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Short Stories

Frunk Tilberscruddy was out of lemons. Several times this morning he had despaired about a lack of citrus to curl his gums. He’d thrice wrenched around his purple hiker’s bag, but all that grazed his fingers were a large sack of coins and a bushel of crushed bananas the same colour as his pack.

Why am I here? Why am I even here? Why am I riding with these guys? We should let them go. They’re no threat to us. These jokers aren’t GC contenders. They’re doing nothing in the mountains and, if they were, that’s not our objective this year. They won’t even be in the bunch at the end

We pull in front of the half-lit Walmart sign, the first ‘A’ flashing like a strobe and the ‘L’ out entirely. There are abandoned shopping carts strewn haphazardly across the front entrance in the night breeze, lonely and forgotten by whatever poor employee got stuck with the night shift; my

Troy was tagged. It was like carrying a microwave around on your ankle. What else were they going to do? Get a drone to hover over his head all day following him about? He wore a more flared trouser than he usually liked over it. He’d scratch around it from time to time, but an itchy tag was low d

Six minutes and thirty-three seconds. That was the amount of time it took a spark to wind its way down and around the forty-inch fuses attached to the nine cherry-red two-stick dynamite charges that Frank Rasmussen was carrying in his dusty leather satchel. Frank had been excavating mines long enoug

'Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.’ Albert Camus   September ‘Gail, dear, you can’t hide cards up your sleeve.’ The nurse points out my mother sitting at the far side of the room in the games corner, but I had already heard her voice, high and shrill. The

I woke up that morning, knowing she had gone. Left in the middle of the night. She didn’t sleep well, so it never bothered me when she awoke. She would usually just get herself up, grab a book and go into the living room and curl up on the sofa. I never sensed it was anything to do with me. It

Jacob knew that logic didn’t always rule the world; at least it didn’t use to. A decade before, as an undergraduate student on a year abroad in Taiwan, Jacob had encountered inexplicable, irrational magic. Now, as an analyst for a private equity firm immersed in a world of numbers and profit, th

Kimi broke sticks just for the fun of hearing them crack. Dry sticks, thick as the fingers of old men and crooked and brittle. And she’d tread on them in the wood or flex them in her hands or across her knee, and the sound of them breaking was like small gunfire. Everything quiet then and all the

Mrs Clarke opened the door. It was on the latch, and she peeped cautiously through the small gap. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘My name’s Jennifer. I’m here from the Sunshine Programme.’ Mrs Clarke’s face brightened immediately on hearing this. She closed the door, unlatched it and then open