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  • Number Six is a Half-Broken Mind

Short Stories

You’ve to follow proper etiquette, or demons won’t give you the time of day. It only takes six things to reach them, and number one is the book I had from my auntie, along with dire warnings not to use it. Demons are surprisingly easy to reach; I wasn’t even trying properly, just having a r

I remember how I was coming out of university: lofty, strong ideals, but incredibly lazy. I read a lot, got into long-winded discussions with no definite conclusion and generally loafed about. At university you could do all this with impunity but now that I’d left it was frowned upon, and being kn

Day two I dread to think how many flies I’ve swallowed since we came here. The air boils with them so that you can hardly breathe. They find their way through the mesh on the cabin windows. They swoop on uncovered food. Their corpses collect under lamps and in the plastic shells of ceiling lights

She came from a wealthy family, she said. Her father owned a string of cinemas and a newspaper. But somehow things went wrong after her husband died, and now all she'd got left was this house she wanted to sell. 'Won't you come along and look at it? I'm not asking much. I just want to be rid of it,

I once lost something of mine, and it was nowhere to be found. Problem was, I didn't know what it was that I was looking for. I searched through my whole house: under the couch cushions, in the kitchen cabinets, under my bed. I rifled through countless documents − taxes, old schoolwork, art − in

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