Katy unlatched the back door one morning. The air was white and cold, like the noise. This idea had been in her mind before; the day that Angel came home and found her missing and their preschool children climbing cupboards for food. He found her walking alongside the train line, just staring out into space, expressionless, except for the gaping jaw that lead to nowhere. He had to shake her so that she knew it was him.

They were all sound asleep this morning; the children, deep sleepers that they were, and Angel frozen and exhausted by his constant vigilance of Katy. He missed her this morning as she caught the 6:15 to the city and caught the driver by surprise. “She just fell off the platform” he described, “staring blankly with her mouth open”. It was an image that would pierce his vision for a long time.

Angel knew there was trouble, he knew he’d let down his guard. The distant squealing of steel against steel woke him and then the sirens gave it away. He’d lost his Katy; the children had lost her – even though she was never there in the first place; never in a world that didn’t understand her; that she didn’t understand. The coroner’s report mentioned depression; the eulogy didn’t touch the subject. One needed an explanation to tie up the loose threads so that that her death could be filed away into the archives; the other just wanted to understand that which could not be understood. “How could a mother do that?” the neighbours enquired, and yet the answers lay all around them, only they were blinded to the truth that sat behind their self-created curtains. It was the seeing that had become too much for Katy; the desire to know, the desire to understand, the desire to create that which she could not create. Perhaps because of the coincidence of a mistreated childhood and parents who had their own curtain veiling them and her from the truth of society. Where caring lost meaning because it became selective and where the differences between in-active, pro-active and too-active became blurred with indistinguishable lines. Where definition was impossible in a world that craved what it was told to crave and where hardly anyone questioned that lie.

Katy died that morning and the excuse for her death was a lie that hardly anyone would question.