“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” He stood at the bottom of the tower, tracking its stonework all the way up to the faint glow in a high window where he could see her silhouette moving against the light. “Rapunzel.… Continue Reading
“Are you sure it’s the defence you want to go with?” her colleagues asked her. Nina leaned against her desk, chewing on that mangled pencil that always calmed her nerves before a big case. “I think so.” “When has that… Continue Reading
They tell me off for her these days. Because she’s big for her age. Mirror-image, polar opposite of what my grandmother told my mother. I don’t overfeed her. She just is what she is. But I know what they mean.… Continue Reading
It’s close to ten years since I last saw him. And now, here he is, standing where I need to be standing. And there’s a part of me that wants to hide behind a tree, to wait until he’s gone.… Continue Reading
They were coming in, and it was well too late to stop them. Always was, wasn’t it? They swung their metal arms like pendulums, battering indiscriminately the doors, walls, windows. They were dull colossi: fifty-foot-high and steel plated; age-faded logos… Continue Reading
High society. Twenty-five floors high. And the floors are all glass, mirrored, swallowing the lights from a panoramic city, distorting them, condensing them, fanning them out in a rainbow across the expanse of some two hundred square feet. A few… Continue Reading
When she steps up there she forgets all about them — the audience, the nay-sayers, her father, her ex-husband — all she sees are the microphone and the lights. All she feels or thinks about is the music. And then,… Continue Reading
He always calls me on my birthday. My brother. Even though he’s been dead ten years. I wait, every year, not knowing what time of day he might call, or from what number. It’s always a different number. I imagine… Continue Reading
We’ve been scattered by the wind to all the corners, we four. Time has made us half-strangers, and we all feel it, looking at each other, seeing where the new lines have formed, the touches of grey, the softening around… Continue Reading
His cheque arrived in the mail this morning. Punctual. The way it is every six months. A note folded inside it that just says: I’m sorry. I stand by the letterbox, staring at it a while, blinking back tears, remembering.… Continue Reading