Laughter. I must be less than two years old (I remember the nappy), standing in a kitchen cupboard that reaches from the bench right to the ceiling.
Rainbow Valley is on the way up Mount Everest, about five hundred metres from the top and patched with bright colours rarely seen in nature.
Three girls dance in front of him. One of them has set up an old stereo, and tinny music blares, blocking out the sound of the cicadas that sing relentlessly at this time in the evening.
When would it stop? They’d said nothing about lingering pain, but these cramps forced her to hold her breath and count through them when they came; they were like something too big trying to squeeze through a small hole.
In the pale twilight of an Arctic summer night, three men ran for their lives through an endless sea of knee-high shrubs and scrub grass.
I never really wanted to be a police officer. Thick flakes of white drift down from a low, grey sky, adding their weight to the drooping branches of beech trees.
AT DAWN THAT morning, a man dressed entirely in black nosed his gray Ford sedan up to the curb on Taylor Street.
A watch alarm was beeping. Someone was being sick. Loudly, close by. Several people were sprawled at odd, impossible angles over the uprooted coach seats.
MY LIFE FELT like a dream. I guess that happens when you elope, hop on a plane, drift off to sleep, and wake up in a foreign country.
He looks up. A square jaw, narrow waist, messy golden hair pushed up off his forehead, except for one lock which falls across his brow the second our eyes meet.
I CHOOSE TO BE EXHILARATED by the gift of failure. I say choose because it is a choice, just like any other choice you make in life.
It wasn’t the first time Evan had drunk vodka atop a glacier. But it was the first time he’d traveled to a glacier with the express purpose of drinking vodka.
Curtis McCoy was early for his ten o’clock meeting so he carried his coffee to a table by the window where he could feel the watery April sun.
Sam stares up at the slowly lightening ceiling and practises her breathing, like the doctor advised her, as she tries to stop her 5 a.m. thoughts congealing into one enormous dark cloud above her head.
Like many others, I did not see it coming. But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean.
Death always visited me in August. A slow and delicious month we turned into something swift and brutal. The change, quick as a card trick.
Te Hoia know the concrete wall has already started to boil under the sun.
One violet twilight, I sat motionless on the grassy edge of a small neighboring meadow.
“Edi. Are you sleeping?” I’m whispering, even though the point is to wake her up.
At some point when I was a child, my father started using a cane to keep himself balanced when he walked.