Short stories by Margo Lanagan
Listing 4 stories.
An unhappily married man is on his way to the wedding of a much happier couple. He no longer finds his wife attractive because of her weight loss, and thus endeavors into an affair with a larger woman, though she may have ulterior motives that he has not considered.
In a dystopian society where select boys are surgically mutilated and used as economic tools, a teenager helps track down and capture one of the boys who recently escaped from captivity. Though his goal is to return the escapee to the wealthy creator of these boys, the teenager soon begins to question the entire premise of their society.
A boy spends the day singing around his sister, as he and his family watch her sink into a tar-pit as punishment for killing her husband. He toggles between the maturity and the child-like helplessness this jarring experience brings out in him.
A boy finds an opportunity to escape his abusive master when they return to the place of his former trauma.