Almost Dark

They are all the same, you thought. And everybody is from one and everybody misses one and everybody wants to get away.

You passed the last few houses and entered the country, a place where towns blurred, disappearing and reappearing again on the other side with new names, new white churches standing in the middle of the town, where all of the roads pointed and crossed.

was like being near a lion or the ocean.

The fire, too, was like the Fourth of July, with all those colours in the sky, only better because nobody knew when it would end and the adults couldn’t control it. It might light up the trees around it, the buildings next to it, it might even run up the street until it reached the houses beyond. It was exciting, the children thought, to be near something that the adults couldn’t control. It