Artefacts
When Annabelle Greggs had her baby, she thought that the smell of her son’s skin would magically drift over the rooftops towards her mother’s house and force the sour old woman back to her door. After all, Annabelle had lost so much in deciding to keep him – her job, her figure, the elasticity of certain body parts; she could not quite believe that she would lose her only parent as well. Not with the baby’s unmistakeable ears, just like his grandfather’s. But her mother did not run to Annabelle’s terrace, which stood between a meatpacker’s with no meat and a haberdasher’s with no linen. Her mother did not come, even after Annabelle made it her business to tell her mother’s oldest friend about the difficulty of Aaron’s birth. And about his ears. Instead, her mother sent a bible w
