“Danger” with Artwork by Sally Doyle

Underneath  this room  is danger.  You can  feel it  when you walk  across  the

floor.  This evening you feel it as you  sit in your  small chair reading.  But still

you  cannot  name it.  The other  members  of  your family who are  staring at

their phones  don’t appear  to be concerned at all.  You stop  reading  to listen,

and rumination turns into trance. Right at the moment when you are thinking,

“Someone has been abandoned,” a woman wearing a surgical mask enters the

room.  It’s then you  notice that  the others in  your family have  gone to sleep.

The woman unbuttons  her dark coat  as if she were  a guest at a  dinner party

about to put her coat  into the arms of the  hostess.  And before you have time

to react or come to your senses, swarms of bees pour out from the black satin.