It’s the faded pink building down the road from the grocery store. An hour by bus from the Metrocable stop. Telephone wires cross the sky, chickens cluck from a nearby balcony, a dog with enormous testicles flees uphill. 1 p.m. Here they come. Chattering busily, streaming through the propped-open door. Ponytails bouncing, shirts untucked and speckled with dust from Tocineta and De Todito crisps. Some are in school uniforms, white socks pulled up to their knees […]

I am walking our dog in the park when the burning sensation infiltrates my throat as though it is new-found land. The burning sensation makes me want to slip into the abandoned baby harness slung over a bench, then run towards a baying that escapes the heat in my blood. The burning sensation has instructions for daylight. In you. Out of you. Beyond you. The burning sensation says the fog expanding in your brain has accomplices. The burning sensation warns […]

To most people, we exist only in books, my bride and I. For the past thirty-five years, I’ve had to watch with impotent horror as our real lives were buried beneath a mudslide of apocryphal stories, false witness, gossip, fabrication, and myth; how our true, complex personalities were replaced by hackneyed characters, reduced to mere images, tailor-made to suit a readership with an appetite for sensationalism. And in all of this, she was the brittle saint […]

My brother’s head sounded like a rabbit’s foot drumming against the baize-coloured carpeting of our room. I had been dreaming about Sarah Claire at our school. She had rabbits. Lots of 4-H stuff, which was why I was mulling signing up. The spittle at the edges of Maxwell’s mouth made him look rabid and he was contorting as if he didn’t have a backbone. I think I said ‘Go, Max, go!’ even though I knew something was well past wrong and death could be here […]

I was the pretty sister. I was the good one, too. Some people said Jackie was the good sister, but that was to compensate for her moving 7,450 miles away from home to save the world. ‘Next right?’ said Jackie, frowning at her phone in the passenger seat. You mean left, babe, I said in my head. Jackie has never had much of a sense of direction, geographically or in life. That’s why I’d come here in the first place—not to see hippos, like I’d told her, but to get her to […]

We began the tunnel behind the bunk bed in the back bedroom. We chose the back bedroom because the guards went in there less often. They were lazy and also had to queue outside the supermarket for an hour or more, which made them lazier still. Some of them were eating cat food straight from the squeezy pouches. It dribbled down their chins and made their eyes go funny. I wonder sometimes if they even knew what they were guarding […]

Yesterday ended in disaster. Very late at night, I decided to write down everything that had happened, the only way I could think of coping. So here goes. Yesterday I woke up at seven thirty in my white-painted wrought-iron bed, felt lazy, decided to have a lie-in. Almost immediately, above me, the neighbours’ bed began creaking. […]

One Wednesday evening, on the stone steps outside an umbrella shop somewhere near Tottenham Court Road, Sam encountered Silvestra de Winter in person for the first, and last, time. Rain droplets spattered down the back of his neck. The umbrellas, lining the window like carcasses in a butcher’s shop, were striped in pinks, greens, and oranges. Some, in what was evidently thought a rather witty touch, had carved animal heads. One duck-headed umbrella looked like […]

It was ironic, she thought. Her first shift at the museum was understaffed, it was just the two of them in ceramics. He was dark-lashed, very slight – given more to edges than the centre of things […]