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Short story category: 5 Minutes

No bridge spans that boatless river, known to one side as the Reka, to the other the Wassel. No tunnel links the two − not twin! − cities. No flights crisscross their skies. Each, professing itself separate and sufficient, has turned its backside on the other. Ramparts reinforce the riverbanks.

Christmas Eve had always been Matt’s favourite night of the year. The reasons he liked it were not the same ones that appealed to other people. It had never been, for him, an evening of quiet relaxation and festive cheer. In fact, it was always a time of hard work, when he would put in a much lo

Larissa, you are looking good. A fine specimen. Half the size, you have been told. Half the weight of your previous self, and you believe them, more or less. You feel able to obey orders and to love yourself a little bit more. And nobody knows. Your duty is well and truly done. The little ones â€

For a city named after debris, Windthrow is surprisingly orderly. The industrial outskirts form a seething ring of poverty and unemployment, but once you overfly that unsavoury moat and breach the city proper, it undercuts the detritus of its name. Downtown Windthrow is a vibrant concatenation of st

'Mum! David’s kicked the ball into the tulips!’ Spring 1965. I am seven. And a bit of a snitch. Upstairs, a curtain is scraped back and Mum appears, wagging finger completely at odds with the twinkle in her eyes. David gets away with murder now. Which is very annoying to my seven-year-old

Sym stared into the open pit of the hearth. Nothing but ash and dust; a few lumps of kindling turned to carbon. And yet he couldn’t stop staring. A vortex seeking to suck him in. Four days now he’d sat in that armchair. He’d moved a couple of times, of course. Sipped a few mouthfuls of wate

She lay on a sun lounger in the garden, the morning sun wrapping her in its rays and whispering her to sleep. Clear thoughts were transforming into the figures and shadows of dreams. She was about to succumb to the final pull of slumber when a cool darkness blotted out the patterns that had been dan

A wave rolls, like a lumbering seal. The sea is a stretch of grey mounds and I wait for the next one; lazy, easy, barely moving. How I envy it. The water swells like a soft inhalation and yawns up the beach. Sums up Clenton-On-Sea, really. My head’s banging. I got up at the crack of midday, mas