Women with legs the colour of sweet nut glaze, their dresses high and tight to their throats, the clip of their short steps. The girls with the secrets under their skirts, fingernails like preserved cherries.

…from After the Fire, a Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld, who if you can’t tell, I’ve been reading a lot of lately.

At school things caught at his hair and plucked at the back of his trousers. His pen moved slowly across the page, ink swelled into the paper. He felt himself trapped between the bone and flesh of his face, and he couldn’t move. Everyone else’s hands moved at impossible speed over their work, the noises of the classroom were high-pitched and speeded up, made no sense. He felt his own body, a sluggish weight, pale and thick, a rock with a wooden shell. With effort he stood up, ignored the squealed noises of the teacher, the weird electric sound of laughter, saw only that Amy Blackwell’s blue eyes watched him as he walked out of the classroom, away from the school, heavy enough that he might sink into the ground and suffocate, or else fall on the pavement and shatter into splinters.

…from After The Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld.

Sometimes you read and have a feeling, not that you’ve read what you’re reading before, but that somewhere along the way you forgot to write it, and its overjoying, realizing someone else wrote it for you, exactly as you would have wished it written.

Her voice was so deep that parts of words melted before they left her mouth.

…was written by:

a) David Mitchell, in Black Swan Green,

b) Michael Ondaatje, in Divisadero, or

c) Evie Wyld, in After The Fire, A Still Small Voice?