Helen Hodgman

“Jack and Jill slept, wrapped in each other's arms, untroubled by any dream in their cocoon of freshly discovered wrinkly passion.”

“Life's so simple, thought Jill, if only you can strike the right note. All it needed was a little give-and-take. She'd often said so.”

“He saw with sudden awful clarity that if he turned tail now and if, by some appalling miracle, she should survive, he'd never hear the end of it. She'd latch onto his flawed character and hold it up for relentless ridicule till the end of time, or thereabouts.”

“Off with the old and on with the new and never a second's thought between.”

“He was dazed, the soft thoughts sinking slowly in. A son. Even a daughter. His child. Immortality. A chance to make good. Pass on the hard lessons learned.”

“Life's too short to be sat at home writing all the time.”

“She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a full stop, some might say.”

“Jack amused himself by visualising her head creaking open on hinges concealed by her tartan Alice band, and releasing all the furry folk with which she populated her tales.”

“She usually worked at night, claiming that the racket he made about the house distracted her during the day; she needed silence, total silence, in which to pursue her inspiration - else it fled away and left her with a splitting headache to show for it.”

“The sun was up - stuck like half a tinned apricot on a sky awash with all the colours of a fading bruise. Down below the living dead were forming their complaining queues at bus stops.”

“She wrote sniffing back the tears that flowed over the version of things that her unconscious insisted on sicking up.”