(The rise in the otherwise flat stretch of lowlands is not pronounced enough to be called a hill by most people, but the woman who lives there is herself so small that when she uses the term, no one quibbles. They even find themselves repeating it. ‘How long have you lived by the wee hill?’ they say.

The woman is small enough that people double-take to see her. It’s not dwarfism. It’s that she looks as if she is both smaller than and faded from an original, as if someone photocopied a more usual-looking woman at 70% scale and opacity. Her voice sounds similarly reduced.

‘I was quite the dancer once,’ she says in the post office queue, abruptly, and no one knows how to take it. ‘I was bigger another time,’ she claims when she is in the bus stop, and the look of memory that takes her over is unsettling. ‘But not in this.’ She jiggles her arms.

‘That’s a lot for your tea,’ says the butcher, and the woman laughs in a tired way. That evening a tiny figure bundled under scarves comes off the bus and walks the short distance to the woman’s house. People notice, as they do in any town of such size. The guest is another woman, hidden in her clothes.

The unlikely quantity of meat turns out to be a new norm. ‘She’s shrinking,’ the butcher claims, ‘no matter how much she’s eating. She came in, I could barely see her over the counter.’

Sometimes when they glimpse her in the streets it seems to some locals that he’s right, that she’s smaller than she was, and even harder to focus on than before. Others beg for an end to such foolishness.

‘She talks to herself now,’ the publican says. ‘That I will say. I heard her when I went past her house. Asking things in a whispery voice, and answering herself in one even whisperier.’)