Sooner or later, everyone has to hear their voice for the first time.
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I call you again and hear nothing back. I cross through swirling motes caught in greenish rays, over the carpet that I swear squelches under my shoes, towards the bedrooms ...
Would a more loving partner have pieced the clues together? Should I have known? It seemed so obvious now.
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For weeks, even months, after the gig, he remembered that feeling, could cling to it every now and then even as it faded or slipped from his grasp. He would ...
“Sometimes you think you know people but you don’t.”
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He’d said I was part-seagull, and he was too.
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“I always wanted to build a house beside the lake with her. It would’ve been a place where we could grow old and fat together and be buried in the ...
“And these things that happen to us. They don’t just live in the past. They echo.”
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He drives a bus, he lives above a shop, he drinks cheap wine, and he is now alone.
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Our evenings are filled with hospital dramas and 10:00pm bedtimes and getting irritated when one of us reads with the light on, the lamp glowing yellow in the room like ...
He knows he is searching for something that is no longer there.
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I strained to identify flaws, anomalies, patterns in her biography; anything that would point, however subtly, to when and why her fear of elevators began.
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Rain spiders don’t like rain. That is why they come inside.
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Wildwood couldn’t be much farther. After a few minutes a sign informed him that their exit was coming up, then they were at the junction, and he was standing on ...
This night had been going on for years. She blew into her cupped hands, steam mingling with the smoke still in her lungs. It was a long shift. But it ...
You wake up, panting. An ache has settled in the small of your back and the pressure is spreading. You hiss to get breath out of your lungs. The sheets ...
Sharon was usually waiting for me outside her front door. She said the sound of the doorbell woke her dad up. It was a comfort that she was as I ...
Roger and Marie had argued many times over whether they had a right – and by right they were referring to a moral right – to apply for the housing ...
We go to a pub quiz every Wednesday night, my wife Mel and me. We go with our friends Simon and Ginny. Ginny is Mel’s best friend. They’ve known each ...
ADDER
I felt the bite in the region of Staple Oak Fell. Searing pain flooded the muscle of my left calf. Looking down, I could see the black-and-silver tail of the ...