❝Those interchanges uncovered what she saw in me, what flaws she saw in me leading ultimately to a diagnosis of a disability. A small thing, barely noticeable but once pointed out, impossible to ignore.❞

❝Kar was a shade under seven foot tall, a longstanding bias in favour of tall politicians and celebrities having been formalised by the selectors. This despite Melissa’s unheard insistence of it being a straightforward case of parochial thinking. As she repeatedly delighted in telling him, alien notions of fitness and worth did not necessarily include the distance from your nose to your foot. ❞

❝Outside reduced to vistas of only mud-spattered windows, wreathing any news of the world in an orange-tinted patina of filth. Twilight had fallen even before boarding and her world collapsed to something familiar in outline, if not in detail. No matter the times spent on this same winding route, shattered after a backshift on the ward or dropping in on friends, she’d paid no real attention. A bus journey was only remembered in the abstract, in tiny variances of the many. A minute early, a minute late, a dog, no dog, chewing gum ruining her jeans, that blond guy, the day it rained buckets, her brother never stopping talking about roleplaying games, the time she tripped, all smearing together into a single impressionistic mush. ❞

❝But on this night, every year, it’s worse. No squawk code exists for The Problem. It hasn’t begun yet, but it will. ❞