Close

Short story category: 5 Minutes

When I was a child, I used to lie under the huge conker trees that edged the caravan park. I watched the dark dense mass of leaves stir and lift. I breathed deeply. As the sun set, the light caught on the upper branches – so far up, touching the sky – filling me with ideas and possibilities, of

Tommy Lunger got off the school bus, ran up the driveway, and went inside his house. The sun was sinking down below the horizon in the late afternoon like it always did at this time in December. There was no snow yet, but soon the ground would be white, and Tommy would have to start wearing boots to

It's always afterwards people tell you they were worried or they thought that something wasn't quite right. They couldn't put their finger on it but felt something might be wrong. Virtue-signallers, one and all. I know, that makes it sound as if I'm lacking gratitude. But I didn't know anyone wanted

I am sitting in a café at night. I have a table by the window. The café is enveloped in a soft, dim light, but this does not disturb the pitch-black darkness outside. I find it strange that even though there is light, there seems to be nowhere where the light could come from; no lamps or wall l

‘… wipe the villages from the face of the earth, stopping at nothing… liquidate the bandit group based in the villages of Upper Balkaria once and for all.’ – General Kozlov, head of Stalin’s 37th Army, Soviet Union, 1942   ***   The ‘bandit group’ that General Ko

At the Gilberts   The Gilberts were eating pasta with their three children in the kitchen-diner of their newly built red-brick house in West London the evening I met them for the first time. They asked me to join them but I said I had already eaten. Sarah Gilbert made me a coffee, using fre

I have been sitting with the light out for the past hour. My television is on but the sound is down. The girl’s bedroom is opposite my own. Her blinds are not closed and everything is lit up. She is on the bed, watching TV and painting her toe nails, white cotton balls between each, lovely toe. He

With Margo and Jo   ‘We’re lesbians,’ said Margo, on the first day I met them. ‘If you can’t deal with that, we won’t employ you.’ Every family in my country has an aunt who lives with a special friend or a cousin who shares his life with a man he met in the army or in a ba