Karen Arnold

Mornings that crawl past like glaciers, dust motes caught in sunbeams, dancing, whirling, mesmerising. Books forgotten. Pens lost. Dinner money left on the bus again. Words that dance on the page. Numbers that just won’t add up.   Outside, you know the green world is humming and buzzing. The world inside your head is a […]

It is never truly dark in the hospital. At night, dreams hover above each bed, drifting like smoke. Some are delicate as shells from childhood beaches, others dark, slick as canal water.  I wander unseen from bed to bed, trailing my ancient fingers through the gauze of each mind.   I linger near the cribs

She cut her hair yesterday. Knotted her fingers into it, hacked at it with kitchen scissors that were too blunt for the job and the unwanted lengths fell to the bathroom floor like shed snakeskin, dry and whispery. When she had finished, a newly hatched, baby bird face looked back at her from the mirror, startled

There is ice on the inside of the window. I put my face close to the thin glass and breathe warm air onto frost flowers. The cobbled streets of the old town are deserted, the curfew has hours to go. Rooftops shine in the moonlight, dull slate made liquid and mercury. A scrawny cat watches

In five minutes time, you will sigh heavily and offer me an unasked for opinion on the current leader of the Labour Party. I will put my hand on your leg without looking up from my book, knowing you will soon be lost in the pages of your newspaper again. By the end of my

Except she doesn’t any more. The notice is curled at the edges, the paper sere and yellow as a late September leaf. One corner hanging away from a dried out lump of blu tac, the whorls and swirls of her thumb print still visible on its surface, a fossil record of her sun drenched, heat

Spent fireworks litter the path to the front door, damp and blackened, the shadows of last night’s display. The laurel bush near the front door drips steadily, soaking my legs as I brush past. Stepping into the porch, over the sprawling heap of post, I put the key in the lock, open the door slowly

When did it begin, this soft, relentless unspooling of time? When you could not remember the way home, calling me in terror, the dog barking hysterically in the background? When your favourite blue mug slipped from suddenly weak hands, smashing into a hundred fragments? When we saw the grey fog on the x-ray, and held