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Short story category: 15 Minutes

When Adam met his father, he was selling something he didn’t really own. The white short-sleeved shirt and black tie Adam had picked up at a thrift store were enough for him to pass as a Jehovah’s Witness at the door to his father’s apartment complex. An old woman spotted the dark Bible in his

Custard Walker lived small and private, her life pent up inside self-made borders, pitted by absent dreams and a tough reality.   Custard Walker flickered with a worn beauty, her hair uncurling with time and its red fire fading gently into grey. Her eyes had paled to the colour of lime ma

There’s a tree grows in a wood, an old willow tree. And of an evening when the world is quiet and still, if you are really listening, you will hear the tree speaking. And it tells this story. There was once a young woman who came walking through the wood. It was late on a midwinter’s afternoo

And you’re happy to work? she asked, repeating my phrase back to me. Yes, I said. I’ll be coming from a competition and just want to take a week somewhere quiet before classes start again. What kind of competition? I hoped my impatience didn’t carry down the line. Freediving, I said. She gave

13.9 It was always the spring or the autumn when the signal came – something to do with the lengthening of days or nights, and the drawing in and tightening of air that came with the change of seasons. Dr Winterburn wondered if everybody felt this dreamy restlessness at such times, or was it just

First, you see the sweeping shape of a looming wave, perfect blue coming right at you, but it’s not moving. Then, as you follow the crowds of people through the room, you see that it’s not a wave, it’s a whale. You wonder what kind of whale it is, then you wonder if this beast is real or a mod

And then there stood Hristo, eclipsing the doorway of our small classroom late one semester. He stood pale and thin, his hair combed into a greasy centre parting, a leather jacket hanging from his slender frame in a way that made him look sickly, victim to some wasting disease. He was a military bra

Rebecca Audrey Johnson   She woke suddenly, cheated by the shade. It had seemed the perfect spot, accessed via an alleyway running behind her, now hidden from view. Halfway down the narrow passage, which was really more of a space between corrugated iron sheets than a real passageway with m