She gives him a smile of a kind that he has seen many times over the years. From girls, but boys too, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, trying to be seen as worth something in the only way they know, by being a hot ticket. And she is still ding it at what age, twenty? He looks at her evenly, the way he does with the kids at work.
What do you normally do with yourself? he says.
I don’t know. Not much.
Like what?
I don’t know. This and that. Why, what do you do that’s so significant?
In Dance Move, the new collection of stories from Wendy Erskine, we meet characters who are looking to wrest control of their lives, only to find themselves defined by the moment in their past that marked them.
In these stories – as in real life – the funny, the tender and the devastating go hand in hand. Full of warmth, the familiar and the strange, they are about what it means to live in the world, how far you can end up from where you came from, and what it means to look back.
