On the bus to her mother’s funeral, and Maizie forgot to bring money. No point to turn back now. Already Ohio. Maizie has no credit card and no friends to…

I do my best to smooth the duvet, its creases swirling like milk hitting coffee. The body in the bed isn’t helping. The dead woman’s beads – borrowed, amber, still…

We sit cross-legged on the polished parquet floor, the teachers on red plastic chairs at the ends of our rows. We chat quietly to our neighbours while we wait for…

As soon as April had a handle on the alphabet, her parents delegated her education to books. On her fifth birthday, they chucked an unwrapped dictionary at her and instructed,…

When I visit my sister in Summer, she says she wants to be the farmer who tills rapeseed, the crow that flies low over him, says she wants to be…

Bryan, parting the Perspex fronds of a 7-eleven refrigerator unit, doesn’t see Nora approach. But his bones quiver as he fetches the milk. Plastic strips down a back, straggle-bun, plaid…

A bee is on the tarmac going slow for sugar. She tells him bees are yawnsome. I mean, look how they surrender after just one sting, she says, and wearing…

When Mother died I got together with Shauna and she was everything Mother was but possibly better. She didn’t need face creams, nor a forearm when going down steps, and…

The man lifts the sandwich and bites, as he has done every twenty-six seconds since birth. With casual clothes in acrylic hues, dangling legs and nodding head, he represents tranquility,…

When they came to fetch me, they came with nets dragged behind them. I watched them getting slower and slower as they went, their backs bending and their heads down,…

Emily, a divorced high school teacher whose ex-husband gambled away their retirement fund, whacked me in the chest with a baseball bat. “Harder. Like Barry Bonds” “Who?”  “Nevermind. Just swing…

Don’t wear the little green dress, the one we bought you for your sixteenth birthday. The one that matches your eyes. The one I joked about. “Nice, but where’s the…