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Short story category: 20 Minutes+

Amanda caught the first tube into work every morning. It was sometimes hard getting up in the dark and not seeing sunlight until lunchtime, but the alternative was unthinkable. There was only ever a handful of other people on the platform. The regular five. A nightshift-dishevelled man, resigned to

Joanna’s mother figured out she was pregnant before Joanna mustered the courage to tell her, and after kicking Joanna around the house, she kicked her out. Joanna had been working as a cashier at the Food Lion for about six months by that point, and had recently bought herself a rusted old Camry,

Dan leaned closer into the picture as a couple pushed past behind him. Laughing at the framed photographs on the wall, they made their way along the gallery’s narrow landing. In their wake, voices and the waft of cheap wine welled once more up the stairs from the ground floor. Dan stayed a moment

They were sitting at Harold’s kitchen table under a harsh light. Outside, the London of September 1965 weighed grim and heavy, and rain pelted against the sitting room window. Phillip took a long drink of his scotch. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it would be easy enough to find another one.’ ‘

‘That Henry James. He knew a view when he saw one,’ said Mrs Gilfeather to herself as she looked out from the campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore. She was on her own up there because Raymond had flatly refused to accompany her to the top. ‘I’m a feet-on-the-ground sort of bloke,’ he’d s

Most archaeologists of Ged’s acquaintance could not resist taking something from every site they visited. Nothing crucial, nothing that could affect the interpretation of the site, not ‘treasure’ (he loved the fact that treasure was still a legal concept in the twenty-first century). Just stuf

Guru Dan Fennel ambles across the maple floorboards of Yoga Sky Studio. His elegant toes scatter cushions and stroke the cheek of a young disciple, supine on her mat. Dan once travelled from Madras to Seoul on foot. On the way, he threaded the following beads into his string of malas: dharma transmi

It was a miserable evening in November. Odilio – legendary restaurant critic for England’s most prestigious food magazine – bound purposefully along the shiny, waterlogged pavement, through the crowd of rain-drenched commuters, ducking into shelter every so often, skipping the puddles and poth