The pizza boxes go down in the passenger side footwell. I put the blower on max to keep them warm, and use my wipers to move a fallen, sunken, half-rotten cooking apple from my windscreen. The apple falls off but I’m left with a pectin-smudge rainbow covering half the glass.

I leave hill town behind.

Over the train tracks, past the cross, past the white bike. My Hilux smells of the good things in life: grease sinking into cardboard, melted cheese, hot sausage, caramelised onions, crisp pizza-crust. One section of the scent, one distinct aroma, takes me back to Dad. I think it’s the cardboard. Hot, full of pizza steam. Back when I was thirteen, in the months before he died, a pizza place opened up in our Stockholm neighbourhood. A Korean couple and their shy niece. Their thin-crust pizzas were spectacular. Dad used to pick up two on his way home from work. We’d always choose the same toppings. I remember him smiling as he divided them up. Two triangles each of each pizza. He always wanted to eat them straight from the box but Mum would say, ‘not on my watch,’ and we’d eat from pre-heated plates. She never did heat a plate again after his accident. She hardly ate at all.

I reach the base of the hill and speed up.

My headlights are full beam for much of the journey because no other fool is driving around this part of moose country on the eve before Pan Night when there’s a psychopathic killer still on the loose.

I round a bend and my headlights pick out a field of stationary cows. Each one glows in my halogen glare like a plump ghost hovering over the churned, chilled land. Their eyes shine back at me. A field of unmoving spirits. I can’t see their legs. You wouldn’t know there was anything in that field but there is. Dozens of them.

Past Svensson’s Saws & Axes, and for whatever reason, now, at 8pm, there’s a queue out the door. A queue of axe buyers? Or chainsaw buyers? Or is the shop owner selling something else on the side?

I hand out the pizza boxes in the office and Lena and Sebastian grunt and start eating as they type. I pull out my aids and eat and work on fixing my stories. This will be my first issue since moving back up from Malmö. My first paper with ‘Deputy Editor’ written in print. There’s even an actual story about it. How meta is that? Lena wrote it herself. She won’t let me read it until I have a copy on my desk.

After I email my stories over to Lena I say goodnight and drive home. I open my apartment door and there’s a note on the floor.

‘Thanks you for my Sand Witch. From Dan.’