It is late afternoon when she gets home, and the first thing she notices is that the oil drip spot in the driveway is still wet. She knows that her mother’s cheeks will be too. She steps into the house, not announcing her return, but not hiding the resigned thump of the closing front door. There is no way to avoid it; they never argued in their own bedroom, always in the dining room – and there she is: “Oh… Hi Sara!” Her mother has no energy even to reach for more tissues. “Hi.” “How was your day, hun?” “Good.” She walks past the table, trying to retain the image of the church – the girl in blue is waiting for her to return, and grow daisies beneath her feet. “Wait, Sara, please… can you sit with me for a moment?” “I’ve got a lot of work to do.” “Can’t you… Sara –” The words are lost, and the woman surrenders herself again to the table beneath her elbows, where every dark feature in the wood becomes a scar of shame as the girl climbs up the stairs into a place so far away. She is the girl, who treads on wind-strewn weeds, and beckons to the splashes of white on green. The flowers are so small now on the canvas, and whether they are petals, snowflakes, or visions of Elysian spirits is unclear. The tired greys of the church now watch over her, and the steeple casts half her face and breasts into shadow, the tip of that inverted bottle meeting the upper curve of her dress. At the sound of ceramic against plaster, her hand slips, and the blue becomes corrupted with an aggressive streak of shadow. Her shout is drowned by those below. It used to be that he only left on weekends, and returned by Sunday night – now, she never knew whether he’d be home or not, and although his presence became less and less regular, it also became more disruptive, scattering the images of places and people until her brush would only produce shattered frames of vague colours. She goes to the church after the end of school, and the girl in blue follows. Let’s stay here a while. She sits on the road, watching the sun dance past the point of the church, narrowly evading the threat of being cut into two. Isn’t that pretty. The girl in blue decides that where she is, it’ll be sunset forever – a suspended moment of finality, of pink clouds crowning a darkening sky. A promise of stars, and a promise that the sun will rise again after only a few hours of night. She is far away, now – she could dream that the warmth beneath her legs is drying black paint, and that just a few steps away, separated only by a picket fence and the whole inscrutable world – the girl in blue reaches to the ground for something out of sight. Sunset passes, and that fantasy fades with the light. When the girl returns home, roast lies stagnant on the dining table, by a mauve card which says happy birthday on the cover.