It’s my fault. I was a drinker anyway—I’ve always liked to drink. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there’s nothing more boring than that.

the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps. All these things I know, but I don’t say them out loud, not now.

My head leaning against the carriage window, I watch these houses roll past me like a tracking shot in a film. I see them as others do not; even their owners probably don’t see them from this perspective. Twice a day, I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment. There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home.

The cemetery has a wrought-iron gate, with an intricate scrollwork archway over it, and an inscription: Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I Will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me. Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I’ve known has had a way of going missing. They skip town, or turn perfidious, or else they drop like flies, and then where are you

.There’s also a story that claims the city wasn’t really destroyed at all. Instead, through a charm known only to the King, the city and its inhabitants were whisked away and replaced by phantoms of themselves, and it was only these phantoms that were burnt and slaughtered. The real city was shrunk very small and placed in a cave beneath the great heap of stones. Everything that was once there is there still, including the palaces and the gardens filled with trees and flowers; including the people, no bigger than ants, but going about their lives as before – wearing their tiny clothes, giving their tiny banquets, telling their tiny stories, singing their tiny songs.The King knows what’s happened and it gives him nightmares, but the rest of them don’t know. They don’t know they’ve become so small. They don’t know they’re supposed to be dead. They don’t even know they’ve been saved. To them the ceiling of rock looks like a sky: light comes in through a pinhole between the stones, and they think it’s the sun