Ninebark keeps my mother’s hands in a frame on the fifth floor, facing the lift doors, between a platinum disc and a fire extinguisher, and I’d forgotten, because I’d spent five years making a point of it.
It’s a spread from the first album’s booklet, two of the six pages, blown up to the size of a window and put under glass. My handwriting. The crossings-out. Down the right-hand margin, in the blue biro I’d had from the bookshop, the line about her hands in the sink, which I’d put down straight at twenty so I’d know where it was. There’s a small brass plate at the bottom that says LONGFIELD, DIARY PAGES, which they weren’t.
The lift opened on it. Hal got out first, with his coat on, and went to the desk. I got out second and looked at the carpet.
Ezra got out last, and stopped.
He’d…
Keep reading.
Unlock this story and the entire library.
Or start another story free
Every story here is finished, and its first five chapters are free.
- Under Two SignaturesAn architect and the anonymous investor funding her tower fall for each other under an agreement neither can break.Completed · 15 chapters · 2h 2m
- The Standing InvitationA married engineer and the architect she works beside spend months not touching each other. Then she faces what she has already done.Completed · 19 chapters · 2h 32m
- Notes Toward a Second LanguageTwo translators, divorced, are left a dead friend's last novel on one condition: they finish it together, in one room, in six months.Completed · 18 chapters · 2h 59m