Of Things Gone Astray. Janina Matthewson

       Mrs Featherby.

      MRS FEATHERBY HAD BEEN HAVING pleasant dreams until she woke to discover the front of her house had vanished overnight.

      They had been dreams of when she was younger and more energetic, dreams of a time when she had full use of her knees. She had saved someone in one of them, someone helpless, she thought, but once awake she couldn’t remember who or why or what had happened next.

      It was the breeze that woke her, naturally. It wasn’t that it was a cold breeze, or even a particularly strong one, but when a person has gone to sleep in perfect stillness, the unexplained movement of air around the room is a rousing influence, and Mrs Featherby had never been a deep sleeper.

      She looked around her for a moment in that state of bewilderment that often occurs in the moments after waking. The light from the street was flooding into the room through the gaping hole that the previous evening had been her bedroom wall. Mrs Featherby blinked hard twice and decided to pull herself together. She stepped out of her bed and walked to the edge of the floor, the wind whipping the hem of her ancient nightgown and pulling at her long, flint-coloured hair.

      It was early, barely five o’clock, so there were no people around, but Mrs Featherby knew that when there were people, those people would stare. She knew that they might even approach the house. That they might ask questions. That they might attempt to breach the sanctity of her home, of her fortress. She set her mouth and turned away.

      Mrs Featherby, whose first name was Wendy, or had been many years earlier, did not waste time in wondering how a tonne of brick and mortar could have been uplifted and transported away without waking her or leaving a trace of masonry on the road. She did what was practical and called the police. She didn’t particularly trust the police, but she felt that it was the correct procedure.

      She was informed that an officer would be sent within the hour, so, thanking her stars that the bathroom was at the back of the house, she performed her ablutions efficiently and impeccably and moved downstairs to the sitting room to wait.

      She wondered if she should have anything ready for the constable when he arrived. She’d always considered herself lucky to not have had the police in her home before, but the downside to this was becoming apparent: she had no idea of the correct etiquette.

      Indeed, it had been so long since she’d had anyone of any kind in the house that she’d all but forgotten how to go about it. The only person that had crossed her threshold in recent months was the young man who delivered her groceries at nine fifteen every Tuesday.

      Was it correct, Mrs Featherby wondered, to refer to the impending officer of the law as a guest? If he was to be a guest she should certainly have, at the very least, a cup of tea waiting, and possibly a biscuit. The cake she’d made on Sunday had been past its best yesterday and she’d thrown it out. She had intended to bake a replacement, but doing so before seven in the morning simply for the imminent arrival of an officer of the law seemed a little extravagant. And he might arrive in the middle of the process, which would be entirely inappropriate. She would make some biscuits later in the day, she decided, as she’d intended. There was no need to rush the process.

      Tea would do, she decided. Tea would be enough.

      Mrs Featherby sat still and upright in her chair, gazing through her absence of wall into the garden beyond. She sat still and upright and waited.