The Debris Field

Claire leaves the hospital alone. She was supposed to call Dawn — promised the doctors she would, let them believe her mother was on the way — but instead she takes a taxi, riding through Broken Hill in silence. The house looks the same from the outside. It's the inside that tells the truth. Every room holds evidence of the spiral she couldn't stop: crusted dishes, tangled blankets, curtains still drawn against light she couldn't bear. She should call the children. Instead she tells herself later, and turns toward the back door.

The studio is twenty metres across the yard, but the distance has changed. Daylight is merciless when she gets there — the empty mirror frame gaping from the wall, shattered glass spread in a jagged constellation, blood trails leading from the debris into the open centre where she'd danced and fallen and bled. She cleans because cleaning is something her hands know how to do. The broom first, sweeping glass into glittering mounds. Then the cloth and bucket, kneeling to scrub at bloodstains that have had two days to set. The surface layer lifts, but beneath it the wood has absorbed what it absorbed. The stains fade but remain.

The mirror was an investment she can't afford to repeat. Classes resume in five days. And the town is already moving — two messages arrive while she's on her knees, parents withdrawing their daughters in polite language that barely conceals what's really being said. The ambulance was seen. The gossip has outpaced the floor cleaner. Then the phone rings, and for one desperate second she believes it might be Paul. It's Greta, calling back from Adelaide — the mother-in-law she accused of lying the day before.