Corridor Nine
by Sophie Stocking
Seven years ago Bernadette Macomber did everything she could to cut her ties to her father Fabian, his opiate addiction, gun collection, and increasingly bizarre behaviour. She moved with her husband and four children, leaving no return address. Now, following his suicide, her father paradoxically makes contact again, and Bernadette finds herself not liberated but tethered to him ever more tightly by the bonds of familial guilt. Desperate for absolution, Bernie returns to her father's home to hunt for evidence of his insanity and to try and understand why suicide became his answer. While she remains driven in her quest to understand the power of the parent/child bond, her father, Fabian, locked into his after-life purgatory, pushes for freedom via any available loophole through the punishing bureaucracy of personal evolution. While exploring his options, he encounters his jailor, the demon/angel Bune in the afterlife space of Corridor Nine. The colliding events trigger a...