Category: Short Fiction
Here’s Why: Short fiction by Anne Leigh Parrish
Here’s why. You slump, shrink, curl down in your seat, never stand up straight. As if an arrow might pick you off. Not an arrow, a bullet. Not a bullet, a blow. Not a blow, words. Not words, looks. Here’s why. You’re a freak. Four inches in one year? Your father’s colleague says he keeps […]
Short Fiction: A Sliver of Ivory by Vanessa Lafaye
He wanted you to have this. It was written with exaggerated clarity on a scrap of paper, as if the author was unsure of the reader’s grasp of English. The torn paper, rather than a proper card, another signal from the sender. It was signed Elaine, with a rounded, buxom capital E. On the padded […]
Short Fiction: A New Year’s Friendship
Elaine Walsh Barrington revs up her white BMW and reverses the car out of the double garage behind the house. “I really don’t mind getting a taxi to the station again,” Lorna, her younger sister, says from the passenger seat. “You didn’t have to leave your New Years Day open house like this.” The clenched […]
Short Fiction: By The Wayside
She’s a woman who discards anything which causes sorrow or blocks her path. A man she cares for does both, and she leaves him. She takes only what she really values, an old set of books, a few china plates of her mother’s, an abstract painting she’d found in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She abhors […]
Non-Fiction: Being Bombed Out
This is an account of what it was like to be nine years old and on the receiving end of the bombing power of a well-armed enemy. Like millions in London we were evacuated at the start of the war. My father went to Harpenden with the insurance company he worked for, two days before […]
Short Story: A Simple Mistake
The dome of an umbrella bobbed along the top of the fence, beneath the dripping horse chestnut branches. Pink, blue, white stripes. Childhood colours, an adult’s height. It had been raining for days, maybe weeks. Lots of umbrellas bobbed along her fence, but she recognised this one. It was him again. Cynthia wheeled herself into […]
Short Story: Artichokes
My mother loved artichokes. She trimmed the stems and steamed them in a shallow pan. When they were cool, she paired them with a vinaigrette sauce. One by one we gently peeled off the leaves and dipped the tender part in our individual glass bowls. Eventually we made our way down to the heart. This […]
Short Story: The Long Way Home
‘Did I defrost the chicken?’ Janice asked Mungo, the small bobbled bear stuck to her dashboard, as she pulled into the stream of going-home traffic. Tom used to do the remembering for both of them. That was before. Before the stroke which changed everything, destroyed his memory, robbed him of control over his left side. […]
Short Story: The Keepers
Short story about friendship between lighthouse keepers by Melissa Bailey, whose novel Beyond the Sea came out earlier this year. Ten miles from shore, perched on the low black rock, the lighthouse was a hazy smudge of white in the gloaming. Isolated, indistinct, hovering somewhere between sea and sky, an as-yet unlit beacon of hope […]
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