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Abbie
“Okay, everyone.” I usedmy sing-song instructor tone as I flattened myself on my mat and closed my eyes. “Let’s move into corpse pose.”
“Hey!” Burt the Third barked over the gentle notes of meditative music floating in the air. “Thought we told you not to use that word anymore.”
My lips quirked as an annoyed murmur rolled through my seniors’ yoga class. I shouldn’t tease them, but when twelve geriatrics tell you not to imply they’re already dead, it’s hard not to laugh.
“My apologies, everyone,” I intoned. “Let’s move intosavasana. Settle yourselves on your mats, face up with your arms by your sides, palms open if that feels good, and eyes closed.”
I waited for the shuffling to ease and silence to fall, paying close attention to the sound of measured breathing over the light yoga track. A faint but insistent hissing sound underpinned themusic, and I made a mental note to remove this song from my play list.
“Breathe in through your nose.” I followed my own advice, then emptied my lungs with a small sigh. “Now let it go. Sink into the floor, releasing all tension from your body.”
A chorus of exhalations answered me, and I fell quiet, leaving the class to their own meditation. Everyone was a regular participant with a good understanding of their practice.
Who was I kidding? Most of them would be snoring inside a minute.
My eyes grew heavier, and my muscles looser as I released another long breath. I’d been a yoga teacher for three years and a serious student for five before that, and I still didn’t take these pockets of rest for granted. My life off the mat was what some people might call… vibrant… and my practice was my stabiliser. I did hours and hours of yoga every week, in class and on my own time. If anyone asked, I told them the best thing about it was it kept me in shape, but that wasn’t the reason I’d never give this up.
Yoga required me to check in with myself every day. It was a reminder that the Abbie Ellison people thought they knew wasn’t always the same Abbie Ellison who went to bed alone every night.
Yes, alone. Every night. It had been a long time between drinks, and this girl was thirsty.
The hissing sound grew louder, and I wondered if the noise might be air whistling through Irena Kowalski’s false teeth.
I did my best to clear my mind, letting my thoughts pass by like cotton clouds in an empty sky, but for whatever reason, today was not my day.Somethingnudged at me, an uneasy sensation of waiting without knowing for what. I didn’t ignore it or try to fight it—I’d long accepted I had a sixth sense for certain things. For one, I could tell when my friends got lucky just bylooking at them—their auras took on this kind of post-coital glow that was hard to miss. And for another, I could feel when change was coming, a sensation of waiting like standing under steel-coloured clouds carrying fat drops of rain.
The hissing grew louder and more urgent. I sat up, looking around for the source.
“Whatisthat?” Burt dragged himself to standing and slapped his faded old baseball cap on his head. “Been getting noisier for the last half-hour.”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted as I climbed to my feet. The sound seemed to come from the ceiling, and I rounded the room slowly, ears straining as I tried to figure out where it originated.
Lorraine Langley, my old history teacher, mirrored my movements on the other side of the room, her knotted feet creaking on the polished floorboards as she passed racks of luscious indoor plants, hunting for the hiss. “Sounds like the time a water pipe broke in my classroom.”
“I hope you’re wrong, Mrs Langley,” I muttered, passing the wall of shelves and hooks that housed my extensive collection of yoga mats, blocks, belts, and bolsters. “I have no interest in dealing with a leak today.”
Around us, all but two of my students were upright. After asking Irena to gently wake the ones still sleeping, I rounded the last corner of the room and still wasn’t any closer to finding the source of the sound.
“I think it’s loudest over here,” Burt called, standing almost directly in the centre of the large room, head tipped back and hands on hips. “What do you think?”
“I think—”
With a soggy crack, the ceiling over Burt sagged, and every chin in the room jerked in that direction. Like a slow-motion horror scene, the hissing grew louder—and wetter. The plasteraround the bulge split and flaked, sending specks of white paint and dust raining down on our heads.
I took a few fast, worried steps forward as, with torturous inevitability, the ceiling gave way.
Someone screamed—me, I think—as an explosion of ice-cold water pelted down over my head.
“Holy fuck!” I skipped out from the gush of water, which was steady but slowing. My feet slipped a little on the wet floor, and I righted myself easily enough before panicking about everyone else’s footing. Not everyone here needed new hips, and I didn’t want to be the reason for a sudden uptick in the sale of bionic joints.
“Nobody move,” I ordered as I sloshed my way to the stack of rubber mats on the opposite side of the room. The water had pooled from wall to wall to a depth of an inch, maybe less. I tried not to worry about that now. Stressing over my business could come after I made sure my clients were okay. “I’m going to set down a row of mats from here to the door, and then I’ll help you down the stairs one by one, okay?”
“I don’t need help getting down a darn flight of stairs,” Burt grumbled, though he did me the favour of not moving.
“For me, Mr Spies?” I threw him a pleading look as I stamped down a rise of panic. “Please? I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
