It’s a cut glass afternoon and the wolves are dancing in downtown bars, howling classic rock choruses as they swing each other to oblivion. The local band never made it nationwide, though they once had a single that blasted from every transistor radio for every backyard barbecue and beach blanket romance, and when they slot it in now, between Black Night and The Joker, the wolves spin faster though they don’t even realise it was their song. But because this isn’t a bitter story, the band don’t mind, and the bass player remembers that beach blanket, wolf-whooping night, when the music fired in his belly and the words came fully formed like a daughter of the old gods, her blood red lips laughing and singing at the same time. Hours from now, when he’s too wired to sleep, he’ll look down from his balcony on the wolves still dancing in the street, reach into the cut glass sky, and caress the full Moon with string-blistered fingers.

Every room has a clock, madly ticking, its face slick with sweat, its movement adjusted to forgetting. There is a picture of blue shoes abandoned in the long grass by a river, a terrier sniffing amongst decadent leaves, a silver butterfly lost beneath glittering water. Tick-tock, tick-tock. There is a phial of holy blood stolen from a chapel on an isthmus and dropped into and endless lake, the cake of soap with which my uncle washed his hands of all traces of war, a bowdlerised book of myths for the barely awake. Tick-tock, tick-tock. There is a key impossible to turn, a key impossible to read, a key impossible to sing. Tick-tock, tick-tock. And at the quayside, a mother with a clock face and hands like spades or arrows calls for the dog she lost in the war, calls for the blue-shoed boy she lost in the river, calls for time to settle on her silver tongue. She opens her chest with the movement of crows – tick-tock, tick-tock – and God knows when she’ll ever find room to truly sleep.