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Short story category: 10 Minutes

Helen was standing by the milk with a list in one hand and a phone in the other. Julia had found the Almond Thins she came in for and was looking at yogurts – her daughter didn’t like peach or cherry, so she’d been scanning the multipacks for offending flavours. When she saw Helen, she quickly

‘I can’t believe you kept it.’ It’s an ugly thing – a Year 8 woodwork project. Unevenly circular, almost egg-shaped where I over-planed to make tiny unnecessary adjustments, erroneous hour-increment markings where my chisel deviated around the grain. For some reason I painted a black ca

Two months ago, Anna’s mother withdrew from public life and began collecting assassinations. Her first acquisition, according to most reports, was a cumbrous reproduction of Gérôme’s The Death of Caesar, which she dangled above the fireplace of her dimly lit sitting room. The exact order of he

I went to Cornwall to escape broken things. I thought it was my work, a doomed quango project to build the unbuildable database that no one wanted, but Marie assured me it was our relationship. Do you really want to do this? I’m sick to the eye teeth of your back-end issues. We were both strung

When Natasha went away, he kept finding things she had left behind. A map of Belsize Park under the sofa cushions. An article torn out of the newspaper with a sentence underlined in purple felt tip in the pocket of the dressing gown she’d liked to borrow. Six numbers on a lolly stick caught betwee

The mermaid was gone from the icehouse and the Dowager declared the tenants had all been lying, or else their minds had been touched by the cold and too much whisky. Being their only gentle-born witness, I was summoned to the Bighouse to defend their tale. My father was angry; he couldn’t say so o

Georgia Leland had forgotten to water her indoor garden and the leaves were fading from green to brown. Perched on a wide wooden windowsill, exposed to the bright Kansas sun, her stem-and-leaf children yawned lazily and stretched out, searching for drink. It was the longest they’d gone without it

‘I thought you’d have a cat.’ ‘Hmm?’ Roy stirred from his daydream. ‘What did you say?’ The gardener cleared his throat and spoke again. ‘I figured,’ he said, ‘since you’re an Egyptologist and all, that you’d have a cat.’ ‘A cat? Why would I have a cat?’ ‘