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Short story category: 15 Minutes

Only after she secures her starched white blouse does she line her eyes and dab her cheeks. Otherwise she wears no visible makeup. Slinging the yellowing cloth bag over her shoulder, she locks her door and makes her way down the unpainted stairs. When she steps outside, she is confronted by the dust

Such a quiet boy could not be good. Zulekha saw him the first morning he was on duty, waiting for the girl that was to be his charge. She asked his name, and he ignored her. A snide remark about him being deaf and dumb didn’t make a difference. He went on cleaning the dashboard and only left her s

If there’s a dingier, grottier pub in all the British Isles, I’ve not found it yet. The Nun’s Purse boasts fly-strewn windowsills, walls the colour of a tobacco addict’s teeth, and table-tops so sticky that old Bill Jones lost a shirt sleeve to one this afternoon. Even the most iron guts can

I’ve slept badly again. The farmhouse is unearthly cold. Alive, too, in the still of night, with ticks, groans, intestinal gurgles. The fridge, juddering to a halt. Alice was restless. Shy of dawn I heard her get up, potter about downstairs. She’s left a note on the kitchen table: can run you

Leena had to starve herself for three months, but eventually her figure is boyish as his. She exercises in secret, locking her fingers over the beam above the kitchen doorframe and hauling herself up until her arms burn and her stomach muscles shake. As Anuj wastes slowly into bone and mattress, she

The Hour My job is simple. I have to embroider the flag. Every day I come here from the village to earn our ethnic improvement grant. I sit here in the dust and sew the tiny threads which will make up, one day, the glory of the new flag. Paco, my husband, says it is like laying hairs over the

I can hear my brothers, my uncles, my great-uncles hammering away in the mines twenty floors beneath us. Candlelight toys with the dining room and for a second my world becomes dark. Grandpa begins, spewing out the same rhetoric he does every time the three of us are together. His hands are stain

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, Three for a Girl and Four for a Boy, Five for Silver, Six for Gold, Seven for a Secret never to be told, Eight's a Wedding, Nine's a Birth, Ten, you must walk to the Ends of the Earth. Traditional counting-rhyme   One for Sorrow. The young girl sits at t