I have always enjoyed the friendly one-upmanship of choosing anniversary gifts for my wife. Gifts significant to her while honouring the traditional symbolism of the item’s primary material. Most importantly, though, something better than what she gets me.

I held a candle to the smoke detector and, with the alarm screeching, kicked the bedroom door off its hinges. My efforts were rewarded with the most passionate sexual experience I’d ever had. Harriet didn’t even care my helmet was a Fireman Sam toy.

She survived the winter massacre and now stands alone, exposed, in the dank, still earth. Waiting for something. But what she can not tell. All she knows is that the hushed song of her kind as they swayed to the music of the wind is gone.

‘Live from London to the world, it’s Barnyarn! The show where we can walk with the animals, talk to the animals, grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals. And here’s your host, Bob ‘Doolittle’ Daniels!’

To the boy, the boots looked to be very valuable. Not the sort of thing a man would part with willingly. He assessed the man as subtly as he could and saw the silver pistol on his hip. “Did ya–y’know, kill him? The man?”

“Parents always say their dogs ‘went to a farm’,” I said this with air quotations even though I hate it when people do it to me, “because they think kids will blame them for killing their pets. It’s what I’d tell my kids, too. I’m forty-three now, Mum. You can tell me.”

“Everyone’s going crazy with this virus, huh?”

“I mean, it’s good for business this week, but once the mandatory shutdown starts? I don’t know what I’m gonna do, man.”

Rey demands payment for protection, an offering. Some product or service to ensure one of his minions doesn’t slide a knife into your side as you sleep or fuck you in the shower block. My offering is to take care of the rat problem. 

The stain is a black smudge on my white pillowcase. Depending on my mood, it reminds me of a horse or a pineapple or the Green Dragon character on a mahjong tile.

“I’m calling the police,” Harry’s mum said on the afternoon he’d accepted chocolate from Homeless Jeff.