The House Is Holding Its Breath

“You can tell something’s wrong when even the toast forgets to smell like breakfast.”

The next morning felt like a pause between songs. You know that bit on the radio when the music ends but the next one hasn't started yet, and the silence is too full and stretchy? It was like that. Like the air had been holding something and was getting tired of keeping it in.

I woke up without the sun in my eyes, which was strange, because Grandma always opened the curtains early and said things like, “Daylight's wasting,” even if we had nowhere to go. She'd sweep into the room like a cheerful whirlwind, pulling back curtains and smoothing blankets, sometimes singing little bits of songs I didn't recognise.

But this morning, the curtains were still drawn, and the hallway was quiet. No kettle bubbling. No smell of toast or butter or teabags being jiggled in cups. No radio murmuring about water restrictions or Grandpa's racing form being rattled. No wooden spoon tapping against the side of a mixing bowl.

Just stillness.

The light that crept around the edges of the curtains was a muted blue-grey, like the colour of the sky just before a storm. It turned our little sewing room hideaway into an underwater cave, making the shapes of the furniture look strange and unfamiliar.

I lay there for a bit, staring at the lumpy ceiling and wondering if maybe the whole house had decided to sleep in. The plaster had these funny ripples and bumps that sometimes, if I squinted just right, looked like maps of imaginary countries. Today they just looked like an old ceiling that needed fixing.

Mack was already awake — I could tell from the way he was lying stiff, eyes open, hands tucked behind his head like he was pretending to be relaxed. But his shoulders were tense, and he was barely blinking as he stared upward.

“Did you hear anything?” I asked, my voice sounding too loud in the quiet room.

He shook his head slightly. “Not yet.”

We waited another minute before getting up. I pulled on my dressing gown—the purple one with stars that was getting too small but I refused to replace—and Mack stepped into his slippers, the ones shaped like monster feet with claws on the toes. They usually made me laugh, but today they just looked silly and out of place.

The hallway felt colder than usual. Gerald the dinosaur tile seemed to watch us pass with a worried expression, though that was probably just my imagination. The ship in the crooked painting looked like it was sinking deeper today.

The lounge was dim and smelled like yesterday's socks and lavender spray—that artificial kind that doesn't really smell like actual lavender but like what someone thinks lavender should smell like. Grandma sprayed it when she thought the house was getting “stale,” a word that always made me think of bread left out too long.

Grandpa was in his chair, same spot, same green jumper, only this time he wasn't watching the telly. The screen was on, but muted. Just a cooking show, a man in a pink apron flipping something in a pan that didn't look quite right. The food was an odd yellowish colour, like scrambled eggs that had given up halfway through.

Grandpa's head rested back against the cushion. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing — you could see the slow rise and fall under his cardigan. His mouth was open a little, and a bit of dribble had dried at the corner. His skin had a greyish tinge to it, like paper that's been left out in the rain and then dried in the sun. His hands lay motionless on the armrests, blue veins standing out against his skin like rivers on a map.

“Grandpa?” I said, softly. My words seemed to hover in the air without reaching him.

No answer.

I reached out to touch his hand, but Mack caught my wrist and shook his head.

“Let him sleep,” he whispered, his breath making a tiny cloud in the chilly room.

I nodded.

We padded into the kitchen, our slippers making soft shuffling sounds against the linoleum. The room was unusually dim, the blinds still drawn against the morning light. The table was bare—no placemats, no cereal boxes, no butter dish waiting to soften. The clock on the wall read 8:47, much later than we normally had breakfast.

Grandma was sitting at the table, holding her mobile phone in both hands like she was waiting for it to give her good news. Or any news. Her thumbs brushed over the screen occasionally, but she wasn't really looking at it. Her hair wasn't done like usual — it was clipped up, but messy, like she'd forgotten about it halfway through. Wisps escaped around her temples, giving her a slightly wild look. She was still in her dressing gown, the blue flowery one with the frayed cuffs, something I'd never seen this late in the morning.

She looked up and gave us a small smile. “Morning, darlings.” Her voice sounded rusty, like a door hinge that needed oil.

“Is he okay?” I asked, nodding toward the lounge where Grandpa sat immobile in his chair.

“Just tired,” she said. “We all are.” She reached out and patted my hand, but even that seemed to take effort. Her fingers were cold, and I noticed they trembled slightly as she withdrew them.

She stood up slowly and put the kettle on, but forgot to fill it with water. The empty kettle made a hollow clicking sound as she switched it on. Mack pointed it out, and she blinked a few times, like she was just waking up.

“Oh, right. Silly me.” She tried to laugh, but it came out more like a sigh.

She lifted the kettle from its base and carried it to the sink. Water splashed over the sides as she filled it, darkening her sleeve. She didn't seem to notice. Her movements were stiff, like she was performing a familiar dance but had forgotten some of the steps.

The kitchen felt different this morning. The buttery yellow walls that usually seemed so cheerful now looked jaundiced in the dim light. The strawberry curtains hung limply, their cheerful pattern at odds with the heavy atmosphere. Even the fake fruit in the bowl looked dull, the bitten apple a reminder of innocence that felt out of place.

“Did Mum call?” Mack asked, sliding into his usual chair at the table. The legs made a scraping sound against the floor.

Grandma's back stiffened slightly as she stood at the sink. “Not yet,” she said. “But it's still early.”

It wasn't early. It was nearly nine o'clock. On a normal day, we'd have had breakfast, gotten dressed, and been shooed outside to “get some colour in our cheeks” by now.

“She said she'd call today,” I reminded everyone, as if they might have forgotten.

“Yes, she did,” Grandma replied, not turning around. Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath.

Mack caught my eye across the table and raised his eyebrows slightly. It was our secret sibling code for something's not right. I nodded back, acknowledging the message without needing words.

The kettle began to rumble, building toward its familiar crescendo. Steam escaped from its spout in ghostly tendrils that dissipated into the cool air. Outside, a magpie warbled its morning song, the sound somewhat muffled by the closed windows. It felt like the bird was in another world entirely, one where mornings proceeded as they should, unaffected by whatever stillness had descended on grandma’s house.

Grandma pulled three mugs from the cupboard, then hesitated and added a fourth. She lined them up on the counter like soldiers awaiting inspection. One had a chip on the rim. Another had a faded picture of the Sydney Opera House, a souvenir from a trip taken long before I was born. The third was Grandpa's special mug, the one with fishing flies painted around the sides that no one else was allowed to use.

“Would you like some toast?” she asked, her back still to us.

“Yes, please,” I answered quickly, desperate for something normal.

“Me too,” Mack added.

Grandma nodded and reached for the bread bin.

“Should we wake Grandpa?” I asked, glancing toward the lounge.

Grandma's hand paused on the loaf of bread. “No,” she said softly. “Let him rest. Doctor's coming later.”

“Doctor?” Mack's voice sharpened. “Why?”

“Just a check-up,” Grandma said, too quickly. “Just to be safe.”

She turned and gave us another smile, but this one was worse than the first—stretched thin and brittle, like it might crack if we looked at it too hard.

“Everything's fine,” she added, in a tone that suggested exactly the opposite.

The kettle reached its boiling point and clicked off with a final hiss of steam.

The day drifted like soup on a low simmer. Not boiling. Just warm and thick and slow. Minutes stretched into hours that seemed to melt into each other, the boundaries between them blurring like watercolours on wet paper. The clock ticked, but time seemed to move differently, as if the hands were wading through treacle.

We didn't go outside. It was too cold, Grandma said, though I'd seen children playing in the street bundled up in scarves and beanies. The real cold, I suspected, was inside grandma’s house—the kind of cold that blankets and jumpers couldn't fix. It hung in the air between rooms, invisible but undeniable.

We didn't play astronauts. Mack didn't want to. His eyes had that faraway look they got when he was thinking too hard about grown-up things, the sparkle of imagination switched off like a bedside lamp. The HMS Marshmallow had been dismantled, the cushions returned to their proper places, our space adventures as distant as real stars.

Instead, we coloured in — or tried to. Grandma had found some old colouring books in the spare room cupboard. Mine had princesses with impossibly small waists and giant eyes. Mack's had dinosaurs and dragons. We sat at the kitchen table while Grandma moved around us, making phone calls in the hallway that were too quiet to hear properly.

I gave up after my green pencil broke and couldn't be sharpened. The pencil sharpener kept eating the wood but not the lead, leaving me with a jagged stick that made ugly scratches on the paper. I tried using blue instead, but the princess’s dress looked sad and cold, like she was going to a winter funeral, and my heart wasn't in it anyway.

Mack drew something in his notebook that he wouldn't let me see. Not a dinosaur or a spaceship, but something with straight lines and boxes. His face was serious as he worked, his tongue poking out slightly between his teeth the way it did when he was concentrating extra hard. When I tried to peek, he covered it with his arm and gave me a look that wasn't mean but wasn't inviting either.

When I asked what it was, he shrugged. “Just in case.” His pencil made a soft scratching sound against the paper as he added more details to whatever he was creating.

“Just in case of what?” I leaned on my elbows, princess colouring book forgotten. Outside, the sky had turned a dull pewter colour, the clouds hanging low over Broken Hill like a woollen blanket.

He didn't answer. He just folded it up and tucked it into his backpack, which he'd taken out from under the bed and had started quietly packing. The backpack was navy blue with reflective strips that glowed in the dark. Dad had bought it for him at the start of the school year, saying every explorer needed proper gear.

The zip made a whispering sound as he opened the main compartment. He moved methodically, like he was following a checklist in his head. First went the folded paper. Then his water bottle, half-filled from the bathroom tap. I watched as he added two muesli bars, the little torch from Grandpa's shed, and a folded-up tea towel—the one with tiny kangaroos hopping around the border.

“You're not running away, are you?” I asked, not sure if I was teasing or afraid.

“No,” he said, not looking up as he rearranged the items to make more space. “I'm getting ready.” His voice was calm, matter-of-fact, as if preparing for some unknown event was the most normal thing in the world.

“For what?” I twisted a loose thread on my sleeve, wrapping it around my finger until the tip turned purple.

He looked at me then, properly looked, his eyes meeting mine. They were serious and somehow older than the rest of his face, as if they belonged to a different person entirely. In that moment, he didn't look like my annoying brother who put bugs in my shoes and stole the last biscuit. He looked like someone I didn't fully recognise.

“I don't know,” he said finally.

The honesty in those three words made my stomach feel hollow. Not knowing was scarier than any definite answer could have been. Not knowing meant anything could happen.

I watched as he added Ribbons the Rabbit to his backpack, tucking her carefully on top of everything else. That's when I realised he was serious. Mack never took Ribbons anywhere—he always said she was my baby toy, even though I knew he secretly talked to her sometimes when he thought no one was listening.

From the lounge room came the sound of Grandpa coughing—that same rattling, chest-deep cough that seemed to be getting worse, not better. The doctor hadn't come yet, though Grandma had made three phone calls about it.

Mack zipped the backpack closed and pushed it under the table, within reach but out of sight. He picked up his blue pencil and returned to his dinosaur colouring book as if nothing had happened. But I noticed his eyes darting to the backpack every few minutes, checking it was still there.

In the kitchen, Grandma's hands trembled as she made yet another pot of tea that no one would drink. The spoon clinked against the side of the teapot, a nervous, uneven rhythm. The smell of chamomile filled the air—her special “calm down” tea that she only made when things weren't right.

The radio was off. The television was off. Even the clock seemed to be ticking more quietly than usual, as if afraid to disturb the strange hush that had settled over everything.

I looked down at my half-coloured princess, her face blank and empty where I hadn't filled it in. She stared back at me with vacant eyes, waiting for something to happen.

I knew exactly how she felt.

At lunch, Grandma made sandwiches but didn't eat hers. She cut the crusts off mine—something she rarely did—and arranged them in neat triangles on my favourite plate, the one with a faded rainbow around the rim. The sandwiches were Vegemite and cheese, usually my favourite, but today the Vegemite tasted too sharp and the cheese too bland, as if even food had lost its certainty.

Grandma stared out the window above the sink while we chewed, her own sandwich sitting untouched on the bench. Her fingers absently traced the pattern on her apron—small blue flowers that had been washed so many times they were barely more than pale smudges. Outside, a pair of magpies hopped across the back lawn, heads cocked as if listening for worms beneath the surface. One found something and tugged it free, the small victory going unnoticed by everyone except me.

“Not hungry?” Mack asked, nodding toward Grandma's abandoned lunch.

She startled slightly, as if she'd forgotten we were there. “Just saving it for later,” she said, though we all knew she wouldn't eat it. The sandwich would sit there until it curled at the edges, then disappear when we weren't looking, probably into the bin or to the magpies.

I asked if I could make a get-well card for Grandpa. Something to do with my hands, something normal and useful when everything felt so strange and helpless.

“Of course, petal,” Grandma said, managing a small smile that didn't reach her eyes. “Use the coloured paper in the bottom drawer.”

I found a piece of bright yellow cardstock that felt cheerful in a forced sort of way, like wearing a party hat at a funeral. I folded it carefully and drew a lopsided garden on the front with flowers that looked more like colourful snowflakes. Inside, I wrote “GET WELL SOON GRANDPA” in my neatest handwriting, adding extra loops to the G and P to make them fancier. I drew a stick figure me holding hands with a stick figure him, both of us smiling with curved lines for mouths.

When I gave it to him — carefully slipping it onto his lap while he slept — he didn't stir at all. The card rested on his knee for a moment before sliding off and landing on the carpet with a soft whisper of paper against wool. I picked it up and tucked it beside him on the armrest, propping it against the worn fabric where he might see it when he woke up.

His breath came in shallow pulls, each one making a slight whistling sound on the inhale. His skin had taken on a waxy sheen, like the artificial fruit in the kitchen bowl. I wanted to touch his hand, to feel the familiar roughness of his knuckles and the soft pad of his palm, but something held me back—a fear that he might feel different now, that the hand that had always felt so solid might somehow have changed overnight.

He made a noise later, a sort of moan-cough, and shifted slightly in the chair. His eyes fluttered but didn't open, and his fingers twitched against the armrest as if reaching for something just beyond grasp. That was the most he did all day.

Grandma appeared in the doorway when she heard him, her body tensing like a startled bird. We all waited, watching, but nothing more happened. The moment passed, leaving the air feeling thicker than before.

“The doctor will be here soon,” she murmured, more to herself than to us. She'd been saying that since morning, the words becoming less certain with each repetition.

The telly stayed on mute. Grandma didn't turn it off. Just let the colours and pictures flicker in silence, casting strange, shifting lights across Grandpa's still form and the faded carpet. The screen showed a game show with people jumping and shouting, their silent celebrations jarring against the quiet of our lounge room.

Grandma’s phone rang once, making us all jump. She answered it in the hall, her voice a low murmur. When she returned, her face was tighter than before.

“That was Dr. Matthews,” she said. “He's been delayed at the hospital but will be here by four.” She checked her watch, then the wall clock, as if comparing them might somehow make time move faster.

Mack had stationed himself by the window, occasionally peering through the lace curtains at the street beyond. His backpack rested beside him, within easy reach. He hadn't mentioned it again, but I noticed he kept it close, like a lifeguard with a flotation device.

I sat on the floor near Grandpa's chair, close enough to watch the shallow rise and fall of his chest but not so close as to disturb him. My colouring book lay open beside me, but I couldn't focus on staying within the lines. Instead, I found myself staring at Grandpa's hand as it hung over the armrest. I tried to remember all the things those hands had made and fixed and held—fence posts and fishing rods and my small fingers crossing the road.

In the kitchen, Grandma moved about with uncharacteristic quietness, as if afraid that normal sounds might somehow make things worse. No spoons clanking against mixing bowls, no kettle whistling, no radio playing the midday news. Just the soft pad of her slippers against the linoleum and the occasional opening and closing of a cupboard door.

The house seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for something to happen or change or end. And we all waited with it, suspended in that strange, silent afternoon that stretched out like a shadow at dusk.