Close

Short Stories

I She sits in the seat beside me, with beautiful hands, long tapering fingers and clean, almond fingernails. Before we take off, she sends a text. ‘Sorry couldn’t speak was reading a story.’ I look for kisses, but there aren’t any.   Her hair is red and falls down her bac

It’s Thursday and I’m in the baby changing facility at Waitrose eating a no-butter flapjack. The air smells like baby wipes and there is a small, bright spotlight that draws out my shadow as I move beneath it. It’s not a bad place to eat in secret while I mentally guess replacement ingredients

Her name was Mrs Martinez, Mrs J. Martinez, and when she said the ‘J’ part, her eyes squinted, just to let you know that when you addressed her, you’d better say it, too. She was my third-grade art teacher. She was chic. With almost every other sentence, she mentioned she was from France, e

I wasn't good at constructions. Orestes used to be amazing. The trap was a sieve borrowed from his grandmother without her knowing about it. A small stake, made of wood he had cut from the floor of the abandoned house right next to his family’s. Two ropes from his mother's laundry. If I remember c

He sounded different in the confines of the car. The rain on the windshield threatened to drown out his voice, a sound like the tapping of a thousand fingers. ‘So.’ Ellen shoved her schoolbag down between her legs. It didn’t have any of her school things in it. Instead it had changes of

When Maggie Murray lost her husband to drowning, it came as no surprise. The sea had never made any secret of itself. She knew what it was and what it did, and she’d carried the weight of that knowledge since her earliest days. She’d been just a bairn when her father paid for a pleasure trip

For one summer, George Burns set up an orange-and-green folding chair at the edge of our lake. The town was a place that was no place in particular, and the lake was the size of a spaghetti pot. No one can prove it, but he was there. The Munchkins knew it; fourteen under-eights whose counselor ha

The half-moon beach is manmade – I found out. The house used to be a boathouse belonging to a hotel, perched on top of a cliff, overlooking the majestic lake encircled by lush foliage. It started with a vision of a rich man. A railway was laid, the beach was made. The hotel was eager to meet th