Fiction

To tell you the truth, I don’t like to remember that day, or the days that followed, but the memory of it is fresh. I can recall that hot afternoon vividly and in detail, when that man showed up at our doorstep.

Margrit Silvia Twist lived across the road from a retirement home. As she closed the front door behind her, she noticed two young carers smoking out of their patient’s window.

Mel will be the first one to turn up and there’ll be a yard-long prep list on the workbench so she’ll start with roasting squash for the soup. She’ll get the stock bubbling and skim its greyish foam.

The release bell rings and I join the men as they fill the landings, a crowd of testosterone swaggering along the hallways, down the stairs, into the dining hall where they jostle and talk so loudly I want to jam my fingers in my ears.

Friends is hard. Harder than writing or numbers. Sometimes, friends get angry, and when they shout, you can see their teeth.

Jake stretches his back, which makes his chair swivel, setting off a wave of nausea. He plants his feet on the floor, looks up, away from the floating colours of his screen to a cratered, grey ceiling tile; he breathes in slowly.

A pale winter light is seeping through the curtains. It turns the dust into grey snow on the fields of the wardrobe and dressing table, curving the corners of the gilt frames and softening the ridges of the picture rail.

At certain times of night, it is hard to know where you are in the hotel complex other than by the carpets. The bedrooms all have the same executive swipe of red, blue and yellow shards.

The first time he came inside her he wasn’t meant to, but she didn’t get mad. She realised, as he jumped up in a show of panic, that she quite liked it.

I am eighty-four. My mind doesn’t work. Ahsan says only one of those things is true. I shiver beneath a blanket by a dying fire before an altar, Ahsan holds my hand and says that we have known each other for a long time.