When the war came, Paul was evacuated one morning. He was put firmly on the train and waved off into the west. London, they told him, was a death trap, even though his side was going to win anyway. These words filled him with anxiety and hope at the same time, but both emotions faded […]

There are buzzards in the fields around where I live. I never thought ours was the sort of town that would have buzzards, or any kind of big bird like that—not vulture types. We’re more of a pigeon place. Blackbirds and blue tits. Seagulls, sometimes, at a push. But no, we have buzzards. And the […]

It wasn’t even Halloween, technically. It was the day after, at your company’s annual Halloween party, and it was late and you were drunk, so when Susan suggested a short-cut through the cemetery you didn’t hesitate. You’d follow Susan anywhere. You remembered a song from your teens: Went down to the cemetery, looking for love […]

Does it look different? Zoe asked, tilting her head. Tom stopped in the hallway outside the bedroom and glanced back. Does what look different? he asked. Zoe shrugged her right shoulder, rolled it forward, rolled it back. My arm, she said. This arm. She waggled the fingers of her hand. The fingers felt different. The […]

“You’ll be needing a spade.” Uncle Don indicates the black-iron pot by the door. It bristles with gardening tools the way other people have umbrella stands. Around it is a tumble of men’s shoes in a litter of crumbled-off mud. A far cry from the kitchen at home, white-tiled like a science lab, or a […]

i. Rumen We come because there is a war in the old country. We come because there is a drought that becomes a famine or because we woke up one day and suddenly our money was worthless, or because we have always practiced the wrong religion but recently, since the last election, our neighbors look […]

There’s a family building a snowman outside a little wooden house. A mother, dad, two kids: perfect. They pat down his sides, laughing at the woolly hat on his head, and then they are gone, left behind us. It’s getting dark and I wonder that such young children are still playing outside, then remember it’s […]

Wenham Magna, Suffolk, 1633 “The devil is everywhere,” James Hopkins, the vicar of Wenham, tells his youngest son one morn, his Apostle spoons laid out on the table before him. Heirlooms of silver, each bears the image of a saint moulded into the handle, along with the associate symbol, orb, key or cup. “The worm, […]

A crown wasn’t a requirement for starving, but most of us adopted it as a rule. We imagined the crystals as diamonds, the metal as silver, the weight of the circlet resting atop our hairsprayed updos the triumph we’d been chasing all seventeen years of our lives. Sequins and glitter look better against exposed hip […]

When it was my turn to have my lips sewn, I chose lace. I’d never seen anything so lovely: scalloped edges, intertwining threads forming webs and florets. The way it curled in my palms. How it tickled and scratched my skin, rough yet pliant. The cart in the bright sewing room was neatly packed with […]