Troy was tagged. It was like carrying a microwave around on your ankle. What else were they going to do? Get a drone to hover over his head all day following him about? He wore a more flared trouser than he usually liked over it. He’d scratch around it from time to time, but an itchy tag was low d
Read MoreSix minutes and thirty-three seconds. That was the amount of time it took a spark to wind its way down and around the forty-inch fuses attached to the nine cherry-red two-stick dynamite charges that Frank Rasmussen was carrying in his dusty leather satchel. Frank had been excavating mines long enoug
Read More'Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.’ Albert Camus September ‘Gail, dear, you can’t hide cards up your sleeve.’ The nurse points out my mother sitting at the far side of the room in the games corner, but I had already heard her voice, high and shrill. The
Read MoreI woke up that morning, knowing she had gone. Left in the middle of the night. She didn’t sleep well, so it never bothered me when she awoke. She would usually just get herself up, grab a book and go into the living room and curl up on the sofa. I never sensed it was anything to do with me. It
Read MoreJacob knew that logic didn’t always rule the world; at least it didn’t use to. A decade before, as an undergraduate student on a year abroad in Taiwan, Jacob had encountered inexplicable, irrational magic. Now, as an analyst for a private equity firm immersed in a world of numbers and profit, th
Read MoreKimi broke sticks just for the fun of hearing them crack. Dry sticks, thick as the fingers of old men and crooked and brittle. And she’d tread on them in the wood or flex them in her hands or across her knee, and the sound of them breaking was like small gunfire. Everything quiet then and all the
Read MoreÎles de la Madeleine (Magdalen Islands) Canada, 1771 The sea itself feared to swallow a race bold enough to unknot her watery roots… where the giant seaweed moors the horizon to the setting sun. Antonine Maillet, Pélagie la Charette Marie-Andrée Le Blanc has never heard of the
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