(published in White Wall Review, 11/05/19)
Merethe’s not back,” Colton says as he walks into the room.
It’s 10:10pm. At 10:15pm, the automatic lockdown system would start. At 10:17pm, Sarah Hamilton, our long-suffering houseparent, would unwedge a strategic wellie from between the doors and let the lockdown system finish. I throw a coat over my pyjamas, grab my flip flops, and head out into the snow.
[published in Bandit Fiction, issue 2, 20/06/2018; republished in Hypertrophic Press, Winter 2018]
“Sammy is in the kitchen.”
Sammy pronounces it more like “kit-hen” when he points to the upper right-hand part of the diagram. It’s a common problem, that harsher “-ch” that doesn’t exist in all languages. We’ve done a sheet like this with cutesy drawings of architecturally unsound houses every week for the past month that I’ve been coming to the refugee centre.
