The first time the scion of House Dragon painted the eyeless girl, he was only six years old.
You should not, I’ve read many times, reach for your phone first thing in the morning—
From the moment she steps out into the laneway before her morning shift, Hazel Bates, tea lady at Empire Fashionwear, has the curious feeling of being watched.
Sarah stood and took a bow, allowing the swelling sound of rhythmic clapping from the audience to wash over her.
He looks up. A square jaw, narrow waist, messy golden hair pushed up off his forehead, except for one lock which falls across his brow the second our eyes meet.
Two seconds after Doctor Gary Bendigo pulled in to his parking space outside the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center and cut the engine, a bird shat on the windscreen.
Three years ago, I stood on the edge of a dirt road in front of wide open plains, tears streaming down my face.
Danny Leavitt, a gangly eight-year-old with a severe peanut allergy, was the one who discovered the body.
The bass thumps from somewhere behind me, echoing the beat of the blood pulsing in my ears.
Sam stares up at the slowly lightening ceiling and practises her breathing, like the doctor advised her, as she tries to stop her 5 a.m. thoughts congealing into one enormous dark cloud above her head.
When I arrived here this morning the sea was still far out, the sand stretching white and vast.
Clytemnestra looks down at the steep ravine but can see no trace of dead bodies. She searches for cracked skulls, broken bones, corpses eaten by wild dogs and pecked by vultures, but nothing.
One good push releases the handle, and the brass tongue withdraws into the lock.
Self-Interview #1, in what is to be a very illustrious journal B: Why have you succumbed to this self-interview? B: For the money.
Grace is hot. There’s the sun, like boiled breath, on the roof of her car but it’s more than that.
Curtis McCoy was early for his ten o’clock meeting so he carried his coffee to a table by the window where he could feel the watery April sun.
He stood in the shadows to one side, letting the rage build within him. He needed the rage. He fed off it.
It had been a poor harvest in Scanlon Estate. The wheat crop had been meagre at best, and the apple orchards had been savaged by a blight that left threequarters of the fruit blemished and rotting on the trees.
It was dark and clammy and damp in the tunnel.