Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to...

Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.

In an age of rust, she comes up stainless steel

She’s in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.

No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.

Because the bag is full of colours – starbursts and wheels and whorls of dazzling brightness that are as fine and complex in their structures as the branch is, only much more symmetrical. Flowers.