Vanilla Slice

Short Story | 500 words | Exploring familial grief in Fortitude Valley

A girl is asphyxiating on a sticky, pulsating dancefloor in the Valley. Her neon outfit catches the strobe lights, her blue face staring up at the shimmering disco ball. The crowd thrums to the techno beat, their $10 basics sloshing as bodies jump and shout. Black-out curtains drawn so we see each other as our best selves: obscured drunken visions in the dark. Guilt and anguish strapped into a silver mini-skirt and a mesh top, performing normalcy. Humanity’s insistence on living.

I lock eyes with her. Her purple lips. His pale ones. Her pointed nails clawing at her throat. His hand clutching his chest. Their silent pleas for help.

My body works on autopilot, having replayed the scenario in my head for six months. My hands dial triple zero; my legs fold under me as I pull her onto her side. DRS ABC. No, that was for drowning, wasn’t it? Recovery position. Airway. My fingers in her throat. Paramedics’ hands cracking his ribs, trying to restart a heart that had failed ten minutes ago. Pain in their final moments.

I ride in the ambulance. Blue, red, blue, red. Sirens blaring nonstop. They hadn’t gone this fast, then.

Tube in her throat. His body jolting from the defibrillators. I picture her in the morgue, the autopsy report dissecting her last moments. Five shots of tequila and Lexapro. For him, a blood clot and half-digested custard and pastry. Would he have asked that of his executioner, had his last meal been his choice and not mine?

I’m in a hard plastic chair outside the hospital room. Beeping, shouting, nurses running. I daydream. It’s maladaptive, the therapist had said. Everything I do seems to be maladaptive, though.

I maladaptively imagine the eulogy mapping her life. Prime of her youth, it would say. Leaves behind a child, it had said. Her funeral, more vivid now. White lilies. Powdered face to cover up the dark mottled skin. Mourners patting the shoulder of the surviving family. The black hole of grief.

“If you need anything…”

Anything being insufficient, anyway, because if it were anything, it would be resurrection.

Doctors come out. “Without your quick thinking, we might not have saved her.”

Quick thinking hadn’t saved me, then. The regret swallows the small flicker of relief.

A woman runs up the halls in pyjamas, hair unbrushed, worry etched onto her youthful face. She disappears into the room. Comes back out; I’m not sure how much later.

I should leave.

“Wait a sec, please.”

Okay. Waiting. More than a sec. A few minutes.

Then, a paper bag. A grateful smile.

A vanilla slice sits inside the bag. The sister goes back into the room, leaving the door open, and I blink against the light. The sun’s risen again. I bite into the thick custard, the pastry crumpling in my mouth. I hadn’t eaten one since my dad died.

She climbs into her sister’s bed and they wrap their arms around each other, watching the daybreak.

Humanity’s insistence.