At all points  it was seamless with the wall. She couldn’t see much of the face, but it was smiling.

Saturday  morning,  Joan  had  always made  cakes. Often  her husband found her in the kitchen, still up to her elbows in flour or perhaps setting the ‘regulator’ on her brand new Creda oven. The radio played a little light classical music. Alan loved her cakes. He would put his arms around her, rub a little, bunch up her skirt, then shoot helplessly while he was still trying to slip into her clean underwear from behind. ‘Oh!’ Joan would tell him, ‘I do love our times  together.’ It  was their  mid-morning Saturday  ritual.  He could always surprise her. She was always ready for him, yet never somehow prepared.  Today, though,  she was only thinking  how awful it would be if he came in and saw the vulva in the kitchen wall. And just as she thought that, he did. Once Alan arrived, the walls returned  slowly to their original colour. It took all morning but everything was real again. After they held hands the way they did, staring up at the wall together, Joan and Alan felt for a week or two that they had changed. They knew a secret others didn’t. Though it was horrible,  it made them  feel that  they had found their way through  to some more knowing way of life. Joan said vile things. Alan pulled her skirt up and fucked ’til they were both red and sore. Then they found that all their friends knew the secret too, so it was just a kind of loss everyone went through.

The assistant began to bang her head on the side of the immersion tank and make a sound full of grief. She could hear herself but not stop; the technicians could hear her, but it was too soon to get the lid up. Later, she cancelled her subscription  to Cedar Mountain  and received a refund; this time no one could explain what had gone wrong.

Panamax IV:

‘Don’t you get sick of the cultural  noise?’ R.I. Gaines asked Alyssia Fignall. They were sheltering from the noon light in a bony cloister, perhaps  a mile from the sea and some miles down the valley from her hilltop site. Its arches were in shade, but full sun fell across the dry central fountain, the pale rhiolite columns, the dry brown vegetation between the cobbles. She had been trying to explain to him how richly-decorated the cloister would have been before time stripped  off the paint. This had upset his idea of it as bare, quiet, uncommunicative:  possessing an almost geological calm. ‘All I want is the stone, wiped clean.’ He shrugged. ‘And perhaps this sense of an unending afternoon.’

She smiled. Touched his hand. ‘You’re tired, Rig.’

‘I’ll stay a bit longer,’ he told her. ‘The ship won’t come until dark. You can tell me all about these sacrificial engines of yours.’