Vanta Black by Stephanie Bishop

Matilda had a thing about arrivals. On planes, even when not working on foreign policy, she wore tailored suits and carried a valise, as if on her way to an important meeting, or in the event of becoming ejected, disembodied over enemy territory, needing to command as much respect as a man, as Roosi, for instance, or any of her colleagues. Nothing could be done about shots fired by narcissistic young men. One had killed her brother. And now she found herself alighting from a taxi at the head of the circular driveway to the Grand-Hôtel, Cabourg, looking as bourgeois as […]

Beyond the glass enclosure of the pool, past the herb garden, city lights bristle at the seams of the sky. Out at the edge of a nature reserve, this house stands at a gentle gradient; on nights when the moon is on the rise I get a tidal view of tree heads standing tall like sentinels at the borders of my house. At two in the morning, Hajj and my two youngest boys are asleep inside. The back yard is still, its silence punctuated by the occasional roar of tyres turning on the road in the distance. Underneath a cauldron, […]

‘She keeps her eyes on me, but slowly her eyebrows come down and she mumbles, ‘I’m not a ganga.’ Then she unpacks her McChicken…’

They laughed, uneasily. Every hour one or both looked out their kitchen window. The car remained parked, most likely with the man inside, but from the first floor of their space-age block they could not be sure.

By the time mum pulls into the station, Levi is about ready to piss himself …

Miracles by Jennifer Mills