As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong

can still throw it in the air and catch it behind me, I know I can. But this shop is small and the ceiling low: the reel would plummet – a bird struck by stone.
    The boy stares at me with a curled lip, a lip you could rest an oil bottle on. He holds one hand in his pocket, and now I know what it is. I have seen this boy. With his fatboy friend. They run behind horses and scoop up horse shit with iron shovels. ‘Penny a bucket! Penny a bucket!’ they shout. ‘Do yer garden good!’ I know this boy. I know what he hides in his pocket.
    A grey day, brown dust, the gust of a northerly. Fraser’s milk cart, the tired old horse pulling the steel urns. The rock came out of nowhere. The houses across the street, the horses, and kicked-up, blown-up dust. My beautiful window with the best polished fruit: the apples turned to show the reddest cheeks, the oranges, bananas and pears. My shatter-webbed window, my gorgeous fruit, sliced with glass. I ran out and there he was, smirking, running away, slingshot in his hand.
    â€˜Thank you, Mr Wong,’ she says. ‘Say thank you, Edie, Robbie.’
    The girl hesitates, says thank you. I give the diabolo to her.
    Mrs McKechnie. Kind-heart, bad-luck woman. Mother of a redhead, bad-heart boy. Wife of a dead man.

The Shadow
    Edie was sure Robbie had taken her teddy bear. Where had he hidden it? Had he ripped off his head like the porcelain doll Nana gave her? Not that she particularly cared for Minnie, apart from as the recipient of imaginary lifesaving operations. When Robbie fractured her skull there was no blood or white or grey matter, no interesting convolutions of the frontal lobe, only shards of painted china and a disappointing hollowness.
    But Teddy was different. Everybody who was anybody had their own teddy. Even Mrs Newman had one – she took him to the opera. Mrs Newman told her he was named for the US President.
    While Robbie was out with Billy, Edie searched his room. Under his bed amid dirty shoes, cricket balls, wickets, marbles, a football and dead spider, she found three very smelly socks in varying shades of brown and black, which she picked up between the tips of her thumb and forefinger and placed under his pillow. She washed her hands, came back and searched his wardrobe. At the back, under cricket pads, gloves, a slingshot, train set and old jersey, she found a cardboard box marked in large black capitals:
    R. D. MCKECHNIE
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
KEEP OUT!
    Inside were two slim soft-covered booklets – The Shadow and God or Mammon? – and a collection of tracts, home-made cards and letters:
    Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum,
29 August 1909
    Dear Robbie, – Thanks for yours of the 19 August. I remember your father well and was sad to hear of his passing. I still recall his hospitality and excellent conversation. You must not let this loss set you back, as would be the case of lesser mortals. Your father was a true Briton and you would do well to follow his example.
    I enclose my books and a card which I have made for your instruction.
    With every good wish,
    Yours as ever,
    Lionel Terry.
    The Shadow had a watercolour on its cover, all black and grey and off-whites. In the top left corner, a man with mad, pinprick eyes flew in the air, holding a scimitar high over his head, ready to sweep down from the clouds and strike. Below, only spires, domed roofs and crosses were visible. Inside were the words:
    To
my Brother Britons
I Dedicate this Work
L. T.
July, 1904
    then a prayer, an introduction which continued for eleven pages, and a long rhyming poem full of words like vile traducer , plague-fraught offal of the earth and stinking swamp of black iniquity .
    A card read:
    Many fools have many moods,
And follies great and small,
But the fools who swallow foreign foods,
Are the biggest fools of all!
    Another:
    The patriot is governed by his brain, the traitor by his stomach.
    Edie put the cards, letters, everything back in the box