Close

Tags: Loss

The man loves his three hats. His wife, she doesn’t love them; to her they are just a chore. They lie wherever he leaves them, and she must pick them up, put them back where they belong. Again, and again. Over the decades, she must have picked up those hats hundreds of times. Thousands. But the

If dreams count as experience, then I’ve died about 600 times. I pulled that number out of nowhere – I don’t actually know how many times I've dreamed of my own death, but I know it's probably an abnormal amount. At least once a week. One sharp self-slap across the face was enough to know this

Jackson’s first reaction to the phone ringing was one of pure annoyance. Music had been blasting in his car as he flew down I-95, and the call had come just before his favourite verse. He was already in an uneasy mood after a not-so-great visit with Mindy in Jersey. He grabbed his phone off the em

We had walked down to see the frozen canal. It was the day after Bonfire Night and the sky was bright blue. Not a cloud about. Cold though. Coldest it had been all year. We sat on a bench and ate slices of Alison’s homemade lemon drizzle. Drank tea from a flask. There was a scattering of icing-sug

The soil crunches against Nell’s teeth as she grinds them together. Clumps of earth and small shards of stone cake her gums. Her tongue feels around for pebbles too big to ingest and brings them out from the very back of her mouth. They have no place here. Once identified, she spits them back onto

I can tell she is going to irritate the bejesus out of me from the minute she takes a running jump into the swimming pool. The over-exuberant type – Little Miss #LiveLaughLove. Ignoring the tsunami of chlorine she’s unleashed into my eyes, she makes a laughing ‘brrr’ sound and shakes her hea

No matter how much he loosened his tie, Joe could not seem to get enough air into his throat – as if some unseen force was gripping his trachea as hard as he was now gripping the leather of his steering wheel. White lilies. They had ordered pink azaleas and the florist sent them white lilies

She came from a wealthy family, she said. Her father owned a string of cinemas and a newspaper. But somehow things went wrong after her husband died, and now all she'd got left was this house she wanted to sell. 'Won't you come along and look at it? I'm not asking much. I just want to be rid of it,