Sublime

(Although even in her twenties, Charlie wasn’t what you’d call eye candy: her looks had always been sharp edged and intense, more like eye tequila.)

meteoric

had started dumping sachets of mushroom powder into his metal water bottle. Alex had tried a sip: it made the water taste swampy and expensive.

Jo looked at the bar, where she’d worked for a few summers pouring wine and shaking cocktails for the hordes from away, sunburned tourists who’d said her little seaside village was quaint and asked what folks did here in the winter. Well, this is what we do here, she thought. We gain weight and drink too much and get on each other’s nerves.

Maggie’s destiny arrives one afternoon without a clarion call. It comes on cat feet, like everything else in the world that has the power to destroy you. She had

I hungered for cast-iron certainty even though I realized that I was living in a morass of uncertainty—why

A