The night was at her disposal. She might walk back to Great Mop and arrive very late; or she might sleep out and not trouble to arrive till to-morrow. Whichever she did Mrs Leak would not mind. That was one of the advantages of dealing with witches; they do not mind if you are a […]

Amy spends hours studying Russian in their room with the door closed. Her favorite letter in the Cyrillic alphabet is ж, which looks like a butterfly and sounds like the s in treasure, zh. Amy copies out all the words from her pocket dictionary that start with ж. Zoe is less diligent, preferring to play. […]

As I cycled past the rows of identical houses, I thought to myself again how much like nests they looked. They resembled a huge cocoon that Yuu and I had once found in the Akishina mountains. My town was a collection of nests, a factory for manufacturing babies. I was a tool for the town’s […]

All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine . . . she remembered the advertisement. Here indeed were both in profusion. The […]

at times like these Amma misses Dominique, who long ago absconded to America they should be sharing her breakthrough career moment togetherthey met in the eighties at an audition for a feature film set in a women’s prison (what else?)both were disillusioned at being put up for such parts as a slave, servant, prostitute, nanny […]

Years before, I had had a lover who was a welder. As a gift he once welded me the single most beautiful object that I own. It is a palm-sized box made of Plexiglas, with several stacked layers of blue-greenish broken glass sealed inside. The box, he explained to me, is the love. It is […]