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Short story category: 20 Minutes+

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

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

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

As in life, the dead also showcase their inequalities. When I say the dead, I mean the dead bodies, the cadavers. I became aware of these inequities in a strange way when I joined medical school. It was on the stone tables of the anatomy dissection hall that I first noticed these differences. In

I get Math and English. History. Even Music. But teaching grade 8 Science needs a PhD. I’m scanning phrases like, ‘Water is critical to life’, ‘Water systems influence climate’, and ‘managed sustainably.’ Why don’t I have a cat to hug at times like this? I clearly need one. Maybe I s

Jack Rosenberg blew into our lives when I was twelve; any way you looked at him (up, down or even sideways) you saw cash. On Long Island, he was one of those super-rich snobby neighbours who only nodded hello, because he didn’t want to waste a whole wave on us. When we ran into him in Florida, he

My biggest secret is that you licked off my right nipple. Shame in the shape of absence. Making love with men was a dream for months. I thought to myself – you will understand the pain of a cold bed, once you’re grown. But what do you know about it now, now that you are? Then, you were a glob