Fryn

The dream, a dropped coin, wobbles rolls off the table. Graphite eyes sketch shadows on the ceiling. The quilt is cold, the mattress smooth vacant Flimsy thoughts dangle from the fan blade, the lamp, the bedpost delightfully tangled and several years long. I coil the fibres on my thumb and fingers - Wind the bobbin, take up my needles to knit it, spin it into silk pyjamas. The fabric lines my eyes.

CHAPTER ONE The sound shouldn't have been so loud, given the mechanical buzz of Eliza's equipment across the room, but to May's ears the ticking of the clock echoed. Her pencil scratched across the grid-ruled page, reluctantly making molecules to match those in her textbook. She'd already arranged all of her notes in neat piles around the desk, attaching post-it notes here and there for effect. Her pens ranged from longest to shortest, and from darkest to lightest within that order, and she'd re-stuck all the price lists to the bench. She'd even dusted the mermaid's frame, not that the creature appreciated the gesture. At the top of the bi

PROLOGUE 'Sad mother and absent father, seeking guardian for their only daughter,' read the advertisement in the classifieds section of the local newspaper. The small photo underneath was in full colour and had a telephone number as a caption. A rosy-cheeked cherub peered out of the page, blinking long eyelashes and sucking her thumb, and Eliza couldn't have painted a more perfect set of yellow curls if she traced them from a magazine. She flicked forward and backward through the pages until the words transferred themselves onto the palms of her hands, but the ad remained on page fifty-six and the little cherub never stopped smiling up at h

Of all the places she anticipates finding it, it's not on the toilet. Technically she muses, it isn't on the toilet though. She is. It's in the roof. It makes sense, she supposes, that you'd hide it somewhere that people wouldn't look for it. But still, it's a little unexpected. She's just noticed that Heaven is in the skylight in her bathroom. She's not sure how long it's been there, but she counts herself lucky that she decided not to hose it out recently. Typical, though, that she let Steven borrow her ladder. She flicks the light switch on and off, checking to see if it's a trick of the light, but it makes no difference. She waves timid

Lucy A pocket full of change. My mother has a voice like a dropped coin. I know, because I have her voice. Her eyes, Her skin, Her nose. Her voice. When she talks it shatters the silence It startles the Bear Man, then it wobbles, stops. And when he knows he's won again, he picks it up and puts it into his pocket. His pockets rattle with family secrets. Mum says we need him. He pays the bills, puts dinner on the table. He keeps us safe. Yeah, I say, from everyone but himself. I hate him. Sometimes I hate mum too. That's why I hate myself. (Because I can't speak up over the rattle of his pockets. ) Tim A dr

Suddenly, I find myself sitting in my bedroom on the second floor of Eliza's building. The shop hasn't changed much, and the buzz of machinery is as familiar as her voice. My paintings are still on the walls, with some photographs and a mirror. The cold tiles of the balcony stick to my thighs as I sit and listen to the traffic growl, feral, below my feet. I wonder for the first time if Eliza tells baby Faye any of the stories she used to tell me as we sat out here, sticky because the air conditioner was broken and hungry because the bread was gone. I try to focus on that feeling, and not on Sam snoring behind me, or the itching on my wrist.