Close

Short story category: 5 Minutes

Angela stood at the window, watching her daughter watching the chickens. She carefully rubbed a china plate clean. The girl had always been more like her father, not like Angela at all. And it was possibly her own doing, because from the first moment she’d clutched that delicate and infinitely pre

It was a quiet Sunday morning when bits of me began to fall off. I put that first finger on the kitchen worktop. It wobbled for a moment before rolling off and onto the floor. The worktop wasn’t level. I found my big toe from my right foot in my sock at bedtime. I supposed that I should wash

Having swallowed a bellyful of commuters, the steel serpent sighed to a halt somewhere in the depths of its underground domain as if it simply couldn’t summon the strength to carry on. The lights flickered out and for a moment the carriage was consumed by the darkness and silence of the tunnel. Th

I walk about the platform, the early morning beginning to warm around me. The barriers come down but I can’t see the train coming. Tiffany takes my hand. ‘It’ll be alright,’ she says, ‘You wait and see.’ ‘Ever notice how long it takes the train to get here, after the barriers co

I had hoped – selfishly I’ll admit – that after her death, he would be able to forget her. This, however, was not the case. I sit beside him now, a stone’s throw away from Land’s End, on a makeshift wooden bench. Soft and brown, the bark having peeled off long ago; leaving behind a smoo

The rich always die last, the old man croaked. His voice whipped away, swept across the white scoured snow-surface of the plain. Friend leaned forward trying to catch the tail end of his words. The man’s eyes were black, yellowing skin around them, red patches on his cheeks. Piss-holes in th

Three men asked me to marry them. I said yes to them all. Vernon March whisked me to the altar in the month which matched his name. His courtship had soothed me like a breeze, flattered me into a flutter. I wore a green gown with a wreath of violets and primroses. They wilted nearly as fast as th

I’ve never understood the allure of New Year’s Eve. I mean, what makes that one night so much more special than the other 364 nights of the year? And am I really supposed to believe that the mere act of counting down to midnight is enough to negate all the injustices and humiliations of the prev