I went online. I had brought my laptop—my ten-year-old laptop with a Harley-Davidson sticker on it. It had been Karl’s; the Harley-Davidson sticker was meant to add a frisson of danger to his civil engineer life—so upgrading it would have…
I was hungry and in need of a drink. I washed down some bread and cheese with a gin and tonic while sitting on Christina’s little sofa, half-watching a dubbed version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I have…
On my return to the house, I noticed a plant growing right outside the front door. It was quite tall, nearly reaching my knees, with thin yellow petals, right in the middle of the dusty path. Though tall, the flower…
I noticed a small dark tattoo on Rosella’s arm. A circle and a horizontal line that meet on the top of the vertex of a triangle. Off the horizontal line were two short upright lines on either side. Like the…
Christina’s car was a reluctant old thing. I sat in it a while, breathed in the stale upholstery, looking for clues about her life. There was nothing in there except an empty bottle of diet lemonade and a half-eaten packet…
I am telling you this for what will follow, so that you really know where I am coming from. I am not prone to far-fetched nonsense. I think the moon landings were real and that the Earth is, roughly speaking,…
I am not great at believing in the mystical. I think it is because I was raised a Catholic and have had a life full of unanswered prayers. I wouldn’t say I am totally unreligious. But even when I was…
I felt uncertain. And this uncertainty was to intensify until I had to hear my own breath just to know I was real. A part of me wondered if I was now taking part in some elaborate prank. After all,…
I needed to get out of the house. I needed to know what happened to Christina.
It was a lovely letter. Any letter that gives you a car in the postscript has its bonuses. But I must admit it made me feel exhausted, troubled, and even more confused than I had been to begin with. I…