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Short Stories

Six minutes and thirty-three seconds. That was the amount of time it took a spark to wind its way down and around the forty-inch fuses attached to the nine cherry-red two-stick dynamite charges that Frank Rasmussen was carrying in his dusty leather satchel. Frank had been excavating mines long enoug

'Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.’ Albert Camus   September ‘Gail, dear, you can’t hide cards up your sleeve.’ The nurse points out my mother sitting at the far side of the room in the games corner, but I had already heard her voice, high and shrill. The

I woke up that morning, knowing she had gone. Left in the middle of the night. She didn’t sleep well, so it never bothered me when she awoke. She would usually just get herself up, grab a book and go into the living room and curl up on the sofa. I never sensed it was anything to do with me. It

Jacob knew that logic didn’t always rule the world; at least it didn’t use to. A decade before, as an undergraduate student on a year abroad in Taiwan, Jacob had encountered inexplicable, irrational magic. Now, as an analyst for a private equity firm immersed in a world of numbers and profit, th

Kimi broke sticks just for the fun of hearing them crack. Dry sticks, thick as the fingers of old men and crooked and brittle. And she’d tread on them in the wood or flex them in her hands or across her knee, and the sound of them breaking was like small gunfire. Everything quiet then and all the

Mrs Clarke opened the door. It was on the latch, and she peeped cautiously through the small gap. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name’s Jennifer. I’m here from the Sunshine Programme.’ Mrs Clarke’s face brightened immediately on hearing this. She closed the door, unlatched it and then open

Îles de la Madeleine (Magdalen Islands) Canada, 1771 The sea itself feared to swallow a race bold enough to unknot her watery roots… where the giant seaweed moors the horizon to the setting sun. Antonine Maillet, Pélagie la Charette   Marie-Andrée Le Blanc has never heard of the

My mother loved gossip, particularly when it concerned human folly or, even better, sin. I always put this down to her childhood, during which she had been brought up by joyless Victorian grandparents in accordance with the strict teachings of the Plymouth Brethren. Although she had long escaped her