‘A woman she does not recognise sits beside her. She smiles at Adeline and Adeline thinks, there is a corpse in the next room.’

‘The roar of an engine is what you hear first, that and the shrieks.’

‘Eileen daubed the river mud on her arms, dredging up great handfuls and sliding them down her skin, and on the skin of her legs and chest above her swimsuit, like they used to do when they were kids. Mud soap. We’re taking a bath, they’d yell.’

‘I step onto the balcony. The first time today, although it’s getting late. I want to step outside at least once a day. Otherwise, I feel like a trapped man. It was your idea for us to move here. I’m getting used to it. I light my cigarette.’

‘Nell knew the men were discussing how to start cutting at the thing, trying to decide how to get the meat off of it.’

‘He woke with a terrible cramping in his stomach, and whether or not this was a sign of things to come, the cramping did not abate on arrival at the church. Silently listing the members of the parish council, Pawel stood above the grey object. It was a rock.’

‘Where once stood a man, now stands an instrument. They have hollowed out my chest and their hammers hover above my ribs, quivering with a morbid anticipation. I say what they want me to.’

‘He was tired: of holding the sky, the weight of the clouds, how the rising puddles would flood his furred boots, chilling his toes.’

‘Autumn passed. The tree’s branches turned to rust. It shed what needles it could spare.’

‘“You’re not what I expected.”
The man’s brow narrows — such a cliché. At what age do we learn to pull our eyebrows together when we’re confused? Surely, it’s not innate.’

‘There’s a buzzard hovering over the tor. It’s beautiful.’

‘I needed no help. My insistence, my scorn of two decades.’

‘The lady next to me on the park bench says she sees me here every day and should she read my tea leaves. I ask who wrote it. She guffaws, throws her head back hard.’

‘I’ve decided to write a 500 word flash fiction inspired by the prompt ‘other people’ which will cover the imaginary subject of my boyfriend's death.

However the twist is that he both exists and doesn’t.

I appreciate that's confusing.’

‘They guard class conversation like black oil Dobermans. The first seminar is a prospectus collage sticky with sun-softened glue resin.’

‘You will call me old-fashioned (you have no idea).
One must move with the times, yes; but the Moon Base did not see my best work. Gravity was weak, slow. My pieces were all molten truculence: a brutalism of tubes, sterile screens, abstract gleam.’

‘Protected, inside his aluminium Johnboat. His feet rest on her silver hull and back against her wooden ribs. Those hands with fish-bone cuts, untangle nets. There he drifts patiently, in our horseshoe harbour, waiting for the Varagen.’

‘When my youngest sister, Idabelle, was taken by consumption, Ma insisted we have a photograph taken of all of us together, so she could remember all of her children. We couldn’t bury Ida until the photographer could come from Boston. And so, we had to put her in the root cellar.’

‘How do you know I swim?’

‘Your hair tells me.’

‘I had a husband once. I won’t have one again. We don’t need to talk about that. ‘