The grass was deep. From where he lay he could see only green in his peripheral vision. Arms stretched out at his sides, he cut a stout, lopsided asterisk in the hillside. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with warm, humid air and as he slowly exhaled he imagined his breath propelling the clouds, steering their course far above the valley. He closed his eyes and made the sky break apart into hundreds of thousands of tiny shards, spilling down onto the valley below. When the storm was over he reopened his eyes and observed the shrinking sky and the ground closing in on him as he sank deep into the hungry soil.

          The twins kept secrets from their parents. They kept them in jars covered in masking tape so that nobody could look in and see them. The boys would do horrible, nasty things. They would set traps for old ladies in their knitting, poke kittens with sticks to make them hiss and write love notes addressed to pretty girls with forged signatures of ugly boys. The twins kept their secret bottles in a hole at the back of a disused shed in their yard. When the hole filled up, the boys found a large rock and smashed the secrets and plugged the hole. From then on all that ever grew in the garden were horrible, knotted and mangled potatoes that no one would eat.

          The massive dog lay on its side before him. Jim watched as the creature’s rib cage grew and shrunk with each laborious breath. He got down on his knees and pressed an ear up to its chest. Inside he heard the sounds of a carnival. The trapeze artists were up, people were gasping at the mid-air acrobatics. Oohs and ahhs reverberated inside the glum beast. The carnival was giving it indigestion. Too many happy people made the dog whine. Eventually it shrugged Jim away and slumped off to a corner where it vomited streamers and clown cars and at last went to sleep.