Fiction

Amy ran into Jeremy during her lunchbreak and he proposed dinner before he left for his next posting. They were both diplomats, representing different countries in the same capital, and dinners were a professional obligation. She accepted. She only expected dinner.

Claire was careful her door didn’t slam. She felt along the wall for the stairwell lights. Her phone vibrated; the driver was close.

The cat belonged to her colleague, who was in Portugal. She was doing him a favour. She thought about the favour often, its scale, its generosity, what it said about her as a person, the way you think about generosity when it isn’t producing the right results.

You find your seat without hassle. It’s not a busy flight. The man in the seat next to yours is tidy and small. He looks so clean you imagine he smells of Sunlight soap. And maybe he does, but as soon as you settle in and fasten your seatbelt, all you can smell is his breath. Before you register that you’ve caught his eye, he tells you he’s on his way to visit his son in Wellington. You now wish you’d untangled the wire of your headphones as you walked onto the plane.

I look down at the screen. There are nine images arranged in a square. In the top row, a white puppy gazes longingly from a cage in what appears to be an animal shelter. One of its back legs is bandaged.

One morning, Erin woke and felt an absence in the bunker. “Where’s Max?” she asked, a quick snap of a question, fired into the vacuum. It was the cork on a bottle of sparkling panic.

Our home comes into sharper relief (a cruel shard in the heart) as it recedes, twisted from the pressure of abstract machines, imperial globe a scorched veil over the true globe.