You were there! Her mother hooted. You were there! Only in an incubator. And to her temporary friends, conspiratorially, Got tangled in the cord. Not breathing, see? So they took her away. Put her in an incubator. So how was we supposed to bond?

They couldn’t have bonded if she was dead, either. But April said nothing.

And ruined my figure, didn’t you, Trouble? To the Liquid Supper friends, Her father ran a mile. Ran a mile! I thought a sprog would bring us together, turned out she did for us.

That was a cue for the strangulation mime, the big eyes, I could kill you! and the friends cackling and pouring themselves ungainly splooshes of wine. Predictably in the months to come, April’s mother would turn on each of them for spurious offences. Would find new confederates, closer to dissolution. Would start swearing about this bloody place, move herself and her underfed daughter to the next cheap town, and start again. Just you an’ me, Monster. Until the new Jeans and Joans and Janets arrived.

April imagines herself in her mother’s belly, listening to the cackles and hoots, looping the cord around her own neck to the words of her mother’s favourite refrain. I could kill you. Without friends, it came with teeth.

But she is not with her mother. The silence of a made-safe room hums around her. Sunlight a sheet of gold on the floor, the wonder of human achievement framed in the window.

She breathes once, twice, and her mother dissolves.

‌Panini

There is a thought at the back of Logan’s mind that he’s struggling not to notice. All morning as he tries to work it is gnawing just behind his ears, a pernicious beetle whose mandibular motions are boring increasingly joined-up tunnels of air into the structure of his reality. Again and again between the hours of nine and eleven he finds himself stationary, eyes frozen halfway through a page of text or hand paralysed in mid-motion as the effort to shut out the gnawing shuts down everything else. Again, and again, Logan heaves his mind back to the new case on his desk, but it is unengaging: a woman has brained her spouse with his own guitar after decades of assault in the other direction. Far from being unbalanced, it may well be her first act of sanity. The effort to spin out this simple opinion to the required minimum of a hundred words feels beyond him.