Diane Williams

He is a figure I once engaged with for years, amid scenes with nearly religious significance attached to them.

And by chance, this Saturday, I had witnessed him stepping away from a park path and stooping beneath the leaf cover – only to put his hand against the tree trunk.

He smiled when he saw me, but when I reached him he was speechless and sour, and then he proceeded on his way...

I was able to get Harriet Mounce to shriek and I think I must have thought any shriek would do.

When she first stood there naked, I remember she was solemn or she looked annoyed or was she really pained? But she did seem to like me. The cues – she had really focused her eyes on me and she had smiled while on her haunches by the hearth a bit earlier.

Because she is a brunette, the sight of...

The bird’s voice was such a thick voice – it could never have been carried away by the high wind. It was a passionate voice that might have answered the question, ‘What am I living for?’ – had there only been words to accompany it.

And I did get to see the bird out on a limb, opening and closing its mouth, its breast pulsing.

Ruby had said, There is the bird that is...

How best to touch these woody objects or a person?     She batted together the parts of the sycamore stick she had broken in two and then made of them the self-important capital letter T – and she spun one.     She rolled the stick over her thumb and then she tried for greater twirling speed, as she sat on the park bench that bore a personalised inscribed...

I had had enough of everything during what I took to be my turn.

‘Can I just pet it,’ I said, when Tim and I were in bed, ‘instead of my taking it inside?’ But Tim said no.

And then, at the task, he pulled himself back and forth inside of me with many repetitions, enough to get to the next step for him – to stabilise the project. He was cramming rather a lot into...