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slowness. He hid the soiled clothing under the bed, and then he sat on the coverlet and waited for his mother to find him.
    She found him.
    “I looked all over for you,” she said from the doorway. “Where did you get to?”
    “Just on a walk,” he said. She was obviously displeased with him. “You don’t ever leave the garden without telling me first,” she said. “Especially not to go down to the Ponds. What’s out there has brought us enough unhappiness. How many times have I got to say it?”
    “Sorry.”
    “It’s always sorry. But it never sinks in, does it?”
    She left him and went back downstairs, and he sat alone in his room for a while. He looked at his model aeroplanes, hanging from the ceiling on lengths of fishing line so that you could squint a little and they’d look as if they were actually in flight. They never moved, but their shadows passed across the walls again and again as the days went by.
    Mostly he could put things out of his mind, once they’d happened. Without immediacy, it was as if they faded and left no stain. But the hurt of Kelly and the others turning on him as they had. . . for some reason, this seemed to be something that wouldn’t go away.
    He lay back. The hurt shifted. But still it stayed with him.
    Visitors came calling, some time later. He heard their muffled voices down below. He wondered. He wondered who it was. Then he thought he heard his name. Nobody called for him, but after a few minutes he heard his mother coming up the stairs. He tensed as she approached his room along the landing.
    He’d expected her to be angry, but she wasn’t. Just very, very deliberate. She sat on the bed, and his heart dived in despair. He’d known scenes like this before, but only rarely. When loved ones died, or his pets “went away”. The serious moments, where his life took some kind of a turn that he hadn’t asked for and couldn’t control.
    She said, “I’m going to ask you something. I want you to tell me the truth.”
    Dylan said nothing.
    His mother said, “Where did you go when you went out this morning?”
    “Just playing,” he said.
    “Who with? The ones I’ve had to keep telling you about?”
    Again he said nothing, but the way that he avoided her eyes was a form of admission.
    She said, “There are two policemen downstairs. They’re going to ask you this, but I want you to tell me first. Did you touch Kelly at all?”
    Touch her? He’d had to. He said, “I pulled her out when she banged her head.”
    “Pulled her out of where?”
    “This place they were showing me.” He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about the other part.
    “Were they making fun of you?”
    “We were all just laughing.”
    Then his mother said, “Listen to me, Dylan. They’re children. You’re twenty-six years old. I’ve tried to explain this to you but I can never seem to make you understand. You’re not one of them. They’re not your friends and they never can be. Now, tell me again. Did you touch her?”
    Dylan swallowed.
    “Not like that,” he said.
    The hurt was coalescing into something deeper and more vivid now; an apprehension that was all the more fearsome for being without a shape or a name.
    She said, “Come on, Dylan.”
    “Come where?”
    “We’ve got to go down and talk to these policemen.”
    “I don’t want to,” he said.
    “I know you don’t,” she said.
    And then she took his hand, and he had to let her lead him down the stairs.
    [Originally published in Kimota 6, Summer 1997]

COLD COMFORT
    by Mark Chadbourn
    The house was perfunctory, some would say charmless, but it was theirs. Plain front, flat windows, nothing to trouble the eye or mind. The front lawn was small, square, a little overgrown. There was a similar one at the back. The street was quite reasonable, not too busy, not too quiet, not covered by the warning paint marks of the utility workers. It was on an estate called The Green. Every town had one called The Green; it was one of