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Short Stories

‘Happy birthday. It’s not much but I didn’t really have any time to shop. It’s just been so busy at work and, well, you know what it’s like. Well, you don’t actually, but anyway… happy birthday.’ I regard the hastily wrapped parcel my sister is offering and manage a weak smile. I

We always just called it The Lane. It was a path between two avenues in the same housing estate with cement bollards at either end. Beer cans, carrier bags and other detritus gathered in its corners and lay hugging the high garden walls at its edges. Animal waste too was deposited there to petrify a

One day, towards evening, as the sun was declining over the distant hilltops, and dusk thickened the air like dust rising from the winding road, a figure appeared some way off, approaching the town slowly, steadily, until some minutes later we could make out that it was a man. At that time, we had b

It arrives in a long, plain box, spattered with raindrops. ‘Are you going to open it?’ ‘Later,’ Thom says. ‘Let’s enjoy lunch.’ ‘Don’t you want to see it?’ ‘I’d rather spend time with you.’ That means: I’ll open it when you’re not here.   Last

Rebecca Audrey Johnson   She woke suddenly, cheated by the shade. It had seemed the perfect spot, accessed via an alleyway running behind her, now hidden from view. Halfway down the narrow passage, which was really more of a space between corrugated iron sheets than a real passageway with m

In my perverse mind it’s summertime: that hot summer of 1976. Which it could not have been, since Lukey was born in January. Even so, I persist in seeing it this way. Seeing my mother, in bikini and tie-dyed sarong, drifting from shaded bedroom to sun-scorched balcony, a whiff of coconut suntan lo

Amr was cogitating on Time – or to be more precise, timing. Like most gamblers he had a very large and capacious mind, and could think his way round to the latest cutting-edge research, say, on unicorns and UFOs. The way he figured it, standing there in the small, square, white-walled kitchen, was

‘Please,’ I said in desperation as I looked across the open bonnet of my car. It was 2.30am and we were in the garage. It was December and it was cold in Aberdeenshire. Colder than usual. ‘I just want to…’ ‘You have to stop!’ I begged. ‘…fix it,’ he said. He was leani