Patrick Carey

Yes.

of the house that she now lives in with her new partner.

The body is of a 60 year old man.

He's wearing a flannelette shirt and you know, some, you get some details like that, but to get him into the hole, this is in the dream, they've had to hack

and saw through his legs, just at the knee, to get him in there and cut his head off.

And in that dream logic, she's thinking, well, this will be great because the shape of the grave won't look like a grave and no one will notice.

Such great dream logic.

She sort of goes through this Marie Kondo-like obsession to purge the house of unnecessary objects, which is exactly what everybody was apparently doing over summer.

And so she starts to sort of go through things that might remind her of the husband and then she realises actually these are his possessions and you can see her working through the house and building this pile on the front lawn of furniture

things that she no longer wants.

And of course, it's all because there's been this psychic disturbance by the dream, which is now becoming so real that she's really quite obsessed by it.

I was reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his short story, Young Goodman Brown, which has almost the same kind of idea going in it, where a young man goes off

leaves his beautiful young wife and family in this very small American community, goes off to do some business at the next town, falls asleep during the journey, wakes up and sees this, well, satanic ritual around a bonfire going on.

and then begins to recognise the people around that bonfire as the people in his community and even his wife is there.

Is it real?

Is it not?

So very resonant of that short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that she's a big fan of Roald Dahl because his thumbprint is in a lot of these stories.

fiction.

There's some deliberate blurring of lines here about some contemporary issues that are going on in Australia.