Alix was never sure what kept the groaning rickety-spider of a dock up, unless it was the mussels that swarmed over the piles, turning them to hazards that could slice a swimmer open. The divers were all over scars from waves and mussels, always being pushed into shell sharp as knives and leaving their blood […]

First Forgetting It was snowing when Ria arrived in Carrmore, and didn’t look as if it would ever stop. Taking time out from unpacking the boxes and bags that she had crammed into her little green Skoda for the drive north, she went to the bedroom window and watched the flakes descend with universal patience […]

The ghost boy was the colour of bone, of gossamer spider web, of salt trails of dried tears. He still had his shape, his outline. No one had said his name in thirty years, even though he’d scarred the house with it, carved onto a tree in the garden, scratched into the paint under the […]

They’s building the bonfire in a field on the forest’s southern fringe, a two minute trudge from camp. They’s piling fuel high—if there’s one thing they got in abundance ’round these parts, it’s wood—close enough to the tree-line to make a point, far enough not to set the whole woodland ablaze. Huffing and cursing, cousins […]