I love this story for how it captures the attraction of fear, the perverse freedom that comes with believing you are about to die. Awake in the middle of the night, the narrator listens to what may be a man on the stairs outside her bedroom and thinks: ‘He was putting more care in to hunting me than I had ever put into anything in my life.’ A perfect balance of inner and outer terrors.
First published in Fence magazine. Collected in No One Belongs Here More Than You, Canongate, 2007. Available to read here
A Personal Anthology 