Kathy Hoyle

The sand is pelt-soft. We pull off our sandals, hitch up cotton skirts and tuck them into our knickers. Then, we run.   The water is teeth-suck cold. It foams around our ankles, around our calves, around our thighs, until my sister calls out, ‘Don’t go any deeper than that!’   We catch hands, plunge […]

  The bones are mostly scarred and ancient-beige, not science-white, like in the books I used to read with Ma.     The signs say, ‘do not touch the displays.’   I want to touch them, to pull out the sharp wires holding the vertebrae together and breathe long breaths into the hollow, empty bone-spaces.