Chelsea Chong

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Bury Them


They wake her every night. One am. Two-twenty. A quarter to four. Not the children. They sleep through the night because James insisted on sleep training them the old-fashioned way and, as brutal as it had been, Anne is grateful it worked. She got her nights back for a while and felt herself returning; body softening, nervous system settling into a resting state, but now they wake her and steal her sleep and she’s too frightened to tell anyone.

Not even James.

Especially not James. He’d move too quickly. Take action without considering all the possibilities, and she’s not ready for that. Anne needs time to weigh her options, but thinking has become difficult, like seeing the road ahead on a foggy night’s drive. The sheer effort, her fingers gripping tight, eyes squinting, trying to make out solid lines, the boundaries of reality obscured by a thick and persistent haze.

It is morning again now, and so Anne stands in front of the bathroom sink scrubbing the dirt from under her fingernails, as has become her daily habit. James is still sleeping. Silently. He does not snore. The kids are watching their iPads in the kitchen, having gotten themselves up and, like little homing beacons, gone straight for their screens. There’s a twinge of guilt in her at the thought of their excessive screen time, but she quickly pushes it aside. She has no space to dwell on the things she should be doing better.

When her nails are clean, Anne dresses and makes breakfast for the children, one eye on the kitchen clock. James will need to take the kids to kindy and school today since Anne has an early meeting with the hospital management. She makes herself a double-strength latte and stands watching Mae and Vince eat their toast, unwilling to stray from their screens for even a second. Anne closes her eyes and takes a sip. The darkness behind her eyelids is peaceful now because they are not there, scratching, crawling, beckoning her out onto the dew-laden grass.


Fuelled by caffeine and adrenaline, Anne attends the meeting with hospital management. Afterwards, she heads straight to the trauma ward to check on Samuel Gunn, the thirty-two-year-old man she put in an induced coma yesterday after he’d crashed his motorbike into a truck. She finds him alone in his room, only the rhythmic shush of the ventilator to break the silence.

Samuel is white. Ninety-five kilos. Scruffy. Tattooed. A drinker, Anne knows since his blood alcohol reading was .09. A stupid choice to down whatever it was and hop on a bike, but mistakes take on an amorphous quality in the trauma unit, as though the body has already absorbed the blame.

Anne looks down at Samuel and feels tired, the wakeful night descending suddenly and coating her mind in fuzz. She sits in the chair beside his bed. She should move. Get up. Keep going, but she can’t.

He will die, this broken man. Anne knows this with certainty, though medically, he still has a chance to survive. She hasn’t shared her intuition with anyone, but she’s not often wrong. It comes as a sensation. A sinking of the stomach, impossible to push aside. It’s there now as she studies the plethora of monitors; ECG, hemodynamic, intracranial pressure, Sp02, respiratory volume and pressure. He’s technically stable, but she knows he will go soon. A day. Maybe two.

Anne will make sure a social worker is available for the family. She wonders who Samuel Gunn is leaving behind. Siblings? Children? A lover? She met some of his family yesterday in the frenzy of Samuel’s admission, but she can’t remember their faces. Her memory is strange like that. She can’t recall the families, but she can’t seem to forget the patients. Try as she might, they stay with her, and their numbers are mounting.


For lunch, Anne crosses the main street to Dumpling Palace and finds Amos sitting at their usual table. Her stomach flips pleasantly at the sight of his face. She orders and takes the seat opposite him, enjoying the close crop of his beard, and that one dark freckle beside his nose.

This moment—the time before they begin talking—is Anne’s favourite, so filled with possibility. She sees his glasses have a smudge on the right lens, so she reaches over, plucks them from his face and cleans them on her boldly patterned shirt.

Amos lets out his breath. ‘Don’t do that.’

Anne bristles and stops. ‘What?’

Amos runs his fingers through the grey patch at his temple. He’s got more greys than she does, even though at forty he’s five years her junior. He reaches across the table and takes his glasses back, fogs them with his breath and cleans his own lenses.

‘You don’t have to make it weird,’ Anne says, trying to keep her voice light to lift the mood, but it doesn’t work. Amos’ eyes stay heavy.

‘That’s…it’s not what a friend would do.’ Amos shakes his head.

The buoyancy she’d felt being near him vanishes, and something pulls tight inside. She’s losing him. She can sense him going.

A waitress delivers Anne’s dumplings, and she sits staring at them, the soy sauce black and oily in its little ceramic bowl.

After too many vodka shots at the hospital ball last week, Amos told her if he couldn’t have her, they needed to stop hanging out. Stop texting. Stop meeting for lunch at Dumpling Palace. It wasn’t fair, he said. It was too hard.

That night was the closest Anne has ever come to cheating on James, but she can’t. She’s not willing to risk her family. And Amos doesn’t want casual. He wants everything.

When the alcohol had left his system, Anne persuaded him to try their friendship again.

Silence stretches between them now.

Amos stands and walks out, leaving four dumplings uneaten on his plate.


That night, they wake her at one fifty am. The digital clock on James’ bedside table casts a dim glow. He never wakes. Not once in the year they’ve been scratching at the back door, their dull voices murmuring until she climbs out of bed to tend to them.

But not tonight.

A shiver traces her spine, but she places her earplugs in, and rolls onto her side away from James and the clock. Surely, Anne thinks, if she can hold out long enough, they will give up and return to where they belong.


In the morning, Mae is sick. James left early for work. Vince sits at the kitchen counter eating toast and watching Bluey, but Mae doesn’t have an appetite. She lies on the couch, and Anne wonders if her limbs have always been that floppy.

Anne pours apple juice into Vince’s drink bottle, delivers it to him, and makes her way over to her daughter. Mae wears her school uniform, a green polo shirt and navy shorts. Anne pulls Mae’s shirt up to check her breathing and drops to her knees beside the couch at the sight of the hungry red rash covering Mae’s torso. It’s spreading down into her shorts and creeping up onto her neck. How could Anne have missed this?

Anne’s hand trembles as she presses her fingertips into the rash and pulls her hand away. The redness doesn’t seem to fade. No blanching, and Mae’s breathing is fast. Too fast. Anne takes her temperature, and when it’s 39.8 degrees, she knows it’s bad.

Her call to James goes unanswered, so she dials Amos instead.

He picks up on the second ring. ‘Hey?’ There’s a question in his voice. Concern. What is she doing calling him? And why at seven am?

When Anne relays Mae’s symptoms, Amos tells her to come straight in. He will be waiting in the paediatric wing of the ER.

On the way, Anne can hardly keep her eyes on the road for glancing back at Mae. Her daughter is sleeping in her car seat, face flushed. Vince is singing softly to himself. This is a punishment, Anne thinks. For failing to tend to them last night. For putting her earplugs in and lying awake for hours pretending they weren’t out there, waiting.


Amos is waiting for them, just as he said he would be. He wears green scrubs, his black-rimmed glasses neatly in place.

He smiles at Mae as Anne places her in the hospital bed. ‘Hello. Not feeling too good today?’ Amos crouches beside the bed.

Mae shakes her head, lethargic, eyes half-shut.

Anne’s chest is uncomfortably tight, and she has to force her words out. ‘Sepsis. The rash and the breathing. I think it’s sepsis. I’ve got a feeling.’

Amos doesn’t look at Anne. He simply nods once, keeping a steady smile and his eyes on Mae in the bed. ‘Can I have a look at your chest please, Mae?’

Mae nods, and Amos gently lifts her polo shirt to expose her rash-ridden torso. He presses two fingers into the middle of her chest and pulls them away, leaving a distinct white blotch. Blanching. There’s blanching, so it’s not sepsis, but Anne could have sworn that hadn’t happened at home.

She drops onto a chair by the bed and hangs her head.

Vince sits at her feet, still quietly singing a song about a monkey.

Anne looks up at Amos and shakes her head, eyes wide, and there’s no need to say anything because he knows.

A nurse enters, and Amos speaks softly to her before catching Anne’s eye and motioning to the door, asking Anne to step outside. The nurse is taking Mae’s temperature again. Mae’s breathing has eased, so Anne steps into the hallway.

‘Roseola, probably,’ Amos says. He stands close and whispers. ‘You okay?’

Anne’s breath catches at his proximity and his tenderness.

She can’t look him in the eye. Knows if she does, she’ll cry. ‘Yeah. I’m fine,’ she says, and stares at her feet, noticing her socks don’t match, one plain white, one patterned and pink. When she finally glances up at Amos, his face is lined with concern.

‘Are you still punishing yourself for that?’ he asks, and she knows immediately that he is talking about the patient she lost to sepsis this time last year. The twenty-year-old under her care. The missed signs. The antibiotics that came too late.

Alexis Bradley.

The very first of her patients to begin visiting after midnight.

‘Are you sleeping?’ Amos asks, but Anne doesn’t answer. She can’t. Her throat feels swollen shut.

She needs to tell him. About them. About all of them. She wants to know if he can see a pattern she can’t. Needs him to tell her they will go away eventually, but at her extended silence, Amos takes a step back.

‘Have you spoken to James about this?’ His voice is professional now. Her head snaps up, and she can see he’s left her again. Become a paediatrician. Just a colleague. Her heart aches, and tears come.

Amos scrunches his eyes shut and lets out a frustrated breath. After a moment, he takes a step closer. ‘You need someone,’ he whispers. ‘If it’s not me, go to him. Open up to him.’ His voice is pleading, urging her back to her husband.

Anne stares down at her mismatched socks, unwilling to explain to Amos the intricacies and limitations of James.

‘Take time off then,’ he says. ‘Get out of here and take some time.’

But Anne shakes her head. She can’t take time off. Doesn’t want to. This place is the railing of her life, and she knows without it, she’d float dangerously off course.

‘You don’t know what you want,’ Amos mutters before he turns and walks away.


They wake her at five past two the next morning. James is silent as always, his plain, clean-shaven face lit by the clock, his skin slightly blue. The scratching is louder this morning, accompanied by a soft moaning she’s never heard before. Retribution, she thinks, for ignoring them yesterday.

The scratching she’s become used to, but the moaning disturbs her. It’s the sound of pain ebbing in from her backyard, slicing to her very core. Anne gets out of bed, places a hand on the wall to steady herself and finds she is shaking. She doesn’t want to do this again, and yet here she is, padding down the hallway towards the kitchen and the back door.

When she reached the end of the hallway, she pauses. The back door is made of glass, and with one more step, she will see them out there. Closing her eyes, steadying her breath, she reminds herself they are not here to harm her, or James, or the children.

They are simply here.

She opens her eyes, takes one step and there, kneeling at her back door is Samuel Gunn, his tattooed arm still severed from the impact of the delivery truck, his undead body coated in soil, half of his jaw missing.

Behind Samuel is Alexis Bradley, her young flesh puckered and purple, sweat trickling down her arms and legs. Michael Wong is behind Alexis, the bulbous growth of cancer still protruding from his left eye.

The sickly-sweet stench of decay mingles with the tang of fertilised earth.

There are too many. More than Anne can count.

They kneel on the wet grass, dirt-flecked skin pallid under the bright moon, waiting.

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Banner Art:
Photo by fitra zulfy on Unsplash, 2016