When Misha lost her fifth baby tooth, she understood that she was going to die one day. She couldn’t say why it was this tooth in particular that had caused this revelation, but there it was, plain as the bloody molar in her palm: the truth, plucked out into the open from a place where it had b
Read MoreI can hear my brothers, my uncles, my great-uncles hammering away in the mines twenty floors beneath us. Candlelight toys with the dining room and for a second my world becomes dark. Grandpa begins, spewing out the same rhetoric he does every time the three of us are together. His hands are stain
Read MoreOne for Sorrow, Two for Joy, Three for a Girl and Four for a Boy, Five for Silver, Six for Gold, Seven for a Secret never to be told, Eight's a Wedding, Nine's a Birth, Ten, you must walk to the Ends of the Earth. Traditional counting-rhyme One for Sorrow. The young girl sits at t
Read MoreThe mournful wail of the cop sirens is drawing ever closer, but I feel an explanation is necessary. From the first time I read the book, I was not satisfied with their account of the accident. I was inclined to believe a collusion had been perpetrated on the reader. A collusion in which Fitzgeral
Read MoreWhen Mrs Chen decided to get a divorce, she fretted for a couple of weeks on how best to tell her husband. She knew he would object and she also knew that he would throw things. He would be a rooster in an infinite dawn and she might have to escape to a hotel. She had settled on I want a divorce,
Read More‘Everything you can imagine is real.’ – Pablo Picasso It must be Paris outside; I can smell the rain in the dirt between the cobbles. ‘When are you going to write a story about me?’ you ask, rising from the sofa. Your perfume mixes with the wet-grass scent of the room. I l
Read MoreFrustrating times. Glenn had worked as a junior caretaker at Whittaker Park since he was twenty. That meant lawn-mower or leaf-raker, depending on the season. After ten years he’d persuaded his boss to promote him to caretaker. That meant lawn-mower or leaf-raker, depending on the season. Frust
Read MoreAnna thought: there was a time when people would stop what they were doing, even if they were only walking, and watch, serious and upright, as a cortège went by. Perhaps in other places they still did it. A respect for the dead. Here a funeral car was just part of the traffic, just one of too many
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