Mark Taylor

She was on the cover of all the magazines: those obscure trade ones that lie untouched on a coffee table while you wait for a job interview; the fifty-six issue limited runs where you build a model of the Titanic; the smudged-toner zines that are the only things still worth

When I want to forget a thing I did, I make myself a trophy, and it goes up on my shelf. It sits next to the plaque I got for falling asleep at work, the cup I won for throwing up on my sister's bridesmaid, the foot-in-mouth shield

On the lawn of Safflower House, a unicorn lay sleeping. You could see how it rested on the tips of the grass, barely bending them. It must have weighed little more than a sigh. I wanted nothing more than to go out to it, rest a hand on its nose,

She was a cat by night, and used to wake with the taste of blood in her mouth, but as her fur greyed all that was too much. In those colder, darker nights, when the cat-dreams came she leapt from her own bed and padded over to the box room.

Eventide was a sort of paste, with little crystalline grains suspended in it. You spread it across your eyelids when you went to bed and it kept the dreams off you. Monstrously expensive, but everybody bought it. It was all the more frightening to dream when you were the only

The leopard in the library scared people away. There was no pretending otherwise. She stalked the shelves while you were browsing and made it very hard to concentrate. But she had never hurt anyone, and she always had her library card hanging from her collar, and she read and read

We got one last crop from the garden, those soft white berries that don't grow anywhere else. I put them in boiling water to take off their thin, bitter skins, then cooked them down to a thick jam. Winter air curled in through the open windows, and I

I was worried about the yellowing around my fingernails, a dirty sort of yellow, like I had been smoking all my life. I was worried about the skin cracking at the corner of my mouth, and the taste when I woke, and the way my tongue felt too big by