Four women had been found dead in a house in one of the new estates. You probably heard the story. It was pretty tragic. At first, I had been kind of excited if you want to know the truth. I thought maybe there was a serial killer in our town, something to liven up the summer, you know. But it was nothing as Hollywood as that. The truth was far more simple, and more depressing. Turns out, they’d starved themselves to death. Three sisters and their aunt. They were old, I think the youngest was forty something. They did it for God apparently. Some debt they felt they had to pay. No great political or righteous cause, just their own private deal with their maker. 

Anyway, it really bummed me out. I was going through a sort of aloof phase. While my friends were playing football on the green, I was going for long walks through the estates with my headphones on, listening to Nick Drake, my eyes on the ground in front of me, that sort of thing. I guess I thought I was pretty profound. The trouble with being aloof though, is it only really works if people notice you’re doing it. No one seemed to notice me whether I was around or not. So no one was going to say, “who’s that guy? He’s so aloof”. I guess I wanted to look mysterious but I just looked like a guy with no friends who wore a hoodie in the summer.

Anyway, I started visiting the house where it happened. There was a lot of blame in the papers, about how the community had let these people down. How this wouldn’t have happened in the old days when people knew their neighbours. I’m not sure I believed that. Plenty of bad stuff happened in the old days too, whether your neighbours knew about it or not. A lot of times they knew well, but did nothing. That seemed worse to me.  When I got to the house it was still pretty grim. I figured there’d be flowers or candles or something, maybe even police tape like in the films, but there was nothing that marked it as any different from the other houses in the estate. 

I just stood there looking at it, thinking about how hard it would have been to starve yourself to death. Some of the sisters had written letters to each other in the house. It was depressing stuff. Dying was taking a lot longer than they’d thought. It’s not an easy thing, to die. I think someone said that. It was months before they were discovered. 

I stared at the empty house, smoking cigarettes meaningfully. I don’t really believe in ghosts or anything like that but I still half expected to see something. Some sort of evidence of their suffering–a shadow in the window or a flickering light, a feeling of hunger or even a shiver down my spine. But there was nothing. The house would have new tenants soon. Someone would just move in and clean the stains and bleach the ghosts away. It all seemed so futile.

Still, I kept going back, night after night, to continue my vigil and it killed me that there was nobody else there. But then I guess I wasn’t surprised. They weren’t exactly sociable and I don’t think they had any surviving family. I mean if I lived next to four religious whack jobs I probably wouldn’t have given them the time of day either. But that was while they were alive. I figured now that they were dead they were owed some sort of recognition from the neighbourhood. There needed to be some sort of memorial. It made me angry to think the papers were right. Nobody had cared for them in life and now nobody cared for them in death. So I kept going back. I felt a sort of defiant determination to acknowledge them even if the town had already moved on.

It must have been on the fifth night that the next door neighbour came out and asked me what I was doing. I’d brought some flowers and laid them on the pillar, kind of ceremonially, real sombre like. He wasn’t too pleased when I told him why I was there and he moved me along pretty quickly. He was a bit of an asshole if you want to know the truth. One of those big hairy guys who likes intimidating kids. He was probably a bouncer or something. I’m not really much of a fighter so I just kept saying it was a misunderstanding and backing away. Eventually, after calling me a lot of pretty rude things, and threatening me with all sorts if I showed up there again, he went back inside. 

See, if you really want to know the truth of it, it turned out I was at the wrong house. The women lived another road over. Yeah, I felt pretty stupid then as you can imagine. Anyway, I headed to the actual house and sure enough there were piles of flowers and candles and little prayer cards and stuff. A lot of people had paid their respects. They probably felt guilty for being crappy neighbours. I put my flowers on the pile, they were cheap ones to be honest, and then I walked away. I didn’t even bother looking at the house really. It wasn’t like there was anything to see. The following evening I met up with my friends on the green and we kicked a ball around for a couple of hours. 

No one asked where I’d been. 

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Billy Craven is a teacher living in Dublin, Ireland. He has previously had short stories and poetry published in a variety of magazines including The Caterpillar, Ram Eye Press, Ember and Paper Lanterns.