The Corpse Flower
she told me this years later, near the end, in the small warm room where she kept her pressed flowers under glass. a botanist all her life, fluent in the Latin of things that bloom and things that poison. her hands were still precise, even then. she’d loved, and travelled, and lived a good deal
The Steaming Beast
Spring. new blossoms force their way open across the garden after the dead winter. the air has the first thin smell of lilacs and the promise of tomatoes. across the patch of turned earth, the beast is cooking. steam rises thick and sour from the middle of it, a slow furnace of rot where the old waste
Photo Albums
the pictures went in like a splinter you cannot dig out. one was a Jewish boy, maybe ten, lost inside a heap of striped rags. the yellow star sewn onto the chest like a shipping label on a crate. then page after page of bones twisted wrong, black smoke rolling out of brick chimneys into
The Jockey
the horn blows wild. tidal wave, six to one, 3:35 sharp, the bell clanging, and there she goes, the grey ghost streaking over Sandown’s green lung. punters lean into the dream, eyes wild, hearts pounding against the rail, while Mary — sweet Mary of the quick laugh — slides the coldest pint across the oak,