There was a stage. A microphone. A guy with a guitar and another at a piano. One spotlight trying to mark out everything up there and missing the edges. And that was it. If the audience in the jazz bar had been expecting anything more, anything gran...   [Read more...]

The dapper man picked up a penny. He rolled it around in his fingers, enjoying the coolness of it. It was raining, and he had had only seen it because the bronze colour had shone up in the middle of a shallow puddle.

The dapper man remember...   [Read more...]

Until now, she’d never thought of herself as pretty. Beautiful, yes. Stunning, definitely. An angel fallen to earth, she’d occasionally even heard that one. But ‘pretty’? Pretty was little girl sweet and candy floss innocence. It was not her because it was not...   [Read more...]

Fault. Not a good word. Not a pleasant word. It conjures up the idea of blame. If someone’s at fault, someone’s to blame. The same thing.

Plus it makes me think of faulty. Broken. Useless.

Like you, really. It’s your fault. You’re faulty. It’s not ...   [Read more...]

They panic was reaching heart-stopping momentum now. Jake was sure that at any second his body would give up, surrender, break apart or explode or melt away into the once beautiful sea. It wasn’t beautiful any more. The fear had seen to that.
One minute havin...   [Read more...]

The record was broken. That was not a cliché or a euphemism, it really was completely and utterly broken. Snapped in two due to a bit too much rough and a lot of tumble. And it was all Johnny’s fault anyway. Our dad had told us not to touch the old ...   [Read more...]

She unwrapped her sandwich and fed it to the pigeons, just as she did every day. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered making them in the first place, when she knew that she wasn’t going to eat them. And then she remembered the birds. How they wo...   [Read more...]

In 1921, he flew from the Great Rift Valley. No one believed him, of course. They knew a man could not simply spread his wings and fly. Because a man had no wings, and that was really the point of it. But he insisted he had done it. “Just because no ...   [Read more...]

It was really just a matter of survival. Keep going and keep going and eventually, soon if they were lucky, they would reach a village, a town, a bloody great city with skyscrapers and McDonalds and satellite TV. All right, maybe that was taking things ...   [Read more...]

I am still half dreaming as I open my eyes against the night. The alarm hasn't gone off yet, shaking me awake with its awful, soul grating shriek, and it is not yet morning. I glance at the slime green display on the clock - 2.18am. Not good. Something h...   [Read more...]