Fiction

A silver-haired stranger in an expensive suit knocks on a house in Springfield, Nebraska, and the seventeen-year-old who answers is holding an ice cream bucket, because she has spent the afternoon in an emergency room arguing with a cashew. The will he is carrying will move her family nine hundred miles.

February 1895. Three friends and a solicitor have given their advice, and Oscar Wilde tears the Marquess of Queensberry's calling card into four pieces, balls them up, and flicks them into a melting champagne bucket. He will not sue. Fifty-seven years of life follow from that flick.

A ninety-six-year-old woman sets the Christmas Eve table for the Feast of the Seven Fishes, waits for her granddaughter to announce she has gone vegan, and serves her a can of cat food on a plate. The granddaughter throws it at a life-size china baby Jesus.

A girl from the slums turns the knob on a lamp for the first time. A butterfly of gold lifts out of the base, beats its wings three times, and dissolves into honey-coloured light. Four hundred pages later she will find out what it was.

At three in the morning on Christmas Day, in an alley behind a Walmart, a police officer in a Santa hat makes a small man in a red robe blow into a Breathalyzer. It reads 1.45 percent. He runs the test again. It reads 1.45 percent again.