Choose a world. Change what happens.

• Murder trial and a stated killing
• Access to a household address by a neighbour on the night of a killing
• A concealment of evidence and perjury
• A conviction of the witness and a term of imprisonment
• A curfew, a tag and the threat of recall to custody
• An estrangement between married partners over a statement in a court
• Explicit sexual content between consenting adults, said out loud, with an agreed stop word
• Explicit language about a body

• A legal instrument signed in secret by one spouse and disclosed to the other four days later
• A person's share of a document rising while the other person lies still in a pod, three times, on purpose
• A terminal diagnosis described in a scan report, with a date, in the future tense
• A marriage reduced to a percentage and a name in a public book that cannot be amended
• Institutional procedure shown as the thing that carries the damage rather than preventing it
• A remedy that exists and is legally unavailable to the only person who needs it

• infantil loss referred to as a height chart and an unfilled line; no child is depicted or described
• coercive and loving marital conflict, including a spouse saying something cruel to win an argument
• emotional manipulation by a well-meaning third party
• public professional humiliation and a career consequence
• a statutory declaration the protagonist knows to be arguable
• explicit sexual content between consenting adults
• body and hair description in an explicit scene
• an ending that withholds resolution on the central question
• no death, no injury, no violence that lands

• a woman who has not told one person in eleven years, and a man who has not asked one question in eleven years
• grief, prolonged, in a house with an Aga and a gravel drive
• a hard moral choice with no option that costs nothing

• Death of a 21-year-old woman and the mortuary examination of her body
• Graphic but non-gratuitous injury description from a Home Office post-mortem
• A body recovered from a drainage culvert after eleven days
• A fatal collision on a slip road and a death that a coroner does not take
• A family home after a death: a chair, a jumper, a receipt for four pounds fifty
• A career ended by an honest disclosure
• Institutional pressure, a conduct referral, and a professional standards process
• A judicial review that finds nothing
• An explicit sexual scene between two adults that stops part-way through on an agreed word
• A hard moral refusal, spoken out loud, twice, in rooms with witnesses

• Coercive control within a marriage
• Memory loss and the loss of a person's own history
• An industrial accident and its concealment
• A financial deception against a family that is still paying for it
• A non-consensual restraint, described in the past tense
• Explicit sexual content between spouses, stopping on a spoken word
• Self-harm ideation by a protagonist, stated and refused
• A legal signature that cannot be withdrawn
• Medical procedures described in a mine chamber and a surgery
• A hard moral set of choices with no option that does not cost something
• Death of named characters before and off the page

• A shared consciousness with no privacy on one specific side, described mechanically and used as the engine of the book
• A statutory declaration that requires one of two people to state in writing how many days she was alone and self-aware
• An offer on the table to withdraw one person permanently to a read-only archive, and an ending in which it is accepted
• Institutional control of a legal identity through a bank mandate, a driving licence and a form with a box on it
• Explicit language about a body

• Descent risk to a crew member stated as a probability and tracked through paperwork
• A launch held or scrubbed in four of the five endings
• A professional recusal and the loss of standing it costs
• A next-of-kin form read literally, including the consequence of leaving a box empty
• A spouse's medical data held outside the medical set and used or withheld
• A described sexual encounter between spouses, with the consent spoken aloud before anything happens
• Explicit language about a body, a marriage, and a person's age
• Alcohol-free domestic detail: boiler services, a cat on a boiler, a broken chair, a solicitor's letter read once

• domestic horror, not supernatural horror: the threat is administrative and domestic
• descriptive violence is absent; nobody is hurt and nobody dies on any route
• explicit sexual content between two consenting married adults, written, in one scene
• consent is negotiated out loud in clauses and either person can stop it with one word
• the encounter gates no choice and no ending
• grief about a dead parent, a dead spouse and a neighbour who leaves
• social isolation and the loss of community as a subject, not as a threat
• no minors, no minors-coded characters, no ambiguity
• no instructional detail for any procedure, trade or offence
• no slurs are written out anywhere in the text
• all places, companies, offices, forms and people are fictional

• illness, a delayed diagnosis, and administrative failure rather than an assailant
• a funeral trade depicted in working detail, including a cold room, a plate scale, and four hundred and twelve funerals
• an obsession with weight, and a protagonist who has entered figures in a book without verifying them
• complicity that is total and spoken about openly, in which every character says what they did
• explicit adult intimacy between a husband and wife of twenty-four years, in the room where the work is done
• a hard moral choice with no option that costs nothing

• Sale and loss of an inherited business
• A marriage of nine years ending over money that is not coming back
• An adult affair, written in full, between two adults who agreed what they want and what stops it out loud
• A man being right about half of what he says in a room with a sea view
• Eleven people told about their jobs by somebody else
• A public accusation in a small professional trade
• A woman describing her own failure accurately to the man it concerns
• A building converted to flats and a name taken off a sea front

• the death of a spouse, described from a post-mortem report and from what people said afterwards
• grief, prolonged, in a house with fourteen bedrooms
• a body pledged as security for a debt by a deed its subject drafted herself
• a marriage recorded as a compliance obligation and read aloud to strangers
• public disclosure of an intimate private record
• a professional and financial ruin that is not prevented
• explicit adult intimacy between a widow and a man who acts for the people she owes
• a hard moral choice with no option that costs nothing

• A false civil registration and a declaration of truth made in a prescribed form in 2014
• A marriage that is annulled on paper and cannot be copied in any future
• A woman's body altered by surgery at 36 and a loss of a pregnancy that never happened
• The death of a woman of 71 in Lagos, described in a letter and not depicted
• Vascular dementia and a left-sided stroke in a woman of 74, and her giving evidence by video link in court
• A fire in a registry annex in 1994 that destroyed six thousand registrations and was never reported
• A public correction published as item 41 of a monthly notice, and a stranger's search in Lagos
• Financial distress, a house sold, and a credit union emptied

• Domestic violence that is not reported to the police and never is
• A court finding about a hand on a throat, entered in a public document
• A permanent legal restraint on sexual relations between spouses, agreed to in advance
• Sexual content between adults, with consent stated aloud, in a house that is being emptied
• A professional conduct finding and a partnership put under review
• A judgment and a register entry that are public and permanent
• Institutional procedure shown as the thing that does the damage
• A marriage that continues after a document has ended it

• a first-trimester nuchal translucency measurement of 4.6 millimetres that was never acted on
• a possible genetic or chromosomal condition in a living two-year-old that is never established either way
• a medical records failure affecting six hundred and eleven women
• a referral, blood tests and a wait of eighteen to twenty-four months
• a telephone call read from a script and a batch of letters posted in one morning
• a man who made a risk small in a car park in August 2023 and said nothing about it for four hundred and sixty weeks
• a spreadsheet that ran a marriage and a formula in column ten that could not tell a fact from a stranger
• a daughter's name as the only thing about her that has never been on a form

• An extra-marital relationship of eight months between a married man and another man's wife
• A second relationship by the same woman, of four months, with the director of the same production
• A marriage held together for eleven weeks by a document and a spreadsheet
• An adult man's career ended by a growth on his vocal fold and by a contract clause
• A professional disagreement about a go-on, a two-hour notice clause, and a twenty-minute hold rule
• A production cancelled in one of four futures
• Explicit sexual content between adults, with consent and limits stated out loud before anything happens
• A word used as a stop during a performance, in front of an audience

• A husband describing his wife in the third person, at length, to another person, on a recording
• Infidelity-adjacent: a professional relationship that is not a sexual relationship but is not nothing
• Explicit adult sexual content, written in full, on a recording and in a room
• A professional ethics disclosure and the loss of a registration
• A partnership dissolved and a twenty-two-year friendship ended
• A client's recorded privacy entering a legal disclosure schedule
• A file destroyed to prevent a disclosure, which cannot be undone
• The reader's own act of listening to a recording is the premise and is never named

• A removal direction sought against a mother and upheld in three of the four futures
• Institutional deportation described from a notice, a determination, and an airport at dawn
• A woman of twenty-one who is the subject of a court application and is not a party to it
• A professional conduct referral and a two-year loss of a clerk's certificate
• A marriage of nine years that ends in three of the four futures
• A daughter who does not return in two of the four futures
• A hearing aid, a mould, and a cost of a hundred and ninety-five pounds
• Institutional procedure shown as the thing that does the damage

• Death of a named adult woman at 34, off-page and reported.
• A wrongful professional call with a named institution, a named file, and a closed inquiry.
• Grief kept at a remove, and two adults who cannot say the sentence for four hours.
• Frostbite and the permanent loss of the ends of two fingers.

• battle violence, graphic
• slavery and the slave trade depicted as the era's commerce
• thirst, dehydration and death by exposure
• occupation, deportation of scholars
• sexual content implied, cuts away
• grief
• execution

• terminal illness and medical decline
• asphyxiation and industrial death, graphic
• suicide
• medical rationing
• sexual content implied, cuts away
• grief and anticipatory grief
• workplace injury caused by the protagonist

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