Excerpt: A Mile Away From Where I Am

He turned his body towards her and his face away, staring straight up at the ceiling. “It’s okay, you weren’t the bad guy. Just being shot at by snipers in a shopping mall while you tried to protect Jess and I couldn’t get there in time. Typical male fears of inadequacy. Probably means I’m sexually incompetent.” Which most dreams did, if you believed anything the swathes of literature on interpretations told you. Dreaming of falling didn’t mean you were going to plummet off a sixty-storey building on your way to work the next day, dreaming of having sex with the Prime Minister did not mean you were on your way to the front page of the Daily Star (though it probably DID mean you were in serious need of some therapy) and dreaming that your wife was on the ground in front of you, screaming in pain and terror, blood matting her hair and soaking through the dress you bought for her birthday last year, your daughter lying six feet away still and lifeless as some gruesome rag doll with her lips stained red just like when she tried on her aunt’s lipstick only this time it was blood pouring from her shredded lungs, while you ran and struggled and fought but couldn’t save them, couldn’t protect them – that certainly was not a premonition of what was to come.

That didn’t make him feel any better, though.