Imagine Me Gone
ADAM HASLETT

Imagine Me Gone begins with whiteness, melting icicles, fir trees whose colour is reviving, making them look “alive again, green and moist in the fresh light”. It’s a sad and clean opening paragraph, signifying not spring-like fresh life, but the kind of newness that arrives when something absolute has ended: the kind of different visibility sights take on in moments of shock or acute emotion. The lines tell us more about Alec, their narrator, than the scenery, and already we know that this is a moment of intense, poignant loss. “The footprints that Michael and I had made on the snowy path were dissolving, fading into ovals on the flagstone.”