The woman jolts awake, gasping, heart pounding. Gunshots echo in her head, ones conjured in sleep.
Jake. There is so much I want to tell you, but we’ve always found it hard to talk to each other, haven’t we?
The winter moon lit the paving stones as Gelimer, King of the Vandals, and his brother, Tzazon, galloped their horses through the old triumphal arch, past the theater, past the forum, past the still-elegant sleeping town houses.
He was a Scorpion. First Ensign Salvio was never more proud of that fact than now. He checked his watch.
July 1973 Francis Gleeson, tall and thin in his powder blue policeman’s uniform, stepped out of the sun and into the shadow of the stocky stone building that was the station house of the Forty-First Precinct.
A woman came to the barn today. Her hair was the colour of walnut wood. Her eyes were the colour of bracken in October.
I stood behind the door and rattled its handle, even though I knew you needed a key to get in or out and I didn’t have one.
The fall had turned to winter and then back again without conviction, November’s chill taken up and dropped like a woman never wearing the right coat until finally December laughed and took hold.
Long ago, on a late summer’s day, strange creatures came over the mountain.
Oblivious to the golden morning awakening around her, the chorus of birdsong and the heckling of kookaburras in the ghost gums, Maggie swam laps of the pool.
There was one other Arab onboard the ship to Marseille. His name was Faruq al-Azmeh, and the day after leaving port in Alexandria he approached Midhat at breakfast, with a plate of toast in one hand and a string of amber prayer beads in the other.
I never would have done what they say I’ve done, to Madame, because I loved her. Yet they say I must be put to death for it, and they want me to confess. But how can I confess what I don’t believe I’ve done?
It was religious yearning granted hope, it was the holy grail of science. Our ambitions ran high and low – for a creation myth made real, for a monstrous act of self-love.
There’s a story I’ve heard many times about how my brother Jason got the scar that runs above his left eye, almost parallel with his eyebrow.
If I’d known I was about to meet the man who’d shatter me like bone china on terra-cotta, I would have slept in. Instead, I roused our florist, Mr. Sitwell, from his bed to make a boutonnière. My first consulate gala was no time to stand on ceremony.
I only put the centipede in Eliza’s slipper since I thought she was stealing my sister Sofya from me. I was eight years old and had just lost my mother. I couldn’t lose Sofya, too.
And there’s the Ark Royal, keeping a good distance from the enemy...There were a couple of quiet explosions – pop-pop-pop.
New Zealand, 1994: Sirens are wailing in the distance, a rarity in Queenstown, at any hour, day or night.
