Sublime

An aunt stayed on hoping to curry favor with my mother and named me Hawk, Circe, for my yellow eyes, and the strange, thin sound of my crying.

Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.

sleek-haired, brown-skinned, quick and deft in all her movements; she reminded me of a wren.

it was on the return from the South Pole that Amundsen and his team ate their dogs.

She was Melissa’s oldest, boldest friend. They had gone to the same primary school. Hazel worked in advertising. She had a wide and glamorous smile behind which was an oft-foul tongue, and long, bouncing, half-French, half-Ghanaian curls falling down her back, the most beautiful, the most envied of their schoolgirl pack, the one the boys always wen

Beatrix sighed and watched as the macaque was carried away in his crate. “I wish I had a monkey of my own,” she said wistfully. Miss Marks gave Poppy a long-suffering glance. “One might wish she were as eager to acquire a husband.”

Something had already started; a process that would become more and more pronounced as the years rolled on. I was already starting to tune out human beings. When you have a wolf, they take over your life in a way that a dog seldom does. And human company gradually becomes less and less significant for you.

These folk are not like her and not like her mother; some are differently shaped, their voices rough and deep as a lowing cow. She stalks two as they walk beyond their thorn hedge to a stand of alders by the stream near their house. They are noisy; their untidy feet snap twigs and kick stones without heed for what might hear. They talk but the thin

maverick.