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The gate was open when we got there. Someone had plowed the driveway recently, and the front steps had clearly been shoveled, but more snow had fallen and every surface appeared unbroken in the moonlight. The lace curtains were hospitable...
Thursday, 5 August, 2010
Time alone was hard to find in Alex's house. He timed his trips to the toilet so that he would have time to have a good look at himself in the mirror. Their house only had one bathroom, and most... More...
It was 4 a.m. and he'd fallen asleep in a most uninviting chair. A nurse woke him up. There was something about palliative care nurses that Pinsky liked - a sort of resigned kindness - a grace and an implied... More...
Susan stares at the road ahead, determinedly speechless, feeling lightheaded and tired and irritable. Beside her Richard drives with just one finger on the wheel as if to annoy her on purpose. Occasionally clicking his tongue against his teeth, barely... More...
The cold: that is how she knows. The cold and the pressure against the door as she tries to force it wide, as though a body were leant against it on the inside, slumped on the doormat with hunched back... More...
Thomas is weeding when it happens, when he hacks at the cheat grass and goosegrass choking his daffodils and rips up pubic clumps of the stuff with a garden claw that makes a silvery arc in the air when driven... More...
It began his first night on the boat, a scuttling in the head. He imagined them in the shower, in the sump, armies of them, coppered and searching, their antennas flexed. He was alone and it was otherwise very calm... More...
At my age, it only makes sense that I would think about the things that have influenced my unremarkable life. I have never formed the habit of thinking things through, so I have no idea of how to explain myself,... More...
TS knows precisely when it first came to him, the conviction. So powerful a feeling it was, like fresh blood rushing rudely through his veins, roaring in his ears, that he knew instinctively. Besides, how else could one know such... More...
One day I got myself lost in what was a very small town. It was an afternoon in late spring, and the sun was beginning to bake. I walked through a labyrinthine part of the town, having followed a twisting road that was taking me nowhere. More...
It is four o'clock on a warm August afternoon in Farley Green and I am sitting on my balcony with a cup of broken orange pekoe and one of those apricot biscuits Mina bakes me, and I am planning my... More...
In the summer of 1961, Henrietta Ramsey took part in her first ever scientific experiment. It was advertised in The New Haven Register, and offered four dollars for an hour of the respondent's time, plus fifty cents for bus fare.... More...
George Meadows was butterfly-hunting along Westheath when he saw a tall boy somewhat older than himself advance along the track, followed at a distance by a servant carrying a couple of dead rabbits and a gun. He knew the boy... More...
I met him in Hanoi three years ago, and we became sort of friends. We worked at the same private language school, teaching English to wealthy Vietnamese; but, like most people in that line of employment, he had other interests.... More...
On the day they finished moving the cemetery, Dona Josephina went to ten funerals. After eighty-eight years she full knew the strangeness of this world, yet knew also that attending ten funerals in one day was strange even by its... More...
Walking down our street at eight o'clock in the morning with my son James - he is shuffling along, resignedly. It's summer, there are only three days left of school, and Friday is a half-day anyway. His hair is a... More...
It was round about Christmas when Troy knocked on my door and told me that he was going to lose his arm. "The doctors told me they can't do nothing," he said. Troy had his arm up in a sling... More...
The essentials are these: when Tony was 16 and on a train between Johannesburg and Irene, where he then lived with his parents, he caught the eye of the man sitting opposite him and, before leaving the train, made an... More...
On the first day of the rest of his unemployment, Mr Simmons sat on the edge of his bed, the noose of his Monday tie limp in his hand, like an executioner who'd forgotten whom he was to hang. He... More...
PART I: FRANK That damn asshole who lived on the other side of the fence with his reindeer sweaters and the coffee mug finally met his maker the other day. To begin with, that fence is mine and everything on... More...
Septembers never used to be like this - and you'd think we might deserve a little relief after the string of heat waves we suffered this summer. Just when one week of feverish temperatures and choking humidity seemed too much,... More...
'Love's whole or else it's nothing,' said Shilpa. She lay the book face down on the bedside table, fixed him with her huge spaceship eyes and sighed, 'It's true, Bubaloo, isn't it?' She curled the hairs on his chest until... More...
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