We are burgled one Saturday afternoon when we are out seeing a play about Gareth Southgate.
They force the back gate and smash through the patio door in driving rain. There is splintered glass all over the carpet. Upstairs, they ransack my bedside drawers. Leave piles of stuff tipped out over the bed: letters, photos, earrings, boxes of medication.
The kids’ rooms are untouched, thank God, but they take my old laptop off the side, leave mud on the curtains and long smears down the wall.
I drop the kids with a friend. A young policeman arrives, he looks around, then flings open the Hoover cupboard like someone might be hiding inside. His back against the fridge, he talks loudly into his radio. I feel like he is pretending to know what he is doing. Forensics turn up wearing latex gloves and leave ashy marks on the door frame.
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Much later, a tired man in red overalls boards up the huge hole in the door.
Once everyone has left, I move around the house in silence.
It feels different, a cold energy and unfamiliar smell. I imagine the intruders kneeling in the dust balls by my bed, their gloved hands on all my things. There is a noise in the hallway. I shout out, but it is my cat, Sunny, stretching out her claws. I pick her up and look at the reflections in her eyes.
‘You see anything?’ I ask her. ‘Why didn’t you scare them off?’
She is purring so loudly she is dribbling.
In the bathroom I sit on the toilet and cry.
I fill the sink with soapy water and clean the dark streaks off the wall.
I get out the Hoover and try to suck up all the glass.
The following day, I tell my street WhatsApp group, and something emerges on a neighbour’s CCTV. They send me footage but it’s nothing. A man in a blue anorak waiting outside Super Pizza. Possibly glancing at our terrace, but it is very hard to tell. I don’t mention it to the kids.
The house was dark and empty, I tell them. It was raining. They thought they could try their luck.
‘I don’t like it,’ my daughter says.
‘I know. It’s horrible. But it happens.’
‘When will the window get fixed?’
‘Soon. They need to order the glass.’
My son is quiet. Eventually he says: ‘This is bad.’
‘I know.’ I stroke his hair. ‘The main thing is that we are all okay.’
‘Is it?’ he says.
I am trying hard to sound calm.
‘I’ll get a camera and fix the gate,’ I say. ‘It will feel much better, I promise. It won’t happen again.’
I pay an electrician to fit a motion light with a camera trained over the back door. The camera has an app with a live stream. I can turn the light on and off with my phone. The app’s logo is a blue and white shield.
If someone triggers the light, an alert pops up on my phone: Human Detected.
As soon as it is fitted the alerts come thick and fast. My son with his football: Human Detected. My daughter on her phone: Human Detected. A fox sitting on the wall: Human Detected. When the light is triggered, the camera takes a ten-second video and stores it away in the cloud.
*
The following Saturday we are on the M25 driving home after visiting friends.
The car slows, comically almost, lorries speeding past us like we’re in a wind-up toy, an acrid smell coming through the air vents.
My son pulls out his headphones. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘It sounds bad.’
‘I know.’
I’m panicking. My legs feel like jelly. Years of driving and it’s suddenly lost on me how to use the clutch.
My daughter leans between the seats. ‘Where’s that disgusting smell coming from, Mum?’
‘Please be quiet.’
There is a low rumbling noise. I put on the hazards and come to a halt on the hard shoulder. I put my head on the wheel.
‘Fuck. Fucking hell.’
‘Mum, are you okay?’
Cars whip past. I am shaking.
‘Don’t open the doors,’ I shout. ‘Don’t. I need to call the AA.’
A recorded voice tells me that my call is important to them, but I need to hang up and download the app to report my breakdown instead. The chat bot tells me that my message is important and that they are working to get someone to me as soon as they can.
‘Can they help us?’ my son asks. ‘Are they coming?’
‘Yes. Somebody is coming,’ I say. ‘But we need to get out of the car.’
Sat on the dark verge, my daughter pulls her arms around her knees.
‘This is a complete nightmare,’ she says. ‘Everything is going wrong. We are cursed.’
‘No, we’re not, honey. It’s just an old car.’
My son stares at the road pulling out fists of grass. ‘You’re so stupid,’ he says to his sister.
‘Your clutch has gone,’ the AA man tells me. ‘It won’t be cheap. I can tow you home, but your insurance doesn’t cover that.’
‘It’s late, we need to get back.’
‘Luckily for you I was just around the corner on another job.’
Right. Lucky us.
We get home and go straight to bed, but in the middle of the night my son is sick. It’s an angry puke and goes everywhere, all over his bed, splashes over his Liverpool rug. I help him up to the toilet and stroke his back.
‘Jesus, my love, poor you.’
I fetch his duvet and hose it down with the shower, the brown sludge of his meat patty, his fast-food dinner, rinsing it away is quite something, jamming lumps of it down the plug hole.
He is retching over the toilet bowl.
‘Get it all out, that’s it. Sip water if you can.’
‘I feel so bad,’ he says. He burps.
I touch his forehead. Clammy but no fever.
‘You’ll be alright,’ I say. I give him more water.
‘Can I come in with you, Mum?’
I rub his back. ‘It’s been a hard week. You’ll feel better in the morning.’
I put him down next to me. When I finally get back to sleep, I dream I am sinking in a submerged car that has skidded off the road.
I wake up, gulping air, and immediately google what to do if you drive into a lake.
When I go downstairs, my daughter is in the kitchen sticking a bread knife through the seal on the milk.
‘Please don’t do that.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t wake up your brother. He needs to sleep.’
‘What are you going to do about the car?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
I fill the kettle, then I tell her that if we drive into a lake by accident, she shouldn’t open the doors but escape through a window. ‘Swim straight out and up, and if you are disorientated, head towards the bubbles, then you’ll know you are going the right way.’
She is eating her cereal, her head half inside the bowl.
‘What the hell are you going on about, Mum?’
‘I’m trying to protect you.’
‘From what?’
The kettle boils.
‘Don’t worry.’
I pour my tea and give her juice.
*
A few days later a package arrives. I have ordered ‘Spirit Sticks’ that claim they will banish all the bad! Cedar and sage bunched together with instructions for a spell. The packet says I should light them, then direct the smoke around my home, my loved ones, and anything else that needs it.
When the kids get home from school I show them.
‘They work,’ I say. ‘I’ve done my research. I’ve looked up the reviews.’
My son lies face down on the sofa with his phone.
‘I promised I’d play FIFA,’ he says.
‘No. Let’s try this first.’
I fetch a wooden spoon and saucepan and tell him to bang it as it burns, or it can’t do its work. I give my daughter a baking tray and ladle. She starts hammering away. I can feel it in my teeth.
My son ignores us.
My daughter grabs his phone. They start to fight but the whoosh of the flame as I set light to the sticks shuts them up.
‘Shit. Stand back.’
‘Fire! What are you doing, Mum!’
We blow it out together, with effort. The embers glow red then bright orange and a plume of thick smoke fills the room.
‘It really stinks,’ my son says.
‘It has to stink or it won’t work.’ I hand him the spoon. He is reluctant, but I can see he is on the cusp of joining in. I make circles around the boarded-up glass, then loops above the sofa.
‘It says we should do a chant.’
‘Mum! Please, no.’ My daughter is shaking her head.
I start with the suggestion from the packet: In the name of Mother Nature, get all the bad energy away … I make a swooping motion with my arms like I’m pushing it out the door.
My son watches very still.
‘It says we should put salt around the edges of the rooms. Who wants to do that?’
‘I’ll do it.’ My daughter disappears then returns with the shaker.
‘It’s working,’ she says, as she seasons the carpet.
‘Great. Now the kitchen.’
I make figures of eight over the counter and the sink. There is a low cloud all around us. My son bangs a dull rhythm on his pan. His face becomes serious. ‘Let me do it, Mum,’ he says.
I hand him the sticks and we follow him up the stairs. He cleanses the bathroom, then in each bedroom he waves it around the curtains, the pillows, inside my empty drawer.
‘We need to do each other,’ he says.
We take it in turns to trace each other with the sticks. My son does me. He climbs up onto my bed so he can reach and swirls them above my head until ash drops into my hair.
‘In the name of my mother,’ he says quietly as he finishes by my feet.
My daughter is coughing. ‘Can we stop doing this now?’
‘Yes. It’s enough.’
They both disappear. I open a window and let the smell blow out.
Later, I put pizzas in the oven and we eat in front of the television.
‘Where did we get all this bad energy from?’ my son asks though a mouthful of food.
‘Nowhere. We didn’t.’
My daughter is eating while doing the splits. ‘It’s not even that bad,’ she says.
‘We made good of it now anyway,’ I say.
We watch Brooklyn 99 and laugh till our sides hurt.
*
That night there are no alerts, but at 3am I wake up and watch the live stream on my phone. A black and white picture of our back yard in the dark. I turn on the light and the space floods with colour. A bird’s eye view of our small scrap of grass. The light is so bright it makes things look fake. Daffodils wave mechanically in the breeze. A garden chair has fallen over and is laid down on its side.
No Human Detected.
I go to the cloud and click on a clip it recorded earlier, not long after the kids had gone to bed. There I am, in my sweatshirt and frayed shorts, my hair static, on tiptoes, peering over the back gate.
Evie Wyld awarded Small Bad Things third prize. ‘I felt cold reading this,’ Wyld said, ‘the fantastic expectation of violent horror. I loved it, I am still in the window with the protagonist.’ Hastings is a writer, artist and creative producer based in London. Her stories have been published by Chroma Editions, Dear Damsels, Galley Beggar Press, Mechanics Institute Review, Southword and Thi Wurd. She recently won the European Writers Salon Prize and was shortlisted for the 2025 Desperate Literature Prize. She was the winner of the Seán O’Faoláin Short Story Prize and The Aurora Short Fiction Prize 2021. She was a finalist in the Manchester Short Fiction Prize and has been longlisted for The BBC Short Story Award. She is the co-recipient of UCL’s 2025 Trellis Arbor artist/researcher commission and works as a producer/arts facilitator at dementia charity Resonate Arts. She lives in London. She will be awarded €1,000.
