She couldn't remember why she had sat down. She opened the desk drawer and took out a laminated prayer card and red St Pio rosary beads. Wrapping them around her fingers, she bowed her head and began to pray. She told St Joseph that she dare not approach him while Jesus reposed near his heart.

From nowhere, it rose, a familiar unsettling pressure in her stomach. Her only relief was that somewhere mixed in with the fear came a euphoria she had never found anywhere else. But only the fear washed over her now. Her left hand shot out and slammed down onto a notepad. She slid it across the desk towards her, her head feeling free from her body as she tried to make use of what was happening to her. A dark reel unwound behind her eyes; edited razor-sharp, black and grey shapes, a frenzied acceleration of badly lit scenes. Her right hand groped the air, her fingers searching for two short vertical lines that would make it all pause, then backwards arrows to make it rewind. But this was nothing she could control. Coursing through her was the impulse to stay in the moment, not to go back, not to cast any light onto dark half-memories. But before she got a chance to write, she was gone, sliding to the floor, dragging paper and pens and pencils on top of her. The last thing she saw was her friend, standing in the doorway, shrunken to the size of a child.

My prison is a tool, a training ground, a stopover. I look at the bars behind me, the space around me, the confinement. I think of where you are and how tragic for you it is that here I am, there you are, but oh so quickly, there I am. Right with you.
Entrance. Exit.

He switched off the desk lamp. He returned the key to his pocket, stood up and walked to the door. He slid back the bolt and stepped outside. He reached up and turned off the television, watching as the light was sucked into a tiny circle at the center and turned to black. Then he walked across the floor and up the steps, pausing as he crossed the threshold into his bright, air-conditioned home.

She was twenty-nine years old, small and slender, dressed in a white tank, pale pink cardigan and jeans, her dark hair twisted and secured with a dragonfly clip at the nape of her neck. Her skin was sallow, her eyes winter blue. Beside her was a doll, made from instructions that lost her interest before the mouth was sewn and the brown wool hair could be bunched and tied with bows. Beside that lay a clay ashtray, half-painted and dented by pressured thumbs.