I don’t normally do this on blog posts, but since it kind of links in with the piece I posted last week on reviews (and because Eskragh is going to be republished by Dark Fiction Magazine at some point in the relatively near future) I thought I’d post these quite different reviews of my story […]
Every night, at 10:30, Abigail’s father closes the front door, climbs into his rusty Toyota and drives away. Every night, before he goes, he strokes his daughter’s hair, reminds her not to open to door to anyone else and kisses her on the forehead. It is dangerous to go out after dark.
I was born in a housing estate at the foot of a steep hill. The top of the hill is ringed with trees, ancient sessile oaks, wych elm and horse chestnut. The rooks owned the woods. These were big birds with heavy black beaks and bodies matt as coal dust but their hoods shone like […]
The Spitfire was a sleek metal thing with a space for a battery underneath that made the propeller spin. I had coveted it for months as it had sat in the window of Morrow’s toy shop – the tiny moulded plastic pilot alert, day and night, for Messherschmidts and Focke Wolfs that would never pounce.
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 […]