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Short Stories

Patrick focuses his whole attention on the cat. He watches it roll over and scratch along its back with one leg as if the fur is an old coat to be discarded for the summer. He isn’t allowed to stroke Molly. He didn’t earn enough points in lessons this morning. Mummy was quite explicit. ‘

‘Leather hard! It’s not what you think!’ Evan said, looking pleased with himself. He stood in front of the class as we sat around the well-used tables that filled the small studio space. I didn’t get it. I knew nothing about ceramics and had no clue what ‘leather hard’ meant. I didn’t

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

It was the cold that woke Alma up. The stove must have gone out. She poked her nose out from under the furs that lay heavy on the bed. The window was covered in hoar frost, the layers of swirls and fronds turning the glass into a fantastical forest of white. This must be a good omen. She smiled and

When Adam met his father, he was selling something he didn’t really own. The white short-sleeved shirt and black tie Adam had picked up at a thrift store were enough for him to pass as a Jehovah’s Witness at the door to his father’s apartment complex. An old woman spotted the dark Bible in his

This was the first time Gavil had failed to be the first to produce a cigarette lighter at someone’s request. The lighter that had been successfully found and offered by someone else caught his eye. ‘Where did you find that?’ he asked, checking to see if he still had his own in his pocket.

Guru Dan Fennel ambles across the maple floorboards of Yoga Sky Studio. His elegant toes scatter cushions and stroke the cheek of a young disciple, supine on her mat. Dan once travelled from Madras to Seoul on foot. On the way, he threaded the following beads into his string of malas: dharma transmi

Eve of D-Day They were so, so young, but to Sheila, squinting out from the stage into the bright lights rigged up in the tent, they looked already old. Every show she did, they looked the same. It was hard to make out faces, peering through the dust-speckled beams of the spotlights, the generato