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Short story category: 20 Minutes+

I began to recognise Jayne, as I came to know her, in the vague way one does when a person hovers on the periphery. I’d notice her passing by the window of my bookshop, glancing in, averting her eyes and hurrying away. My bookshop had been open for two weeks with little in the way of sales when

'News flash, Nick − we’re getting a new boss.’ Nick Ikaros looked up from his computer. Randi Lake leaned against the doorframe of his office, twisting a lock of dark hair around her delicate fingers. Tall and pale, she favoured the sixties look: oversized glasses and long, dark sweaters ov

There was giraffe snot on my hand and I must have been smiling because Mum was smiling back at me with my shaped grin. Not hers. Two years before that, I handed Mum a picture of a reindeer that I'd drawn and stood back to await approval. She said it was an excellent giraffe. I pretended that it w

The world’s unhappiest billionaire was born on 12 April 1974, in a hospital in Vienna. He was named Markus. His mother was named Katja. His father remained at home. Home was number thirty-seven Neugrabenstrasse, an inauspicious flat on the top floor of a Viennese suburb. The flat may as well ha

They’ll be painting the park fence soon.  It could do with a new coat. They do it every now and then. There must be a list of fences they have to paint pinned up on a wall somewhere. They probably do nothing else day in day out but paint fences. Not exactly an interesting life, painting park fenc

Katie waited for her brother to come home. Neither the chicken roasting in the oven, the potatoes steaming, nor the vegetables boiling needed her attention until they were done. Her reflection rose up in the darkening window over the kitchen sink; she didn’t like how nervous she looked so she went

It was Dana who first introduced him to me. She had a small unit tucked up in the recesses of an ancient building, its sole window affording such a grand outlook of the wall across the alley that she had taken down the curtains and put around the aperture some pieces of wood, so framing her prize pa

I am forty-five now, and have been getting work done since I was thirty. At first, I hesitated, because the face – my face, everyone’s – seemed too near the self to be meddled with. Those hollows at the temples, the mouldings of socket and cheek, are portals to the brain, the mind. And each wr