Guardian Angel

'Hello, I'm your guardian angel,' she said 'I'm here you grant you one wish.' Her eyes shot through with light, her skin pressed out around her lips around her eyes. She took Elise by the arm and gently squeezed it with her own and fell into step. They walked to the corner before Elise could gather up the words. Sasha was a similar height but she bent down to look up into Elise's downcast face.

'I think I have to get out of here, Sasha, I have a dead-end job, Eddy's off the Melbourne, I'm just feeling so sad about my aunt and all of that...I think I just need a change.'

'Change is what I'm good at,' she replied.

Walking

Veri had been dead for less than two months when - just where Elise had become used the noting the patterns made by the thin long leaves of a lemon-scented gum tree all over the path – someone grabbed her by the elbow.

unsubtle bright gold

It took a while for the results to come back. 'Spontaneous Pneumothorax' - the family didn't know what to make of it. Even Eddy seemed unwilling to go into the details. It sounded like something you could take a liking to, not something that would kill you. She was crumpled on the carpet when her husband, Vince, came home. The carpet was dented where she had fallen, both her hands to her throat. Her face was bluish. Her hair unsubtle bright gold. He thought for a while she had fallen, just then as he opened the door. But, when he touched her she was stiff and cold. He told the family he had knelt there for a while, the 7pm news playing on the kitchen radio. Something about it was so ordinary and also so incredible - he couldn't believe that he could reach for the phone and it would work.

How This Changed Everything

Of course, this changed everything. Who Wilhelmina and Elise thought they were to begin with. When you have spent your life defining yourself as against that other, that thing you are not or the differences between you - without it, you lose a sense of what you are. There was some kind of balance to it – Wilhelmina eventually admitted – like being on a see-saw and supported by the wieght of the other. When they dismount and you fall with a bump onto the hard ground. It also changed the feeling of the air in the evening at exactly the time they got the news for the next few years. The way they felt about the currawong calls at sunset. It altered what they expected in the post and how rich the ten cousins would become when the wills were sorted out.