My fifteenth birthday is stinging with a blistering heatwave. Balloons and streamers are dangling off the clothesline, motionless.
One morning in March 2014, I woke up and wondered just how the hell I’d got here. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a one-room sleep-out at a community home in South Auckland, with rapists and drug addicts as my neighbours.
‘Jason Mott?’ ‘Yes. Here. That’s me.’ I stare down at the young man who stands below me ankle deep in the mud of the banks of the Thames.
I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.
Charlie’s ugly Crocs stuck to the mats on the floor behind the bar, making a sticky, squelching sound.
Jun Chu stood on the deck of a three-masted junk given the auspicious name Silken Dragon.
Cristabel picks up the stick. It fits well in her hand. She is in the garden, waiting with the rest of the household for her father to return with her new mother.
The death of Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, known to some as ‘M’, had been announced to a largely uninterested world a few days before.
Lisa arrived in Southbend in mid-November on a day of gathering storms, when the air dripped with humidity and the huge grey-white cumulus clouds were piled like soapsuds above the line of timber fronting the banks of the Rainsford River.
My writing career unofficially began at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School in Belmont, Massachusetts.
They chose Valentine’s Day 2005 as the date to release the engagement news and Camilla’s new title of HRH The Duchess of Cornwall bestowed by the Queen.
Cindy Thomas was working at the dining table she’d bought at a tag sale down the block.
Samantha watched the girls as they filed into the event hall, tilting their heads back to stare at the ornate vaulted ceiling with its oversized chandeliers dripping silver and blue crystals.
Malcolm ran. One hand curled against his chest, the wrist swollen and aching, the fingers numb and almost black in the sickly yellow streetlight.
When books are your life – or in my case, your job – you get pretty good at guessing where a story is going.
This happened back in March of 2010, when the Philadelphia train station still had the kind of information board that clickety-clacked as the various gate assignments rolled up.
Could a building sweat? If someone were to ask him, Walter O’Brien would say no.
She stood before us, without notes, books or nerves. The lectern was occupied by her handbag.
The thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over.
Pippa Black stared out the kitchen window at the dusty sun-beaten paddocks beyond.
