MIR Editor

My sister’s castle has three floors and a dungeon. There’s room for Barbie to move around the pink rooms without ripping her skirt. The downside is the doors to the spiral stairs are just stickers, purple doors pasted really badly onto thin pink walls. You could run your finger over them, trace the bubbles of…

I could start with Jair. Someone disbelieving, that’s all it takes. Their boyish shoulders bitten. Suggestive circles inside their airlocked briefs. Take the band in my mouth. Thread the yarn in the lapse between drops of sweat and their cotton removed. Kisses on moist foreheads; only then will the New York Yankees baseball cap flip.

We gathered at the Chinhoyi courthouse very early in the morning, as agreed. It was the quarterly date for circuit court and our journey was considerable; out to Mhangura, a small copper mine settlement on the Great Dyke. It was still cold.

She is gripping Eddie’s wrist tight, an affectionate Chinese Burn to remind him how loved he is. ‘Work okay?’ she asks. ‘Treating you kindly?’             Not wanting to disappoint his mother, Eddie resorts to fabricating elongated stories about his Cancer Research colleagues, about how kind and unassuming they all are.

God it feels good, Baxter! To be back out here with you, galloping across the Dairy Acres stubble! A venerable Wycherly stamping ground. Hounds speaking low and strong, streaking across the fields! The finest view in Europe!

There were more cars than usual parked in the drive. Sat in his van, the gardener flicked off the radio and surveyed the area. It was a sprawling Georgian farmhouse practically in the middle of nowhere, enclosed within a fortress of holly. Houses like this once seemed remarkable, but in his line of work they…

‘It’s not an orgy without five people, minimum. Everyone knows that.’ Livia watched Roland crushing the cube of brown sugar into his espresso with the back of a teaspoon. Every time she visited his basement flat, there seemed to be another horse painting. The bachelor uncle who had left this place to him had been…

At the edge of the woods, imaginations run as wild as the animals, and lives shrink to the size of a village clearing. Those who live in the forest are told to fear its depths, warned of beasts that hungerly stalk the shadows ready to gobble up careless little girls.

ou hate your work. This is the first thing you’ve painted in a year. If you were back at college, you’d smash it where the other girls could see or leave it outside the rec room to be stolen. But here it is, tucked under your arm while you edge along the harbour wall, mid-morning,…