Awake at three

Text 1: The Landing Window, by Rhiannon Vance

An original short story extract.

At ten past three Priya gave up on sleep, as she had given up on it every night that week, and went to sit on the landing windowsill with her knees pulled up and her forehead against the cold glass.

The street at this hour belonged to nobody. The houses opposite were dark, their curtains drawn like closed eyelids. The streetlamps made small orange islands on the pavement with nothing in them. A car was parked crookedly outside number 14, its windscreen frosted over, so that it looked blind. Nothing moved. It was so still that she could hear the fridge downstairs, and, very faintly, her own pulse, which would not slow down, which had not slowed down properly since the letter came on Monday.

She did not think about the letter. She had become very good, this week, at not thinking about it, the way you get good at walking round a hole in the floor.

Then something moved at the end of the road.

At first she thought it was a dog, loose, and her body tensed, ready for barking. But it did not trot the way a dog trots. It came along the middle of the road in a light, unhurried, slanting line, as though the street were a field and it had every right to be there. In the first lamp it turned from shadow to colour all at once: a rich rust red, a white bib, a long brush of a tail. A fox.

It stopped directly beneath her window. It looked up.

Priya held her breath. She was sure it could not see her, not through glass, not in the dark. And yet its gaze came straight up and rested on her, steady and amber and entirely without fear, and for a long moment neither of them moved. She had the strangest feeling of being recognised: one wakeful creature acknowledging another, at an hour when the rest of the world had gone.

Then the fox sat down in the middle of the road, as calm as a cat on a hearth, lifted one hind leg, and scratched its ear.

Priya laughed out loud. It came out of her before she could stop it, a small, cracked sound in the silent house, and the fox flicked its ears at the noise and trotted on, and disappeared between the parked cars.

She stayed on the windowsill. Her pulse had slowed. In the east, behind the roofs, the sky had begun, very slightly, to thin.

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