For Want of a Nail Rachel

The car rolls into the layby, unnoticed in the darkness, and grinds to a halt on the dirt. She is crying at the wheel. Perhaps she knows what she is about to do is wrong, but for her, so far as she can see, there are no more options. This is the only avenue they have left her with. In the back, her daughter starts to cry. It is late, she should be in bed. She is confused and tired, cuddling a shivering rabbit on her lap. Her mother rubs her face. They will rest soon. All of t...

The young man stands in the sunwashed kitchen, sweat still drying on his skin. He cannot take his eyes from the young woman standing a few feet away, the young woman dressed only in a T-shirt and a plastic garbage bag wrapped around her waist. The young woman holding a gun on himself and his mother. The young woman is agitated, fretting. She claims to have been raped, and to have shot her rapist, but she will not allow them to call 911 and refuses their offer of clothing. And...

The engineer of the steamboat hears the crew, shouting and raging once again. His stomach turns as he hears their protests. He knows what the captain will say, and he knows why it is necessary, but he also understands why the crew is so repulsed, why they have threatened mutinies. They are military men, and the job they are being forced to do shocks and horrifies them. The engineer can do little, as he approaches the massive paddlewheels that churn the muddy riverwater into a...

The young man weeps as he stands at his window. For months his mind has been dominated by the memory of falling masonry, his ears ringing with the screams of the dying, his nose choked by the stench of decomposing flesh. When he closes his eyes he can see them, the ones he was unable to save. The famous image, a woman with her head thrown back, a man with his arms around her and his head laid on her chest, blood running down his face, both of them encased in dust and crumbled concrete, ...

The children are hungry, clamouring around their mother in the hot, dusty home. Their mother dusts her hands with flour and begins to flatten out the dough, pressing it into discs with her strong fingers before opening the tannour to press them against the hot, clay walls. A few minutes later she pulls the steaming bread from the oven, and the children squeal in delight as she hands out the fresh loaves. It's the pink bread, the bread made with the special flour their father brought hom...

WARNING FOR CHILD DEATH. The nurse slumps in a chair set in the corner of the room, sobs racking her body. Yet another small body lies cold and inert on the table nearby. They have spent days tending him, only for his little heart to repeatedly stop, for blood to ooze from his eyes and mouth. Not a single doctor can understand why. Time after time the ward fought to resuscitate him, the baby's heart had given out. The nurse who cared for him is inconsolable. In a few minutes, she will ca...