No One Gets Out Alive

by Adam L.G. Nevill

But how is it done, how is control over your life possible when you have no money, and no prospect of getting more than a little to survive on? To exist on was closer to the truth. Because that is what you are doing: existing, not living. A familiar suspicion revived itself: that she hadn’t even started in life and was still outside it somehow, looking in, drifting, or being blown about its fringes, while trapped in places where anything could happen to her.

‘Character building’, others might have said about her experiences. But that was also a cliché, and easy to say when it wasn’t your character being built by adversity.

She wanted to be a man; she wanted to punch his face. But she was a girl denied even rudeness because he was unstable.