The closeness between her brilliant, beautiful mother and her talented, intelligent daughter re-enforces a woman's sense of her own inferiority. Add to this her lifelong horror of bats, and things go from bad to worse.

A retired soldier and widower visits a war grave and so discovers the identity of his father.

Memories of her disappeared little brother won't let Nadine go.

A flash fiction story - someone is hiding in the maize fields, someone who needs help.

“Many who waded through the water coloured it with their blood, wine-red – a new meaning for the wine-dark sea of legend…” The battle of Marathon, fought in a time of treachery, danger and intense fear and superstition, was a military disaster for the Persians. But it was not the end of danger for Greece, and the courier’s famous triumphant journey, commemorated in the Olympic race, carried a frightening secret: “His own shadow, long and thin in front of him, was like a rope pulling him towards Athens; as he neared his destination so it gradually shortened, so the sun rose, so the enemy fleet moved towards Phalerum.” What of the Athenian runner himself? Surely, there was no way he could have known how his feat would be celebrated: “Thousands upon thousands of people running. In all the known world, and even lands beyond.” He would surely not have known or cared how fast he was running. And he would not have been able to predict that two messengers, not one, would be named in the annals. Or would he?

Yasuko works in a brothel in Tokyo. One night she is visited by a new client...

A mother, recovering on a psychiatric respite ward, recalls her own mother and her 'other mother', and sees vivid glimpses of hope in the past and present