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Short Stories

My father liked setting the clock an hour fast so he could enjoy the fact it was really only 6.00am and not 7.00am which meant he could have an extra hour’s sleep each morning before he got up for work. In addition, the clock gained five minutes every day, so when I needed to catch a bus from my h

He must have received the letter on Tuesday – perhaps Wednesday, but most likely Tuesday. He wouldn’t have gone down to collect the post immediately; he would have seen the postman arrive from the upstairs study window, registered an arrival of correspondence, but continued at his desk, the same

My biggest secret is that you licked off my right nipple. Shame in the shape of absence. Making love with men was a dream for months. I thought to myself – you will understand the pain of a cold bed, once you’re grown. But what do you know about it now, now that you are? Then, you were a glob

She made her way slowly up the stairs. She had changed for the evening, though it was barely teatime. The dress in heavy luxurious blue silk flowed in opulent folds from her restricted waist. At the top of the stairs, she had to catch her breath. The action gave her some satisfaction. Her hair was p

Juliette takes the familiar curve toward home, gliding through the sun-dappled foliage of Alpine foothills in midsummer. She is tonguing the scab of an old thought, a thing left undone. The natural gas inlet pipe for their water heater is electrified – said with many grimaces and much swearing by

My husband and I live along a West Cork boreen. Heather and gorse brocade the fields, and the hedges are heavy with hawthorn and blackthorn. Some evenings, this landscape seems to exhale an almost uncanny light. We are both in our forties, and work from home. We collaborate on ‘historical rom

No question what her favourite flavour was. Black cherry. The Food City store brand. Julietta would always remember that nearly nondescript, primer-grey can with the maroon letters that spelled out BLACK CHERRY SODA, the words set at a forty-five-degree angle. She only ever drank the stuff in the

Stanley Richard Klonczynski had worked at the dream shop for fifty-four years, seven months and thirteen days, or 19,946 days if you didn’t count the days he took off, which were not very many and really only brought the total down another hundred days, give or take. The 19,946 days – give or ta