On Kimberley Road the boys of the neighbourhood used to play football in the street. Located in a mostly sedate warren of redbrick terraces built on the Sussex downs not far from the parish boundary of Brighton and Preston, Kimberley was just about quiet enough and along its lower stretch just about flat enough for […]

  Wind come down the mountain/you won’t see me ’gain Stars come down the mountain/you won’t see me ’gain —Traditional folk song Bear Creek/Chillcoate Mountain Region ca. 1932, unattributed It didn’t matter how many times Carter watched the footage—it didn’t change; it didn’t yield any further clues. None of which mattered. He couldn’t stop. In […]

1 Eight cigarettes aren’t enough to celebrate my author’s death. The one between my fingers was smooth as my thumb grazed it up and down. It’s been decades since I smoked. The craving to fill myself with tobacco and surround myself in a cloud never left me. In my present life, my parents warned that […]

It started with a hole. Specifically the one seven-year-old Mamo Wajin had dug up behind the church after his mother had sent him outside when he grew restless during Pastor Aduwabe’s sermon. You see, there were three important things to know about Mamo. One. He’d been born with a song in his head and voices […]

The dead flowers lie amid a pile of sea-wrack, where fronds of oar-weed mingle with bits of old rope and broken razor shells and plastic bottle tops and the ever-present sand. She stares at them a moment: a sorry bundle of what might once have been lilies and roses, now all but unrecognisable. Still, she […]

The alpha-posters on our local Facebook ‘mommy’ group call the wishing well park a hidden gem. The hidden part is right: it’s tucked at the end of a cul-de-sac, obscured by dense pines. I must have walked past the top of the street a hundred times in the year Sadie insisted on napping in her […]

He turns, head raised, inhaling. Shale and sedge underfoot, and then a tight slope down to the line of scrub before the hill breaks off into the forest of the valley. The branches flex and quiver above us, praying into the dark. The scratch of bramble on my bare calf, a line of sweat on […]

The double line of stationary vehicles stretched for nearly a mile along the narrow access road before disappearing into the distant woods. Andy’s car sat in the right-hand lane. He was boxed in by a blue minivan on the left, a white two-door directly in front, and a black-bodied, chrome-grilled, muscle car directly behind. The […]

“Love and hate are so entwined that if thoughts could kill, we’d all be dead in the bosom of our families.”—Dr. Sigmund Freud It was the first thing I ever saw in my analyst’s office, and I was struck that anyone would embroider a phrase like that into a sampler, the embroidery thread all in […]

London, 1854 Luella lamented that seventy-one was too old to receive the news about Cross Bones Cemetery, with its dead poking out of the ground. The family lawyer, Arthur Barrows, had come to her townhouse one evening last week and in his usual mordant manner informed her that due to the new Burial Act, a […]