The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.

He’d learned something. Life was booby-trapped and there was no easy passage through. You had to jump from colour to colour, from happiness to happiness. And all those possible explosions in between. It could be...

The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist...

She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [..]...

His anger was still there, and he used it to break into her. He liked the way her eyes widened in alarm, as if he was forcing a lock, as if he was breaking and...

While still practising law, he’d run a hearse-rental agency. Then, later, he’d bought into a handkerchief factory in Baker Park. Their most famous innovation was the funeral hankerchief, a plain white cotton handkerchief with a...

Jed thought he understood. It was like when his radios were thrown away. You could shrug your shoulders, put on a face that said you didn’t care, but you did and nothing could ever be...

This would have once been a place for contemplation. He looked up at the towers surrounding him. Many of the dead bodies had been removed. Their places had been taken by the living.

The strong man lit a cigarette. It looked too frail for his hand. They looked like King Kong and Fay Wray, that hand, that cigarette. There was a movie going on right under his nose...

Sometimes it seemed as if he’d always been very old. People said that time lasted for ever when you were young. That was lies. Lies and rosy spectacles. His spectacles were steel frames and time...

He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty pavement, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the...

Vasco bought a bottle of vodka to celebrate and they drank it in the old sailors’ graveyard in Mangrove South. This was where the funeral business had first put down its roots. Over the wall,...