Selima Hill

Upstairs, in the heat, beside the handkerchiefs, my mother’s navy-blue horsehair mattress

still, although it’s August, smells of damp, of horses in the hush of damp forests,

of Spassky, still a child, playing chess all day long, with nobody, in silence –

Spassky, whose seductive ingenuity my mother has no need to understand.

The aeroplane must have been there for several weeks. A few birds were absent-mindedly picking through the mangled remains of small children, and a gold dog ran in and out of the empty cabin, cradling a spotted quince in its mouth. The man we were looking for was lying on a day-bed under a red tree. He seemed to be having some problem with his skin, and was wearing a pair of white silk gloves...

I have never been to Africa – I’ve only seen it from an aeroplane and longed to go there – it looked like a giant peach, half-asleep, gracefully draped in a dried civet-cat skin someone had sewn bells and teeth onto, and small figures made of ivory that carry miniature gongs and miniature hoes –

so no, I’ve never been to Africa, and...

‘“Possible titles: HAPPINESS: GRIEF: MY CROW.” That’s what it said, in tiny screwed-up handwriting that only I could follow, and maybe her mother, who wrote her the long intriguing letters I was on my word of honour not to read. We used to come up here most afternoons. Stacey would sit on her pillow, and, taking a lock of white hair between her fingers, would...

Beside the river in the dead of night, a cry, and then another, like a spell, turns the darkened beeches into light, the silence of the woods into a bell; and in the cottage on the moonlit hill a woman shivers in her narrow bed to hear the hare; and then the hare is still; she feels its ginger paws against her head, its dusty fur, like ghostly butterflies that fall in winter from the...