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Short Stories

She pulled a bunch of ribbons from her jacket pocket, selected a red one, then squeezed it in the palm of her hand. ‘I wish,’ she said, and closed her eyes, ‘I wish that today will be the day that I find you.’ She took the ribbon to the large elm tree and tied it onto a low hanging bra

‘It is probably best if we start with your body. I’d like you to touch yourself – on the arm, the face – somewhere where your hand can make contact with your skin. Feel it. Soft. Malleable. Our bodies are fantastically adaptable - fantastically adaptable – to external conditions. Well now,

When Misha lost her fifth baby tooth, she understood that she was going to die one day. She couldn’t say why it was this tooth in particular that had caused this revelation, but there it was, plain as the bloody molar in her palm: the truth, plucked out into the open from a place where it had b

I can hear my brothers, my uncles, my great-uncles hammering away in the mines twenty floors beneath us. Candlelight toys with the dining room and for a second my world becomes dark. Grandpa begins, spewing out the same rhetoric he does every time the three of us are together. His hands are stain

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, Three for a Girl and Four for a Boy, Five for Silver, Six for Gold, Seven for a Secret never to be told, Eight's a Wedding, Nine's a Birth, Ten, you must walk to the Ends of the Earth. Traditional counting-rhyme   One for Sorrow. The young girl sits at t

The mournful wail of the cop sirens is drawing ever closer, but I feel an explanation is necessary. From the first time I read the book, I was not satisfied with their account of the accident. I was inclined to believe a collusion had been perpetrated on the reader. A collusion in which Fitzgeral

When Mrs Chen decided to get a divorce, she fretted for a couple of weeks on how best to tell her husband. She knew he would object and she also knew that he would throw things. He would be a rooster in an infinite dawn and she might have to escape to a hotel. She had settled on I want a divorce,

‘Everything you can imagine is real.’ – Pablo Picasso   It must be Paris outside; I can smell the rain in the dirt between the cobbles. ‘When are you going to write a story about me?’ you ask, rising from the sofa. Your perfume mixes with the wet-grass scent of the room. I l