“Ira ‘Mac’ McGowan, chief of the honorary Dodds men, turned up that Thursday midmorning to raise the dead and rescue Carol Dodds from martyrdom and widowhood first by recruiting her son over a cooked breakfast followed by a warm slice of angel cake both courtesy of her maminlaw who after all knelt at the altar of hospitality, hypocrisy and false modesty, and might’ve welcomed Mac after all these years for Jim’s sake, or, equally, spiked Mac’s tea with oven cleaner for Jim’s sake, then fed his bones to the white dog that patrolled their street and one night last November got loose and tore up a family of foxes on Carol’s lawn who’d been at her bins for months, leaving Carol to find the magpies first thing, picking through dead leaf, plucking intestines like worms, while she smelled no blood only mulch and dew.” CrimeManchesterNorthernWythenshawe Book:Oxblood Source: Oxblood
“Vern rotated the nightdress like clock hands – from six thirty till midnight – to read the hem label by the window’s grey light. ‘We’ve been to the moon and we still can’t dye nylon or polyester.’ ‘I haven’t been to the moon; have you?’ she said. ‘This is polyester?’ he said. ‘You should’ve been a woman,’ she said.” HumourManchesterNorthernersWythenshawe Book:Oxblood Source: Oxblood