Last night I caught myself in a lie. But it's a very complicated lie, and I suspect there's rich ground here for some new experimental ideas. Around 2 am, I woke up only to realise that the duvet cover had slipped off my feet, leaving my toes exposed. I experienced the most peculiar sense of discomfort by virtue of this fact. It wasn't because I was cold; if anything the room was too warm for my taste. The trouble was that, out of the blue, I recalled a conversation I once had with my now-dead mother about a rather quirky, irrational fear, a fear she had as a carryover from an overly imaginative childhood. As a little girl, she said, whenever her toes were exposed while lying in bed at night, she was convinced they'd be grabbed by the monsters hiding underneath.

Here I was last night, recalling this otherwise mundane, silly little tidbit about my mom's childhood fears, when I had the niggling sense that, at any moment now, my mom's ghost would reach out and touch my toes. ‘This would be a perfect, unambiguous way for her to prove me wrong about there being no afterlife,' some part of me reasoned. At least, I can only imagine that's what some part of me reasoned, because I instinctively drew my feet up beneath the safety of the covers.