Tree of Life

He is sitting at the kitchen table, his fingertip tracing something on the plain deal. She hangs back in the doorway, watching his moving finger, in and out of a shaft of sunlight. She can see the invisible outline of a logic tree, being inscribed imperceptibly on her table. I am not self-sufficient, she thinks,

Red Viper

It always surprised Emma how much of what Justine said could have come from some of the battier books of the Bible. It might be couched in the language of CBT and positive psychology, but it boiled down to the same thing: you chose to err, you lacked faith (in quite what didn’t matter), and

Evening Haze

At this latitude there’s no night in the summer, just an evening haze. When I was a child, we lived in Tranquility and I had the bunk by the earthside porthole. My mother tried to explain the connection between latitude, rotation, and season. I could never really process it. Even now I have to make

Grey Charm

‘They have a certain charm,’ said Mira. ‘A grey charm. They accept the ugliness of city life, and the limitations. But they’re always grateful for anything you give them. They’re mostly quiet, and their babies are terribly sweet.’ She thought a little longer. ‘And there’s more to them than just grey – there’s an entire

Stone Pillar

Of course we can learn, he said. We keep telling each other what we know, passing it down the generations, and we get things right each time and don’t repeat the mistakes. Well, you try and pray that you don’t. I only know one prayer, I said. Tell me, he said. I said, on the

First Eden

There was an Eden before the more famous one in which Adam and Eve were conceived. This first Eden grew wild and profuse across the whole green sphere. In a very short time, such as time was at that early point, it was a density of leaf and creeper and boughs heavier than any unit

A quiet man’s room

There was a bird called a magpie – it was black and white and around 25cm tall. It was apparently attracted to shiny objects and would steal them – there are stories of magpies trading food from humans for these shiny things. By extension, people who collected useless baubles were called magpies. The last one

Umba

I stood in the storage shed and snivelled and looked at the equipment we had got together for the journey out. There was a solid fuel stove, sleeping bags, canisters for the rebreathers, cloches, H2O extractors. I had been afraid that we wouldn’t have enough canisters; I had taken an old one apart and tried