(There was a sour smell I couldn’t quite place.) I didn’t try real hard; what Sonny had said distracted me. Just, be quick. He hadn’t said why. It really bothered me it bothered me so much. It was crazy. (That smell, it belonged at school somehow.) Worrying about a smell on the subway was crazier […]

In the afternoon a shaft of sunlight fell, briefly, across our alley. Sometimes it came feebly, and sometimes not at all, and when it came it could not warm us, but still we would take our handwork out to the back step to await it. Some days it came in a blaze, and we would […]

Well, my dear, what could I do? I crammed on my hat and just ran. I’d laid everything out, of course, for an early start, and so as not to disturb poor George – when I thought of it I was quite glad the alarm hadn’t gone off to wake him too. I’d missed my […]

I found myself sitting, abruptly and unexpectedly, in my father’s chair, in that room that was exactly as it had always been, that I must transform, firstly into a sanitised memory of itself, and then into an empty shell. When I felt able, I returned to the mantelpiece, and to that hideous, twisted, little wrought […]

“And this peppermill,” he said, his voice becoming a little shrill, “is the body of Major Carson’s squadron. They couldn’t have taken the Fal – ” “And you are forgetting,” there was a sneer in the emphasis, an old accusation about the convenience of this amnesia, “that the spinney was not cleared until the next […]

I find it helps to think of her as falling. She is falling, her hair billowing behind her, when her memory ambushes me by daylight, still falling, still laughing, still blissfully unaware of the marble steps rushing up towards the base of her skull. It is only when she comes to me by night, and […]

Carl tried to warn me about the book, but I couldn’t see the harm. Polly wanted it so much, and I wanted so much to win his child round. “All little girls play at magic spells,” I told him, “she’ll grow out of it.” But she didn’t, and I didn’t win her round, either. She […]