I do not usually do memes, but as I was tagged by Imogen, and as this is a book meme…
1. Pick up the nearest book.
Here I encountered difficulties. I am sitting at my desk. Directly above the computer monitor there is a shelf. Not wanting to go in search of a measuring device, I closed [...]

Wishing yourself flattened between the pages of a glossy magazine never works. Nothing is ever so shiny, nor do any more than 2% of the population possess legs quite so long. Wishing yourself in small bold letters with your words italicised and everything describable and unknottable also never works. Because.
The Girl With The Priestly Admirer [...]

Her face between two vertical rust-flaked bars. She has been stuck there for a long time, head inside, the rest of her hanging uselessly from this insignificant height. (Standing next to me, she would be very small.) The very tips of her toes are her only unsteady anchor. Her hurting flailing envy gives way, after [...]

This is where you have been.
Four white-washed corners of despair. One perfectly round hole set into the thick cast iron door. Sporadic flashes of eye at the hole from day number one. They are watching. You. Day number two. Press yourself into a corner. You think it is the least conspicuous of the four. You [...]

One by one I am killing off every person I know.
(In my dreams only.)
This morning I fell from a concrete roof garden and woke up with a smile hovering above me somewhere, my fist still clenched around the neck of a red wine bottle long dissolved away.
After having killed my father three nights ago with [...]

I dream of riding Oblivion for you, in between brushing teeth in the dark with my eyes squeezed shut against the mirror before crawling back to bed at 7am, and inevitable re-wakening at 8am.
I keep my eyes open. Don’t look down! booms the voice of doom. I look down. Your tiny body hundreds of feet [...]

Being a bit short of my own words today, I have borrowed a few from Susanna Clarke. I am in love with her writing. I don’t want it to ever end. Luckily it looks as if it might do just that. Jonathan Strange… is twenty-five doorstops fat.
… Mr Honeyfoot’s post-chaise travelled through a world that [...]

He has perfected the almost feline leap across the rows of wooden desks. He can start at one end of the room, now, and make it to other side without any part of his body making contact. He practised and practised in the depth of the night, every night for months, after the gates had [...]

Robert? I ask. I have been looking for him for what feels like years. I am fazed by the house I find myself in the parlour of. It is small and narrow, and I feel like an uncomfortably enlarged Alice. I want to leave, but stopping me is this overpowering need to find Robert. He [...]

I am grabbing on tight to the rungs of a ladder. Every morning a little man wearing a fedora hat (not jauntily, but somewhat sardonically, ironically, with a touch of evil) and steel-capped leather boots squeezes my breakable ankles in his two hairy fists, two meaty paws, and pulls down hard. This is a white-knuckle [...]