The room faded away around her, the bed, the dressers, the walls and windows, disappeared, faded out, until the only thing he saw was her standing there. A sheet twisted demurely around her body. Hair falling haphazardly. Chin tucked in slightly, eyes looking up and beckoning with each slow flap of her eyelashes.

Nothing else existed, just her and him and the unbearable distance between them.

The sheet shifted, her leg emerged, bent at the knee. She spun slowly to face him. Walking forward, unbuttoning his shirt, kicking his shoes off and into the white void surrounding them.

The emptiness...

The giant knelt, and threaded the palm trees through his fingers. Lifted his hand slowly, snapping the thinner branches, but not the strongest, fruit baring limbs. He cupped the six or seven coconuts he pulled free and shook them.

The giant's thumb flicked the coconuts into his mouth one at a time. The shells crunched weakly between his teeth.

He finished his handful and set about feeling around the tips of the trees for another. A monkey watched him and sat there trying to figure out a way to profit from this situation, without

Absent for years and then he shoes up and wants to pretend he was never gone anywhere. Catch up, he says, get back to how things used to be.

Used to be, I told him, we,d wake up at dawn and start working. Then the drought came and the animals starved and died and then Pa snapped his back falling down from the hayloft. And then Ma just about folded in on herself until she was just this little thing that the wind could have picked up and taken away, and then one day it did.

But you wouldn't know,...

"Pegodi? Pogado?"

Sneering, Jess looked at Adam and asked waht the hell he thought he was doing.

"That thing there, out on the water. What's it called?"

They both turned and stared out across the man-made lake. No more than two feet deep, and even less than that if you counted the layers of garbage and duck shit on the bottom.

"That building," Adam said, pointing. As if it wasn't obvious enough, sitting on the dock, the second man-made structure in view.

Jess exhaled and told him it was a pagoda. He snapped his fingers.

"That's it. Wow," he said,...

The note on her mirror, written in femme-fatale-red lipstick, a shade she had bought but never been courageous enough to wear out of the house, said to meet on the roof at midnight.

The windows were closed and the door was locked. The recent humidity expanded the cheap wood door, causing it to stick in the frame and she could never open it without Mrs. Montgomery sticking her head out of the next apartment and telling her to keep it down.

So whoever came in didn't come in that way.

Lucy walked through all the rooms again, checking the windows,...

The waves crashed on the rocks at the point, Harold heard them, but only in that way you hear things just out of the way, like neighbours fighting or the alarm clock on bad mornings. He shook the ice in his glass and chewed the inside of his cheek. The bartender was giving him the side-eye as he dried the glasses.

A thick finger freed itself from Harold's fist, pointing up, waved towards his empty glass. The bartender, slapped the towel over his shoulder and fixed another gin and tonic.
Harold nodded and brought the drink to his lips.

He...

"Dragonflies are good luck," his grandmother used to say. "They are fairies' horses. Their wings spread wishes and wonder."

He remembered that and not much else about her. They would sit in the grass by the shore of the lake. He used to spend three weeks every summer out at his grandparents house. They picked blueberries and chopped wood, made cookies and walked in the woods.

He was an adult now. They were long dead.

His daughter stood in front of him, frowning, hands onm hips. "That's not true, daddy. Dragonflies are dragonflies, not horses. And fairies don't exist."

He...

"The flight was agonizingly long, and that was the positive part of the experience.We had reserved a cab a week before, because we didn't want to drive out there and then try to find parking."

"I could have found a spot."

"Ignore him, he's convinced he a dowsing rod of available parking. Anyway, we had made a reservation for six a.m. At a quarter to seven a car screams to a stop in the driveway. You can still see the skidmarks. We were so angry."

"You were angry. I never even wanted to go."

"I told you to ignore him....

No one else stood up when the two elderly ladies got on the bus, so Bear had to provide the example and offered them his seat. He stood up as they approached and made the giving up my seat gesture with his arm. The one lady smiled and him. He watched the smile curdle into an expression of confusion and followed her sightline to see some teenager had taken his seat.

"Hey," Bear said, trying to sound tough and imposing. "You think I stood up for you? I was letting these ladies have those seats."

The teenager ignored him, scrolled...

Words like knives, thrown back and forth across the room, like a death-defying circus act.

Husband and wife tossing sharp insults, from the couch to the kitchen doorway. Neither landing anything deep, glancing wounds, already scraping scarred tissue.

Neither really feels anything for the other anymore. But the dance, the battle, the contest keeps them together. Light reflects of the blades as they flip and fly.

Thud into walls. Plink against the floors. Bounce of their scaly armour of experience, disdain and dull hate. It aches in their bellies. They think it might offer some release, against the mounting pressure....