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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]