Pip Adam is the author of three novels: Nothing to See, The New Animals, which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and I’m Working on a Building. Her short story collection, Everything We Hoped For, won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction.
IN HINDSIGHT, I probably heard the first ones but ignored them. They were probably background to whatever was going on in my foreground and I brushed them off. Maybe it was the microwave, maybe it was a notification on my phone. A hidden box left unchecked, something I’d lost interest in, was maybe still paying for. They were sudden noises. When there were only a few of them, at the start, the dingdingding or the chugga-chug was here and then gone before it…