The Dhow House

the pins of stars.

She had been cast out of her own existence. This was what accidents, injury, trauma did to people, she knew; it dislocated them from a continuous narrative,

the time they were thirty,’ she said. ‘They were adults. I

People who are attentive to the existence of animals have refined souls.

Cloud presses in. In another minute a squall has drifted over her and she is soaked through. She will keep going, because it is her birthday, and to turn away from the storm would be to gainsay the year, to live under a mantel of cowardice and lack of resolve, of failure.

Mostly you find out that what you thought you feared doesn’t frighten you at all, but then something comes along which you had never thought of, and you’re terrified.’

and a semi-insane African grey parrot for a pet who uttered Swine at intervals, and who otherwise spoke only in profanities.

emotional quarantine,

Life without ideas is just a ceaseless lurch from event to event, stimulus to stimulus.