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Tags: Growing-up

He sounded different in the confines of the car. The rain on the windshield threatened to drown out his voice, a sound like the tapping of a thousand fingers. ‘So.’ Ellen shoved her schoolbag down between her legs. It didn’t have any of her school things in it. Instead it had changes of

The half-moon beach is manmade – I found out. The house used to be a boathouse belonging to a hotel, perched on top of a cliff, overlooking the majestic lake encircled by lush foliage. It started with a vision of a rich man. A railway was laid, the beach was made. The hotel was eager to meet th

Kennedy sniffed himself. ‘Hot dang, I stink like dog meat.’ Where the stink had come from, Kennedy couldn’t say. Nor could he say how he knew what dog meat smelled like, exactly. Did he mean that he smelled like dog food? As if he was confusing the thing doing the eating with the thing b

No question what her favourite flavour was. Black cherry. The Food City store brand. Julietta would always remember that nearly nondescript, primer-grey can with the maroon letters that spelled out BLACK CHERRY SODA, the words set at a forty-five-degree angle. She only ever drank the stuff in the

Stanley Richard Klonczynski had worked at the dream shop for fifty-four years, seven months and thirteen days, or 19,946 days if you didn’t count the days he took off, which were not very many and really only brought the total down another hundred days, give or take. The 19,946 days – give or ta

The room was a small box full of colour. As they entered, Mohamed was standing behind the counter cutting cloth. Lalani liked the way he cut without cutting, holding the scissor, and running the cloth against it, so that the pieces of silk fell smoothly to either side. ‘Sari jacket?’ La

I can tell she is going to irritate the bejesus out of me from the minute she takes a running jump into the swimming pool. The over-exuberant type – Little Miss #LiveLaughLove. Ignoring the tsunami of chlorine she’s unleashed into my eyes, she makes a laughing ‘brrr’ sound and shakes her hea

Seen from a boat, approaching the island through cold, choppy, white-flecked seas, the island of Staffa looks like a dense grey forest of rock off the western coast of Scotland. Columns of basalt push up and then flower out into a puffy, cloud-like summit on top of which the plantlife of the island