'I came home to find Marlene sitting on the porch with a rifle resting on the blanket across her knees. Her trembling lips set in a hard line, she stared on past me. She asked me to make her a coffee.
'Inside, I stirred the muddy brown liquid slowly. Marlene's house was one of the older buildings, a house that stood on top of a dusty storage area where her children's sun-bleached playthings and her husband's tools had rested, forgotten beneath her home. Spiders made their homes in the beams and lizards lay languidly in the nooks and crannies afforded by plastic cars, cubby-houses and bikes..'
(Publication abstract)