Spenser bleeding out in the white room, thinking about his father’s funeral. Nine years ago, to the very day. All the curious echoes and vague symmetries that make up a life. And all the different shades lurking within. When the lab technician pricked the end of his middle finger with…

Do they think about you? This is what it’s really about. Chiseled into iron skies or churning leaves from bronze to gold, is there any splinter in time they think about you? Just some ill-formed, shadowy sense of you dropping handfuls of dog food into the crook halfway up the…

Four words. That’s all it is. Four words, four syllables. I came across it late in my year of reading. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger was published in October, his first novel in sixteen years. …

You don’t really see the body drop. The frame is tight, claustrophobic. There is a persistent wobble in the grainy cell phone footage, material record of unknown hand. Many bodies in a small concrete structure, dimly lit. The man with the grey beard and black hair is quietly defiant until…

These are the dark days of summer. Memory of the thirteenth August of his life. Spenser, unpuddled from sleep, his treacle-coloured dream gone forever as his eyelids open to his grandfather’s waking touch. Breakfast is cereal with tepid milk that carries strange, earthen scents. His grandparents’ fridge doesn’t so much…

On The Enduring Pleasures of Sad Stories — The other morning I woke with a dead man drifting through my mind. I saw his body on a cold shoreline, grey skin tangled in seaweed as grey water lapped at his body, clattering the little grey stones that lay all around him. Ruined acolyte of some drowned god. The…

It’s strange how much of your life hides in plain sight. The typewriter has been sitting on the shelf in our living room for years now, on display beside photos and ornaments, books and more books. There’s a sincerity to its presence, the dusty anchor of the reading and writing…

Try making bread, everyone said. Flour, salt, water, heat. Tap the veins of civilization and marvel at the primal embers of human creativity that still glow within you. Alright, Spenser thinks. It might be fun to try. Spinning it silently in his own mind as everyday alchemy right there in…

And then one day the whole world just stopped. I’m not sure exactly when I discovered the owl’s nest on the 24 hour live camera. Something strange happened to my sense of time early in the pandemic. Things started slowing down even as they sped up. I felt like I…