Fiction

‘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…

There are fireworks in the air today, tiny invisible fireworks sparking off me and Tom. Bangers, rockets, Catherine wheels. A spark from me ignites him. A spark from him ignites me. I want to run outside and walk on and on to nowhere.

31 January I’m in a harbourside café in Wellington, stealing a summer from the south. Catapulted into the light, guilty about flying this far but wanting to visit my brother, I arrive with pale peaky skin, eyes squinting at the brightness, legs shaved for the first time in months.

The dump was a big, steep-sided crater in an old slagheap next to Miley’s scrap yard. From the top, fourteen-year-old Habib lobbed a stone at a fridge poking out of brambles that crept up the slopes. It missed.

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,…

I have my father’s eyes. They stare back at me in the mirror. “You’ll never make the baseball team,” they are saying. Rows of boys in letterman sweaters—a snapshot of the American Dream. “God bless President Kennedy,” they are saying. They are not me.

Just as she will allow none but she to cut the children’s hair and nails, so she will allow none but she to tend to her plants. Eight and possibly nine baby seedlings poke their small heads from the soil of the chilli plants container and she is delighted.

We named him Miles because when he was born, he was kind of blue. The umbilical cord was wound tight around his neck, the same way I used to wrap the telephone cord around my finger, sitting in the hallway, talking about boys

I am a Warder at the Gallery of National Art and I pass each day in silence. I sit in a narrow chair and watch the pictures on the walls, the people who wander by and the motes of dust in the thick air.