Wednesday, April 16, 2025
He’s woken by her twitching beside him in the undergrowth, dreaming. Small gasps and whimpers as she squirms and jerks, eyes closed, body tensing and arching in the pitch dark under the black polythene sheet. It crackles as she moves, water dripping off the branches above them. He wants to reach out to muffle her but even twisting his body risks being heard. and he can hear the men smashing through the trees, closing in.Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Two of us were studying music for the exams at the end of high school, and I was the only one also in the school band, private piano lessons, the village brass band, a swing jazz band doing gigs in the evenings. Music, as someone said, was my life. But I wasn’t on the list of the school’s best musicians, I’d just found, left by the school music teacher at the end of last term for his successor.Thursday, April 10, 2025
The woman in the supermarket queue in front of me is swivelling left to right, eyes panicky wide, combing the gaudy aisles of the supermarket. Wedged into place, she tries to bend light around people cross-currenting through the wide gutter between the cash registers and the rows of shelves to see what she was looking for. At the other end of the cereal aisle, a young girl takes a man’s hand and walks away from her.Tuesday, March 25, 2025
The sexton had seen this before. A year after the funeral, a thin strip of pale dead yellow grass outlined the shape of a coffin in the burial ground, like it had been crushed by the dark. The sexton had known the occupant of the coffin and he was happier now she was in the earth instead of on it. But the outline worried him. He imagined malignant goo seeping up from crack of the coffin lid.Tuesday, March 18, 2025
The lino round the base of the toilet is badly cut, leaving a few millimetres of gap between the porcelain and the curled edge of the vinyl. He lays on his side just a few centimetres away, the floor digging into his shoulder. He’s surrounded by the unforgiving hardness and months of built up scum, and the smell of shit and bleach sliding into his nostrils. In the bath, his guitar lies smashed, its neck broken, the slack strings echoing in the tub, water drumming on it from the showerhead.Thursday, March 13, 2025
She catches up with him in the corridor outside the classroom. He’s backed into a corner, she’s holding back, swaying from her ankles, her hand gripping her shoulderbag, pulling the strap down taut. They each have thousands of words - using a few is what just turned the classroom into a killing jar of derision at them they’ve just fled - but nothing will return the humanity that was just sucked out of that room.Monday, March 10, 2025
The reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true, Lloyd Cole sung, clunkily. But the cliché is also true, like mirrors facing each other, infinitely reflecting each other, or a fractal. And none more cliched than American motels. Neon signs, a strip of single storey down at heel rooms at the back with cars parked in front, a crumbling swimming pool with the hint of algae, the simmering highway roaring past a few feet away.Friday, March 7, 2025
You wouldn’t look twice at the Butterflies Of The Night. The secret of their international dominance has been keeping it drab. Even their outer clothing is matte, as though absorbing light and reflecting none back. You have been surrounded by them and never noticed, I guarantee. When the emergency services roll up after one of their kinetic operations, nobody remembers them. Their operations have led to great wealth and power but it’s never used showily or gaudily.Thursday, March 6, 2025
The winches at the back of the Jerry’s boat creak and haul the net into the stern, and Jerry’s eyes are pinned on the winch, his hand tight on the throttle lever, his breath tight in his chest. Finally the net’s all reeled in, except for its end coiled up in a layered tube, like a bright orange mermaid. We stare at it, shifting our balance as the boat bobs, listening to the waves slapping on the hull, frozen.Monday, March 3, 2025
He knows where each stair creaks, whether it will groan when his foot hits the left, the right, or the middle, as he creeps slowly down from his bedroom. Through the living room door at the bottom, he maps the peaks and crevasses of his parents’ war. Or worse, he hears nothing but the burning fuse of silence, fizzing like a cartoon bomb. The only question is which shrapnel sliver will lodge underneath his skin This is family.Sunday, March 2, 2025
Amongst the increasing dross on Substack, there’s someone putting up a word each day as the prompt for a 100-word ‘story’. Plot’s pretty limited at that length, but there’s room for brief character sketches. Here’s a first bash. “Saloon to the left. Snug to the right. No handsome dangerous cowboys here, just a grubby arse pub in the Midlands. Hers for the last thirty years. She opens the door every day with her soul dribbling out of her like the clogged-prostate drip of piss she’ll find miama’d over the floor of the gents later.