Our father was a big-wig at the Oregon Fish Commission, and the freezer in our spacious mock Tudor home in Clackamas was always chock full with wild salmon and bull trout. My twin brother Jake and I gorged on the rich bouillabaisse and fricassee dishes that our mother served up each evening at exactly seven
The copper bell is the only non-essential thing Nora’s kept from before. She’s not sure why. It has no use in this new world. Food, water, somewhere safe, and hopefully dry, to sleep and firewood are all they need now. But oh so hard to come by. Tonight’s dinner – puffball mushrooms with wild garlic
“I don’t understand why anyone would want to get married these days,” says Jean. “I think it’s nice,” says Marie, a friend. “What, taking some bloke’s name? You think that’s ‘nice’? Giving up the name you were born with and taking some bloke’s name? What’s nice about that? It’s like fucking slavery or something. It’s
Stanton sat and listened to the bull make bedlam with a coupling pin and the side of the stationary freight. Though sunlight beamed through the open sidedoor he sat in the gloom between some sacks of poultry feed and a crate of rail spikes, rubbing his face with his hands; labor degraded palms rasped over
I stare at the square photo on my phone and imagine it’s not me. I imagine I am sat idly on the tube with my thighs apart because it’s leg day, rugby socks ruffled halfway down my calves, although I don’t play. I would be looking like I’d been to the gym, hair at strategic
On their way up the coast from the airport an overturned tractor-trailer partially blocks the highway, its wheels spinning in air thick with something burning. “A bit of turbulence,” Greg says as the taxi navigates around trailer doors twisted open. He tilts his head out the window, but there’s nothing to hear other than primal
Allie Owen’s Watch-Me wall clock was robin-egg blue before her fiancé smashed it with a boot. True, Kai patched the clock back together so the hands kept on ticking, but they stuck on one time only, Cinco. Kai rushed from the room anytime he remembered that word. Cinco, the Mexican police called it, Cinco de
‘I’m not going,’ said Mary. ‘But, mum—’ ‘It’s pointless—all these deadbeat men who lie about their ages and their jobs, their divorces and their marriages, who make jokes that aren’t funny…’ ‘Mum—’ ‘It’s not worth it.’ ‘Give him a chance.’ ‘No. Why should I?’ ‘It’s a twenty-minute drive to Kington. What else are you going
He was crossing the road onto Trafalgar Square just like everyone else around him. They were tourists, for the most part, people who had come here deliberately. It was going to be an evening for it. The clouds, if they could even be called that, had floated off again, leaving no doubt about the weather.
I. The summer we found the skull was also the summer that Smith got stuck in the sluice gate and nearly drowned, and somehow those two events have been inextricably linked in my mind ever since. Looking back now, it is as if together they formed a threshold, a kind of boundary between the first
