Fish Man squats Fatima Mansions, a tumbledown townhouse on Pentonville Square. The building is in all day shadow behind iron tooth-pick railings on a scrap of dirt. The windows are boarded and the front door padlocked. But the board at this window, here, is a sham. It is nailed once at the top of the … Continue reading The Hollow Men.
Category: Short fiction
Twelve Shitty Acres.
1 Time passed like what it does waiting for dinner to cook and then PING, one day, a Tuesday or a Monday or something, the ugly folk of Twelve Shitty Acres got a break. One of them, an orange coloured dolly who went by the name of Lil-Let, came home with a little stapled book. … Continue reading Twelve Shitty Acres.
As Thin As Holy Bible Paper.
1 He came back this time as a monkey: a macaque with a vague longing; an ache for a mate, for a cloud-capped, snowy mountain to retreat to, for the hot water springs there to bathe in. He hummed, as best he could remember them, the birdsongs from the ever-after. He came back. And, for … Continue reading As Thin As Holy Bible Paper.
Aces, Fruits & Ingots.
Louella looking out the no-one-can-look-in glass. Everything inside the car defined. Everything outside blurring. Towns appear and disappear. Endless dual-carriage and fields. There is motion. There is none. There is heat. Burning Spear on repeat. There is no sickness. No one spoke as they drove west. They stayed the night at a clean hotel in Meredith. … Continue reading Aces, Fruits & Ingots.
The Kiss.
He woke beneath a kitchen table. Scattered crumbs rose like far-off prairie mountains on the tiles. Through a slice of window he could see a deep crusted snow, shining on a rooftop. The sky held more snow. He was wearing someone else's jumper. Heavy, handwoven, Hebridian: blue with a daisy motif. He stared at the … Continue reading The Kiss.
Pan & The Fluted Mimosa.
The sun dropped behind the bruised horizon and the sky became plateaued in fading orange and blue. A car, bearing the legend Weston Taxis, appeared on the quiet street, stopping opposite The Playhouse. The sky was held in the theatre's windows; a ghost crowd, too; foyered. A man and a woman climbed from the taxi … Continue reading Pan & The Fluted Mimosa.