Okay, this is more like the edgy reality-benders that I usually write. Not sure if it works as I'd intended, and no longer inspired to try to make it better.

If you're not familiar with my normal work, be warned that this is not fluff and bubbles like the other stories I've posted here so far. Plenty of people "get" my writing, but just as many are left feeling confused and wondering what was going on. Welcome to my world...

Anyway here it is...

Um, this one should probably come with a content warning. Some mild language, and deals with themes of the darker side of humanity.

ALYSSA

THAT’S ALYSSA CARTER in the front passenger seat. The round eye of a torch pins her to the sun-rotten upholstery, and there’s someone banging on the glass. She retreats into the pillow-warm doona, and cringes away from the urban myth of the woman woken by pounding on the roof of her car.

…a woman and her boyfriend, sleeping beside the highway from fatigue…

Her respiration, as thick as sweat on the inside of the panes, begins to scab into ice.

…woken by a megaphone voice scraping “Do not move, do not get out of the car. This is the police.”

Fear steals around to the driver side window

… and the wet thumping turned out to be a psychopath smashing her boyfriend’s head to pulp.

She ignores the thumping and yelling.

Alyssa, for God’s sake open the door!

Go on, look, there’s no-one there.

But she’s afraid to tempt fate, afraid there will be a strange face twisting into her vision, and Jason’s blood coursing down the windshield. The doors are locked. What if they aren’t?

Fear, Alyssa, is all in your head.

She scrunches into the foam soft hips of the old Datsun’s bucket seats. She pulls the doona closer and inhales sunlight and summer. It is feathery warm and still has the plastic-packaged smells of newness. A wedding present from six months ago. She burrows into eiderdown soft memories. They seep into her, starting at her feet, making their way up to her calves until she is standing once again in the garden at Eversleigh.

It hadn’t been a gunshot wedding, although her relatives from the North-shore nodded their heads, and coughed discreetly at each other in mors code. The slight swell of her belly was concealed beneath a gathered skirt. Fashionable enough, under the circumstances. But she knew, as soon as she saw the look on Jason’s face, that the gown was too judgmental of her pear-round hips. The day had been sharp blue, etched with sunlight, and…well, intimate. Only the four friends, Jason’s best man and their families. She had agreed that a bigger wedding was unseemly and too costly, but she’d always imagined the cold grandeur of a church and pews bubbling with laughter from old high-school friends, and black-clad colleagues from art school. They’d lost touch with so many people.

But her best friend’s absence had hurt her the most. Jane had never understood her relationship with Jason, and had said things that no best friend should say. About Jason. And her pregnancy.

It’s three am.

No, probably closer to two.

It must be earlier than it feels. Stacy’s cries are like clockwork, which is one of the things that infuriates Jason so much. Every two hours, and then the colicky crying afterwards.

Sorry, Jason, sorry.

Every breath is like inhaling shards of winter. Steel and glass are the only barricades against the night. She can see the light from the tiny window in their apartment. It shines like a beacon out onto the empty street, and Alyssa wonders if she and Jason are the only two people awake in the world.

When will Jason come?

There’s a metal hollow crunch and something buffets the car, like a body thrown against the door.

There’s no-one outside the car.

Headlights shear across the darkness, cutting across the line of chrome carcasses iridescent with frost. She thinks she glimpses the ragged heartbeat of blue and red flashing lights.

Not the police, please, not the police.

A voice yelling, like the roar of a plane engine, or the pressurised violence of a storm.

Alyssa!

Stupid, neurotic fears.

Something throws the brightness of searchlights and sirens into the air. And her head is ablaze with fatigue. Alyssa can’t remember the last time she’s slept normally. Sometimes it feels like Stacy hasn’t stopped crying since she left the hospital.

But Stacy has been strangely quiet tonight. Has barely cried at all.

She looks for the movement of breath, of life. There is nothing. She wants to snatch Stacy up, check she’s alive.

Alyssa slaps her stupid fears away. Neurotic, just like your mother.

She refuses to acknowledge the psychopathic hammering.

Alyssa, open the Goddamn door!

When will Jason be finished?

Jason. His charm, good looks and intelligence had swept her away from friends, and a career as an emerging artist. Her family were all doctors. She’d had the grades for Medicine, but could never see herself as… and there had been the lure of Art School. A great disappointment. So she found symmetry – redemption – in marrying a doctor. Well, not a doctor exactly, but a med student. True, he had a temper. You bring it on yourself. But he was always apologetic afterwards, full of tenderness and kissy, cuddly promises.

Med school hadn’t been everything he’d expected. He had struggled last term… and now with Stacy crying all the time. It wore them both down. Tempers snapped. There was shouting, the slamming of doors, and cruelties voiced but not meant. He’s never hit you.

Alyssa glances at the milky bundle on the driver’s seat, swaddled in pink wool hand knitted by Aunt Janice. The bonnet is a silly, frothy thing and embarrassingly kitsch. You secretly like it. It makes Stacy even more doll-like.

Is Stacy too still? Surely she’s missed a feed. Did she feed at midnight?

You complain when she wakes up, and worry when she doesn’t.

Alyssa is so tired. All she wants is some sleep.

But everything will be better after tomorrow. Today. Jason’s last exam.

Then she and Stacy can sleep in the house again.

Except on some nights, when the crying gets too much for Jason.

Mrs Carter, this is the police. Open the door.

Surely Jason was finished studying?