Daddy
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Grow Light
Read fullThe humidity alarm goes off during the pudding, which in the history of Fenwick Station has never once happened at a convenient time. It is Midwinter's Day, the twenty-first of…
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Last Boat to Kadıköy
Read fullYou kept the coat. I saw it before I saw you. It was on the third hook in your hall, where I had left it eight years ago on the last night, navy wool, a bit shiny at the cuffs…
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Standing Down
Read fullThe jury took four hours and ten minutes, and Judge Rafferty used every one of them to avoid looking at the defence bench. Ally Magill watched him do it. He had watched him do it…
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The Tarp
Read fullAt twenty to nine on Saturday night the freezing rain finds the hole over the front pews, and Calvin Moyer, who has been telling the church board for three years that the roof…
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Anchor Watch
Read fullWe were five days at anchor off Singapore when the captain rang down to my cabin and asked if I would bring the generator logs up myself. I had been Chief Engineer of the Kestrel…
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Immersion Night
Read fullFarhad Irani has been telling me for twenty years that my kheema is oily, and tonight at eleven o'clock he walks across the lane to tell me again. I am alone in the kitchen with…
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Layover
Read fullThe crew van smells of floor polish and somebody's biltong, and Thandi is asleep against the window with her cap in her lap by the time we hit the N2. I let her sleep. She flew the…
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Closed
Read fullAt ten past one in the morning Hal Brandt took his shoes off under the desk for the first time in nineteen hours and found out he couldn't stand up again. His feet had swollen and…
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After Lorna
Read fullGideon Strand is trying to hang his funeral jacket in a hotel closet built for a much smaller man when he hears Ellis Reeve say his name from the bedroom doorway of the suite…
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Prompt Side
Read fullNobody in Kilmoran could have told you exactly when it started, but everybody had a theory, and Maureen at the post office had the best one. Her theory was that it began at the…
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High Water
Read fullI had held the good bunk in that hut for years, and I was sitting on it with my boots off and my socks steaming on the woodburner rail when Rawiri Pene filled the doorway…
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Ham Tea
Read full"You'll eat ham," Bern Haigh says, and puts a plate in Lyle's hands before Lyle has finished saying hello. It is a paper plate with a wall of thin pink ham on it, a boiled egg, a…