yes, I think you’re right, it would be better.’ And I managed a smile of sincerity.

We drove back slowly towards London. The afternoon was lovely: hot and clear. By chance I spotted a turning into some woods with a track which would take the car: exactly what we had been looking for earlier. I swung off the road, went a hundred yards over crunchy twigs and said, ‘Would you like a walk?’ It was so nice to act civilised. The wood seemed to recede in different planes of sunlit foliage with a floor interspersed with happy colourful flowers. ‘Yes,’ you said.

We strolled slowly. It wouldn’t have been right to hold hands. You stopped to stare at the bark of a tree. I asked, ‘What’ll you do?’ You didn’t reply. It was one of those moments when you were totally absorbed in something else. Moments which could be rather charming, but which had become intensely irritating. There had been times when whatever I said provoked no response in you, when even ‘Excuse me, can I say something’ had been met by nothingness, silence. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘OK.’

‘Oh, I’ve forgot my ciggies,’ I said, and went back towards the car. I looked back. You were still staring minutely at the tree, as if it was about to divulge a great philosophical truth. I opened the boot instead of the door. The spade I had put in for winter snows was still there amongst the other debris. I came back towards you. You were still in rapt communion with what? Mother nature? I don’t think so. Your own elevated sense of self-importance, more like. It was so easy. I merely raised the spade, put a bit of effort into my shoulders, and struck your head from behind. You went down with an awful scream and I banged your head again. Twice. As hard as I could. Then I used the edge of the spade as an axe and swung again. It was very satisfying. But it did take four blows before your head was separated.

I glanced around. Summer in the country. All the lively noises of nature were there. A starling was eyeing me. There was no reproach in her beaky stare. I listened hard. Something passed on the road maybe once every two or three minutes. I went and drove the car back towards the entrance to the wood, stopping it plumb on the narrow track to discourage any other casual explorer. Then I came back and dug your grave. In it went your body. I spread leaf litter as best I could over the top.

I carried your head by the hair. Sure it dripped blood along the trail, but there wasn’t too much mess. Your good looks had gone with the life which had drained out. I looked briefly at the mouth which had given me so much pleasure. By chance I had an empty supermarket bag in the car. That would be good enough.

I drove out of the wood. There was earth under my fingernails. Eventually the lane I was following crossed the A1. I parked and sauntered back to the bridge with the bag, tying a knot in its handles. It was simply a matter of judging when to drop it. One didn’t want to be seen letting an object fall onto a busy road. The traffic, though fast, was pretty light in volume. A moment came when three articulated lorries, line astern, were about half a minute away. I let a couple of fast cars pass underneath and then dropped the bag. I didn’t stay to watch, but was confident your head would be pulverised out of all recognition.

At home I had the salmon sandwiches and the wine. Sure, I felt guilty as hell. But when I thought about it, you really were a bitch. It had got to the stage where I couldn’t bear to watch you eat. I hated your trinkets in the bathroom. And the way your lipstick came away on a glass.

The next day I checked the car and shovel for any stains. Nobody missed you. Your work as a freelance translator meant there was no regular employer who worried about your absence. People like you move on. There are no restrictions for Europeans. When your friend phoned I said we had split up, and you had gone back to your parents in Spain. But I knew the main reason you had come to England in the first place was to escape their oppressive regime. You had made a point of not writing to them.

No, no-one missed you. I miss you sometimes. That’s why I like talking to you. And it assuages my need to confess, having these little chats. You were fascinatingly foreign, to begin with, and we did make love very well. It would have been lovely to do it in the bluebells. You reminded me a bit of Francine, except that her head came off straight away.

Graham Buchan has worked in film, video and television as an editor, writer, producer and director. A regular on the London poetry scene, he has published short stories, travel writing and film appreciation.

“As usual Milo, when my guest arrives, I will expect you to remain in your room,” said Jennifer. “I’m making some dinner you can have in there.”

Milo pushed himself up from his wheelchair to see spaghetti hoops bubbling in a small saucepan on the hob. The kitchen was littered with cooking detritus: chopped onion, tomatoes, garlic, green beans and two bloody chops on a plate by the oven. The kitchen was awash with an array of delicious odours. Milo’s stomach rumbled. He was weak and hungry, as usual.

“I have two bottles of a marvellous Temperanillo,” said Jennifer. “Ribero del Duero. Spanish. Award winning.”

Milo grunted a reply. Jennifer paused, mid-stir over a large pot of sauce.

“I’m afraid there is insufficient for you to try it, Milo,” she said. “You can have one of the little Belgian beers you like.”

Milo mumbled in dissatisfaction. Jennifer thumped the meat with a tenderising mallet, the slipped both pieces into a bowl of oil, massaging them momentarily, before placing them in the frying pan where they sizzled enthusiastically. Milo strained up on the arms of the wheelchair again to watch the spaghetti hoops congealing in the bottom of the pan.

“Starters are chilling; wine breathing; vegetables drained. Now, how does Ronald like his meat?” she said, visualising her gastronomic agenda. Milo rolled his eye.

“Oh Christ!” she said, finally noticing Milo’s burning meal. She snatched the saucepan from the hob and slopped the contents into a plastic bowl. She located a spoon, slung it into the bowl and pitched the whole lot onto Milo’s lap. Milo rapidly began spooning the scalding hot muck into his mouth, barely tasting it as he swallowed.

Abruptly, the doorbell rang. Jennifer raised her hands in panic. Milo stopped eating and a number of spaghetti hoops fell from his open mouth onto the rug on his lap.

“Right, Milo,” she said, preening herself rapidly in the reflection of the toaster. “Make yourself scarce!”

Milo awkwardly turned the wheelchair and wheeled himself toward his room. The bungalow was small, with his room and the kitchen to the rear and the dining room at the front. He was barely through the door before he heard the bolt slide home behind him. He spun the chair around and pushed his ear against the door. The plastic bowl slipped onto the floor, ignored. He heard the front door open and Jennifer’s singing voice:

“Ronald! How marvellous!”

Milo heard the deep reply of a man, but could not decipher the words. He pictured obesity and jowls.

“Oh…” he heard Jennifer say and he detected a note of displeasure (which he recognised so very well). “…well, no, not a problem exactly…well no, I know you pay a lot of money, but some prior notice…Oh! Very well! Come in!”

Milo sniggered and readjusted his ear to the door. He loved to hear her when she was annoyed, unless she was annoyed at him of course. He heard the front door close and the sound of movement at the front of the house. A long silence, followed by music: Nora Jones, her dinner party music. Then he heard her irrate stomp, the rattle of the bolt. Milo rapidly reversed the chair away from the door. Jennifer appeared. She was seething.

“Ronald,” she said, trying to control her anger, “has decided to bring an unannounced guest.”

Milo moaned.

“You know what that means.”

Milo rolled up his lap blanket obediently. Jennifer went quickly into the kitchen and he heard the sound of the fridge opening and closing. She reappeared and instantly stabbed in the syringe, depressing the plunger in one motion. A euphoric warmth flooded his body. Milo relaxed in his chair and enjoyed the sweet numbness which enveloped him. Jennifer appeared again, with the hacksaw and clamps.

“There’s enough of the tongue salad to go around, but not the main course.”

Milo gurgled quietly, as the morphine took hold proper. Jennifer quickly unravelled Milo’s bandages, revealing his crudely cauterised stumps.

“Keep the bloody noise down this time,” she said, as she leant down to begin.

Milo laughed silently, his shoulders shaking as she sawed.

Richard Rippon was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne when Slade was at Number One with ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’. He has worked as a lab technician, HiFi salesman, labourer, cinema usher and bouncy castle doorman. His stories are widely published.