Save it for when you need a little happiness, she had said, pressing the parcel into his hands. When there doesn’t seem to be any left on the horizon. The horizon was nothing now but shards of moon-glow bobbing on… Continue reading

It would have been better if he’d just vanished without a trace. A parent can make up all sorts of hopeful stories then, about other shores, other ships, even about a son who hates them so much, he’d rather disappear… Continue reading

The first time Mother ever screamed at me was just this morning, when I reached for the door. I wasn’t going to go outside – I just wanted to look at the snow that’s been whispering for so long behind… Continue reading

What does it mean to be a goddess? Or to become one? She smiles at me when I bring her tea. Thanks me and drinks it in slow, savouring sips, in time with the rain falling outside, the way anyone… Continue reading

On the fifty-sixth day after she had started waking up to the same day, the same blithe, sunny Saturday morning every time, she stood at the top of the stairs, staring down at where her father’s still, broken body had… Continue reading

Numb hands grasping a hilt he could feel like his own skin. Numb arms, no sense of the strain he could see taut in the muscles, as they lifted the heft of him. How he could see, that dizzy, encompassing… Continue reading

Every day since he’d been seven and had first decided he would have to sail someday, he had stood at the edge of the salt sea and stared out at where white met the shimmering blue of the horizon. And… Continue reading

A flower for every soul. Some housed in glorious gardens, but she kept hers close always, in a little pot clutched against her chest. Wilted sometimes by wind or heat, but never killed, and she had no place safer to… Continue reading