Sept sat cross-legged in the centre of an ordinary living room and pulled The World from his head one wire at a time. Blood ran down the pale skin on his back, staining the blue shorts that were the only clothes he wore, and spread across the wheat coloured carpet in a growing pool. The […]
The colour of the money passing through the accounts of DeGris and Languedoc may be as green as in any other bank, but the colour of its customer’s blood is invariably blue. The company began life as a goldsmith’s and issued its first cheque in 1668. Today it serves a liberal scattering of the world’s […]
A life does not flow evenly from spring to the ocean, its passage is broken by rapids and falls, twists and turns. The choices we make define a life’s course. Some decisions take us over a threshold where the effort required to backtrack, to paddle against the turbulence and cross to another stream, requires more […]
The rusting husks of Soviet-era industry litter the Balkans. Shuttered chemical plants smear rainbows across ground water in Serbia, cold and rusting furnaces rot in Bulgaria, in Montenegro the wind howls through the girdered skeletons of dead factories and in Macedonia, in Bosnia and in Croatia vast plants with lost purposes are turning gradually into […]
The existentialist philosophers Heidegger and Satre argue that we have been thrown into this universe unprepared and abandoned in a universe that imposes fundamental limitations on what we might become. They call this notion facticity.
One of the other Friday Flash Fiction writers suggested this title and challenged the others to write a story to match. This was my attempt. Alex sat in the departure lounge and tried to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, but a combination of the humidity and his own […]
Solomon heard them coming just before dawn. He shook me awake and then I woke the kid, putting my hand across his mouth, just in case he made a noise. He didn’t. He was becoming a proper little soldier.
The alien thing – white and oblong like a small refrigerator – was still smouldering and popping as Brad slid down the loose soil into the great gouge it had cut into the earth. Suddenly isolated Brad felt his drunken bravado slither away.
“Five…” The astronaut scanned the console. All green. Good to go. “…four…” Far away engines roared, his helmet muffled the noises but vibrations still rattled his teeth. “…three…” He thought of the crowd, miles away, cheering. He imagined his parents and his wife and child. He smiled. “…two…” He would be a hero. The first […]