I hope they don’t hate me. It would be fair if they did, but it would be an awful way to die, wouldn’t it? Hated by everyone around you. They say the defences are going to fall. Any day now.… Continue reading

No one wanted to talk. That was fair – who’d want to spend what could be their last night jawing with anyone in that room? Sullen mugs, eyes all staring at the next morning already. The ones with weapons to… Continue reading

The trains roar above and below. They never stop here. Never above and below, and never in the dark station where I am raising and dropping my knife, raising and dropping my knife, again and again into the bloody hollow… Continue reading

Some said it was bad luck that they were twins. Like it would have been less eerie, less a sign of bad things coming, to find just one child in the forest. Worst luck how they were found, curled together… Continue reading

It would be the last thing I ever did, probably, but I still want to ask her, sometimes. To give up running, go back, and look her in the eye. Do you love me? Can you love something that you… Continue reading

“I’m scared.” “Don’t be,” she told him, the tiny boy whose name she didn’t even know, and heard the words clumsy and insensitive and terribly adult from her own lips. Didn’t she remember what it was like to be a… Continue reading

Life was hard on the stairs leading into the pit. But the screams below were worse, and the light above was frightening, so he made do as best he could. He gathered water to drink when it fell and the… Continue reading

It had been easier, once, to just lie about having a wife. Better than trying to explain why he didn’t. Or ask why he should. More and more, the people around him seemed to just assume it, like a wife… Continue reading

Would it be better if he just stopped breathing? He tried sometimes, in the still of the night, but it was as hard as just choosing to stop should be. His head hummed, his vision swarmed with something like black… Continue reading