Excerpt from ‘Boundary’, by Leif Bodnarchuk of Larne Writers’ Group

Perhaps a year later the McKee family moved in; at first I simply craved attention, racing through the house rattling glasses, shuffling papers and tapping windows, unable to express my confusion as a man should. By 1912 I managed to drive them away and afterward the house lay dormant.

Workmen emptying the house were overseen by an official-looking man who spoke little; he seemed a superstitious sort, for after all contents were removed he made

the effort of hanging near the door a curious thing, a mirror framed in amethyst.

Once alone I inspected it and to my astonishment, for the first time since my death I saw myself. I looked just as I did that day; clean shaven, white shirt and collar with blue necktie; my favourite grey lounge suit; my short brown hair had been covered by my Homburg hat, but it was kicked out of the house by men carr ying my body away. I remembered my wife Heather running her fingers through my hair before I left home. I longed for her; she never visited my place of death, but who would want to see such a thing?

For decades I watched fashions change and people in the street come and go. In the amethyst mirror gathering dust I grew older, and my jacket frayed at the lapels.

I wondered if Heather had passed, hoping if so, it was natural. I could not bear her suffering a fate like mine.

Isaw nearby houses demolished by frightening machines and feared a cruel second fate should my walls perish. I had grown to accept a conditionless sentience as my reality, but my greying face showed me nothing in this world remained forever. When I was alive, I never dreaded death as I did studying my translucent, aging reflection.

During one terrible spring, the sky groaned some nights, the earth shook, and explosions rocked the area, but the house remained. People died in the streets, and from my window I saw their spirits rise and walk north to a hidden shimmering source. After the damage, the rats came; I tried to drive them out, but to my dismay they were oblivious to my presence. The thought of the rot, of irreversible damage, the fearsome machines tearing a hole in my strange dimension, delivering me to an unknown, all wracked me with a gnawing anxiety.

Desperately alone, I conceptualised terrible ends and yearned for one, a real death.

Read the full story at: leifb73.com/boundary