For no real reason – well, perhaps because of the seriousness under the trees or Nader’s hair, which was very messy and covered in little grass seeds – Katie began to giggle. She knew it was wrong, yet it was also natural. She covered her mouth...
Bea stared at the pencils as if they were enemies.
Katie began to draw in the secrecy of her room, in anger at first, using her mother’s pencils and whatever paper she could find. Sometimes, she had to steal from Nader’s study to replenish her supplies, but it was worth it. She was nothing but a ...
I suffered my own battles. I suffer still.
It was all changing. All of it. And it was horrible and it was lovely.
Shush – it’s silent time again.
On some days she was able to see both sun and moon at the same time. Like feuding cousins, they hung in two corners of the vast world-ceiling refusing to look at one another. The moon was always harder to spot and more faded, but it was there if you ...
Katie hated “cutties” and her father’s miserable mutterings of sunken military submarines. She preferred her mother’s tales of her descendants – of legend farrago corn growers singing in shafts of golden sun, or of Rawhunt and Pocahontas ma...
Katie soon learned there was a problem with hope.
Katie quickly learned the best way is to see another world entirely.
She heard him speak, but did not recognise the problem in his voice – only later did she realise it was that thing he’d been concealing – known as guilt.
Nader refused to bring her the feathery dream catcher – her asabikeshiinh – with its willow-web and invisible ‘lady spider’ apparently weaving her spells – an object Bea insisted always hung above her in bed.
A silence absorbed them both – a lack of sound so potent it blackened the place with something richer than hate.
Beyond the boundaries of herself, her parents and the enclosing garden walls, were open fields and other waiting places she still knew nothing of – lies of the land, perhaps. What Katie did know is that out there in the lonely nowhere was a special...
Too old for dolls. Too ill for tablets.
He had become the sky around the sun – alive, but not really there.
Our light will be their death.
The breeze around them seemed to drop – dead – like a door to the best things had just closed.
