Free An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire Page A

the open wedding album, my guts heaving. I made it to the toilet just in time. While I was chucking I noticed how sore my neck and back and hips were. I used to drink until I crashed on the floor all the time when I was younger; it never hurt this much. Bella had a sore back most of the time even though she was young and fit. It was her work, all that bending and scrubbing and reaching and lifting. They were meant to use a swinging trolley thing to move the patients but there was only one of those in the whole place and she couldn’t stand to leave some poor old bugger lying in their own mess for a minute longer than necessary, so she’d often just do the lifting herself. Most of them weighed less than a case of beer she reckoned. But I worried about her. Once your back goes it’s fucked for good, they say.
    Her back. Jesus god help me jesus fuck her back oh god what she withstood what
they did to her back. Jesus god fuck.
    I cleaned myself up and staggered through to bed. My head was spinning and so I used the trick I remembered from my heaviest drinking days, kept my eyes open and focused on a single spot on the wall. I trusted I’d fall asleep and out of my misery as long as I didn’t force my own eyes shut. I stared and stared at the dark spot on the wall and then felt the ice in my guts again as I realised I’d never seen that spot before. My walls are white and I keep them clean, wiping away any scuffs and greasy hand marks as soon as they appear. I would’ve noticed this before, this dark patch, a dappled, airless football. I hadn’t closed the curtains and so the wall was lit by the full moon outside. A clear, light space marred by this terrible bruise.
    I couldn’t move with terror. I can’t explain why. It was only a dark space on my wall but at that moment it felt like my life was about to end.
    And then it was gone. Just like that, my wall was clean again. I pushed myself out of bed and touched the wall where the spot had been. It was like touching a hotplate you had no idea was turned on. It took me a second to understand my hand was being burnt and then I pulled back, dropped to my knees. I touched the wall near the floor and it felt like a wall. I reached up and with just my middle finger this time touched the spot that had burnt me. Nothing. I ran my hands up and down that wall and couldn’t find the hot spot, the dark spot again. The palm of my left hand still stung with the heat.
    I needed to vomit, charged through the doorway, past the kitchen into the bathroom. I didn’t quite make it. Messed up the floor and the front of my nightie. I sat in front of the toilet until my heart stopped hammering and my stomach felt calm. Then I cleaned the floor, put my nightie in the wash, had a shower, took some Panadol with a big glass of water. I walked around the house, turned on all the lights, checked all the walls. Silly old drunk, I said to myself, but when I finally got back to bed and closed my eyes I knew with certainty that if I opened them again I would see it there, that impossible bruise.

    AustraliaToday.com
    A haunted place
    May Norman
    8 April 2015
    Five minutes out of Strathdee, heading south on the Hume Highway, a series of unnatural colour bursts draw the motorist’s eye past the line of eucalypts to the ordinarily drab green and brown grass strip beyond. Pulling onto the asphalt verge it becomes immediately clear that the garish pinks and yellows spotted from the road belong to a makeshift memorial shrine surrounding a lean ghost gum. Twenty or so steps to the left of the tree is the patch of dirt where the naked, violated body of popular, 25-year-old aged-care worker Bella Michaels was found on Monday morning, partially wrapped in a blue tarpaulin.
    The area was immediately sealed off by local police, then in came the detectives, the crime scene investigators and then the battalions of police, including trainees from the police academy at Goulburn,