The rule for surviving the night out here is simple – ignore whatever calls for you from outside. Keep the doors and windows locked, the record player braying brassy cheer if you’re lucky enough to have one, and just don’t… Continue reading

The world had been safe and ordinary one step ago. He’d been walking the ordinary bridge from one place to another when his foot had caught fast and refused to follow him another step. It wrenched painfully against the turn… Continue reading

Acknowledging that the world was ordinary was part of growing up. Accepting that it was ordinary felt more like part of dying. So he never had – he kept taking his camera out to fields where farmers had supposedly seen… Continue reading

The worst part was that they couldn’t remember whether it had always been that way. They should have. It should have been obvious. If the door to their bedroom had always been the glimmering, expectant gap between backstage and a… Continue reading

It’ll be temporary, they all told him, like a comfort. Or a deadline – a demand that he should be himself again, the him they remembered, before his dazed, unfamiliar wandering around his own home could prove their predictions wrong.… Continue reading

“All right, now. I want you to look at this and tell me what you see.” She kept her scoff in the back of her throat, where the doctor wouldn’t hear it. She had already told him and the two… Continue reading

Every brave fisher or traveller waved away from the harbour and never seen again was a question unanswered. A prayer on their loved ones’ lips late at night. Promising anything, promising everything, if only they could know for sure. But… Continue reading

“Don’t touch that!” she snapped. Her voice rang out cruelly across the beach, and he looked up at her with tears shocked into his sweet brown eyes. But at least he took his hand back from the flower he had… Continue reading