Her mother might have been more horrified about the fact she was wasting food than the fact that food came from human veins. Twenty years since moss had started to grow on her mother’s gravestone, twenty three years since she… Continue reading

The soul spins in the chest like clay on a potter’s wheel. The warped sounds of its turning emerge as words and breath and spiral up into crooked thought. Time and the beating heart maintain its motion – tragedy briskly… Continue reading

The last and only thing she had asked was for him to plant the seed over her grave. Instead, he had tucked it in his pocket and taken the bus, ticket already booked before she’d breathed her last request, halfway… Continue reading

Children still played in the street. That seemed to be the only thing that hadn’t changed. The entire face of the neighbourhood had been torn away and rebuilt, maybe more than once. The optimistic patchwork of houses built with whatever… Continue reading

I can walk out the front door into the wide, busy, surprising world and do whatever I want. But he can’t, and so I stay. He smiles at me across the breakfast table at 9:34 exactly every morning. At least,… Continue reading

It was the worst place her car could have stopped. Sputtering one last rum-bitter gasp of spent fuel, a shuddering fume-cough, then rolling to a silent, inertial halt on the gravel shoulder. Under a moon that was always new on… Continue reading

I love you. He leaned over my bed and whispered it, while I pretended to sleep. Again and again, so close that his breath quivered my eyelashes, the hazy, half-shut camouflage through which I watched him. His face a black-hole… Continue reading

Rain ran down through the channels in the bell, ringing it as the wind never would. Its maze-like latticed frame was made for water, not air, its clapper a sloshing bowl that overlapped onto his head where he sat otherwise… Continue reading

It was the inevitable conclusion that no one wanted to acknowledge. Copy an object into a matter replicator, and it could be tweaked and reproduced and perfected forever. Nothing produced by the natural world would ever be as perfect as… Continue reading