The images are more real, and my pulse is racing racing racing, and I bet if my heart was attached to one of those hospital things, all the fast thumping would break it. I don't normally sit in the shed, especially not at 2 am, but tonight the voice in my head is louder than ever before. I tried holding it between my teeth, but my jaw started to ache so now it's balancing near a spiderweb on the windowsill. I need to get a move on because, just my luck, the flashlight is running out of battery. The box of tiles is digging into my thighs, and a draft is blowing through a gap underneath the shed door. There's no danger of me dropping off in here. In actual fact I never was, and if I'm being honest, I only made the sandwich in the first place to put off starting this letter. Lloyd and Webber meowed as if they couldn't quite believe their luck that the sky was raining sandwiches when I chucked it over the hedge. There's jam on my fingers so the pen's sticky.

Don't ask me what type, but they've got big leaves that are rustling in the breeze. It's bloody freezing and Mum would kill me if she knew I was out of bed, but it's a good place to write this letter, hidden away behind some trees. I'm not sitting in this shed for the fun of it. The sky in a socket, I once said, and Dad got these dimples right in the middle of his cheeks, and I don't know if any of this really matters, but I suppose it's good to give you a picture of my family before I tell you what I came in here to say.īecause I am going to say it. Blue if it's bright outside, gray if it's overcast. Dad's is more like mine, except with gray bits above his ears, and he's got this thing called heterochromia, which means one eye's brown but the other's lighter. Her hair's the same color as my sisters' but shorter and a bit wavy. At least that's what Dad says when Mum turns up her nose. The jam wasn't rotten or anything, because it lasts for years in sterilized jars. I struggled to eat the sandwich in the end. To look at me, you'd never guess my secret. They've both got long blond hair and green eyes and pointy noses, but Soph is tall and thin and darker-skinned, like Dot's been rolled out and crisped in the oven for ten minutes. My sister is small and round so we ended up calling her Dot. When Dad stopped grieving, he decided to shorten it. My little sister was born six months later, and Dad named her after Gran. That was the sound echoing around the hospital room seven years ago. If you ignore the weeks she spent in the hospital attached to one of those heart things that goes beep beep if you're lucky or beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep if you're not. She's been dead seven years, and making that jam was the last thing she did. The jam in the corner's from my sandwich. It wasn't your wife's jam the police found on your shoe. It's jam, not blood, though I don't think I need to tell you the difference.

Ignore the blob of red in the top left corner.

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