Excerpt from Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

You're Sellotaped to the bottommost corner. Your photograph is the least distinct and your face is the most grisly. I have to bend down to inspect you and as I move, the shadows shift with my bending body and blank out the glass of the jumble shop window, and I see myself instead. I see my head sticking out of your back like a bizarre excrescence. I see my own mangled face peering dolefully from the black.





The shelter is a forty-minute drive and three short, fat cigarettes from home. It occupies a strip of land along the invisible line at which factories and housing estates give way to forests and fields. There are rooftops on one side, treetops on the other. Concrete underfoot and chainlink fencing all around, its PVC-coated diamonds rattling with the anxious quivers of creatures MISTREATED, ABANDONED, ABUSED. Adjacent to the diamonds, there's a flat-headed building with unsound walls and a cavity block wedged under each corner. A signpost rises from the cement. RECEPTION, it says, REPORT ON ARRIVAL.

I'm not the kind of person who is able to do things. I don't feel very good about climbing the steps and pushing the door, but I don't feel very good about disobeying instructions either. My right hand finds my left hand and they hold each other. Now I step up and they knock as one. The door falls open. Inside there's a woman sitting behind a large screen between two filing cabinets. There's something brittle about her. She seems small in proportion to the screen, but it isn't that. It's in the way the veins of each temple rise through her skin; it's in the way her eyelids are the colour of a climaxing bruise.

'Which one?' she says and shows me a sheet of miniature photographs. As I place the tip of my index finger against the tip of your miniaturised nose, she ever-so-slightly smiles. I sign a form and pay a donation. The brittle woman speaks into a walkie-talkie and now there's a kennel keeper waiting outside the flat-headed office. I hadn't imagined it might be so uncomplicated as this.

He's a triangular man. Loafy shoulders tapering into flagpole legs, the silhouette of a root vegetable. He's carrying a collar and leash. He swings them at his side and talks loudly as he guides me through the shelter. 'That cur's for the injection I said, soon's I saw him, and wouldn'cha know, straight off he sinks his chompers into a friendly fella's cheek and won't let go. That fella, there.'

The kennel keeper points to a copper-coated cocker spaniel in a cage with a baby blanket and a burger-shaped squeak toy. The spaniel looks up as we pass and I see a pair of pink punctures in the droop of his muzzle. 'Vicious little bugger. Had to prise his jaws loose and got myself bit in the process. Won't be learning his way out of a nature like that. Another day, y'know, and he'd a been put down.'

I nod, even though the kennel keeper isn't looking at me. I picture him at home in a house where all of the pot plants belong to his wife and the front garden's been tarmacked into an enormous driveway. His walls are magnolia and his kitchen cupboards are stocked with special toasting bread and he uses the bread not only for toasting, but for everything. 'Any good for ratting?' I say.

Excerpted from Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume. Copyright © 2016 by Sara Baume. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.