During stage two of the Creative Writing course at Strathclyde University, I noticed that one lady in our class nearly always wrote of people being ‘done in’. Until then I had never dared to kill anyone in my stories. I decided to try and this story is the result.

It was written against a target of 4,000 words forcing me to turf on words to get down to this limit.

In the opening scene Maisie appears as her deceased mother, (whom I subsequently discovered was Myra).

This image of Myra haunted me.

After many years of visiting and revisiting this story, you can read “Living with Myra” published here in June 2024.