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Short Stories

I’d been badgered for a while by mum to get a Saturday job but this time the threat felt real. Dad was kind of on my side, but he also was adding the pressure lately. ‘You have to get a job, Michael. We're not going to pay for another computer game, and that’s that,’ my mother said. â€

Kingdom Random Glummerdom, only son of Lord Archibald Giles Glummerdom, was by all accounts a most peculiar creature. His physical attributes alone attested to that, for he possessed a pair of fish-like eyes that gazed vaguely out from their sockets, a gaunt elongated face ending in a receding chin,

It was 2.56am when it occurred to Emma that she could not remember the name of her childhood friend’s cat. Lindsey had been her timid next-door-but-two-neighbour, and her cat had been completely black with an incongruously bright pink nose. Emma’s daughter had reminded her of the creature that e

I had hoped – selfishly I’ll admit – that after her death, he would be able to forget her. This, however, was not the case. I sit beside him now, a stone’s throw away from Land’s End, on a makeshift wooden bench. Soft and brown, the bark having peeled off long ago; leaving behind a smoo

Where do we come from - What are we - Whither are we bound?1   * My name is Big-Head, and this is my Tale. The World is Flat. This is what I was told when I was little, and I knew it to be a truth once I had been taken to see it with my own eyes. There were some, very few, who held that the

DINNER   ‘Happy birthday, laopo.’ Emmeline beamed, her soapy fingers trying not to drop the phone into the kitchen sink. Such tiny things, the phones these days! ‘Thank you, dear.’ ‘I’m sorry I can’t come home early this time. New boss, you know...’ ‘Of course,

My father said that he could hear them coming long before they arrived, long before they burst out of the bush, surrounded by villagers, the engine of their truck screaming, everything dipped in noise. He was twelve years old when they came – the same age as his father, my grandfather, had been wh

Strong boots stomp the tarmac and stop right next to Geoff and me. Wet leather and sheep muck leap up my nose. There’s a strange hand in my fur, big-fingered. I lick the palm – urgh, tastes of engine oil. And the voice that belongs to the hand shouts over the beast in the sky: ‘That missing