The Road to Hell by Gillian Galbraith

wondered where she was. As her eyes roamed around the room, the realisation that she was in
her sister’s house was accompanied by a physical sensation of dread, of fear almost, as the fact of Ian’s death hit her once more. Feeling tears forming behind her eyes, she
deliberately looked up at the ceiling, blinking them back, and tried to concentrate on the whiteness of it, the strange pattern made by the single hairline crack, anything to distract her from this
new, unwanted reality. But a voice in her head, unbidden by her, repeated insistently: ‘He is dead. He is dead. He is dead,’ chiming like a bell.
    ‘Alice?’ It was her sister, Helen, standing outside the door.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Would you like some breakfast?’
    No. That would be the truthful answer, but it was not worth saying. Sometime she would have to get up, sometime she would have to face them all, and now was as good a time as any.
    ‘Thanks. I’m just coming.’
    ‘I’ll just bring it in then, shall I?’ her sister asked, and, without waiting for an answer, barged her way sideways through the door and into the room. She bore a tray, laid
for breakfast, and on it was a small vase of snowdrops. As if Alice was an invalid, she placed it in front of her, resting it on the blue duvet, and then bent over her, plumping up one of the
pillows, ready for her sit up and lean against them. Then she sat down on the bed and looked intently at her sister.
    ‘Thanks,’ Alice said, looking down at the toast and boiled eggs and feeling no hunger for any of it. The meal seemed about as appetising as her own bedclothes.
    ‘Did you sleep all right?’ Helen asked.
    ‘Fine. Thanks.’ Her answer sounded oddly formal, Alice thought, and added to the air of unreality that enveloped her, that she could not shake off. Everything that mattered had
changed. The world was no longer the same. Yet the rules of grammar were being adhered to, food was being brought at the normal time of day and their exchange had been a model of polite triviality.
But she, or the she that she recognised, no longer existed. She had become hollow, no longer had any substance. There was now a huge gap in her where once her heart had been.
    ‘Do try and eat something,’ Helen said.
    When Alice made no move, her sister took matters into her own hands, knocking the top off an egg with a knife and then buttering the two slices of toast.
    ‘They were laid yesterday, so they’ll be as fresh as can be,’ she said.
    ‘What?’ Alice said, bemused, her mind somewhere else.
    ‘The eggs.’
    ‘What about them?’
    ‘They were freshly laid, yesterday.’
    ‘Were they laid by your hens?’ Alice asked, trying to sound interested, but feeling her chin tremble as she said the words.
    How the hell had this happened? How could they possibly be talking about the identity of the hens that had laid the eggs when Ian was dead? Simply pronouncing his name in her head made the tears
swim in her eyes.
    Because that was all he was now. A name in people’s mouths, a memory in their minds. As insubstantial as air. There was no flesh, no body to touch any more, no eyes to look into, no voice
to hear. He, as she had loved him, was no more.
    ‘Yes,’ she heard her sister’s voice as if in the distance, ‘and I’m pretty sure they are both from the Black Rocks. I got them as pullets, on point of lay, and I
think that these two are a couple of their first efforts.’
    ‘Really?’ Alice answered, trying to infuse her voice with interest, but finding that she was quite unable to think of anything else to add. Mechanically, she lifted her spoon and
sank it into the yolk, watching her sister watching her.

    The kitchen, when she entered it, seemed to be alive with noise. Sam, her four-year-old nephew, was racing around the wooden table on his bicycle, stabilisers squeaking on the
wooden floor. He was naked except for a pair of trainer pants, and his dog, a blue-eyed collie, was tearing after him and