My mother is the weather. As a child, I was the core target to which she would unleash her hailstorms and earthquakes that tore me down and broke me into pieces.

Sitting on the plane to Chicago, Mila wondered when exactly the idea had taken hold of her. Did the idea have an infancy or a childhood, or did it ground itself in the soil of her imagination like a full-grown poison tree?

She was not unused to calls of distress, the groans of the feverish, or the cloying stench of broken bodies and all their expulsions, but never so many at a time and never so twisted and ripped.

Three o’clock on a Thursday was an odd time for a visit, but it was the only downtime between my part-time jobs that suited Jo. More unusual than the time was the prospect of a one-to-one rendezvous in my bedsit with someone about my age and attractive.

Nothing is as visceral as holding a handful of human ash. I resist the impulse to sift it between my fingers as I walk. Everyone, from the mourners to the pastor, are far away and yet too close.

“Going souling", they used to call it. I can remember m’grandad telling me he used to do it, when he were little, going round the houses and offering to say prayers for the dead, in exchange for these little cakes, soul cakes they called ‘em.

Saturday. Ged’s day. Best day of the week. When Jean usually pops over to see her sister. If I play my cards right we’ll hardly see each other till tomorrow.

Today was her birthday – sixty-six years old going on ninety – and she was spending it the same way she had spent every other day except Sunday for the past thirty-two years.

The world to Kieran Gilchrist had never made complete sense, even more so when he found his mum and dad stone-cold dead in their bed one rainy morning.

He wasn’t wanted in this country. But as a volunteer in the hospital, he could serve and he could belong.

Pandemic, protests, and presidency. But here it was, the countdown to New Year. New Year in New York. Times Square at New Year.

Aside from that Glaswegian Friend of the Earth, Dougie Macleod didn’t have a lot of time for the other men on the rig. He kept his head down and got his work done.

He watched her leave, knowing that she only pulled the latch behind her. He had at least two hours before she would be back home. He needed one last souvenir, and he knew exactly where to find it.

She’d so looked forward to her first Adult Education class for Memoire Writing and now she couldn’t get a single word down on paper.

Lockdown helped me realise there is more than meets the eye in my town. Scratch beneath the surface you begin to discover there are weird and wonderful things happening in the most unlikely places.