‘The trick,’ she says, ‘is to loosen the roots. It helps with growth.’ I glance at the kid. He’s watching the display intently, a crease between his eyebrows. ‘Loosening roots is good practice,’ she states, while her fingers tease the soil. From where I’m standing – me leaning against a wooden pillar, the kid with …
I can’t remember how long it’s been there. Probably forever. A constant weight on my shoulder – sometimes the left, sometimes the right; always there, always pushing down. I call it The Burden. Sometimes it’s almost tolerable; forgettable even, for a while. Sometimes it’s just crushing: grinding me into the ground, bending my back this …
I’ve found some decent-sized nuggets over the years. But today I’m not detecting in the goldfields. No, I’m about fifty kilometres south along the Old Melbourne Road. That’s where he said it was. It was hard looking into those eyes, the way they always lacked something. Luckily, I didn’t inherit that trait. He knew I …
The Peculiarities of Yearning is a collection of flash fiction and short stories that uses strange scenarios to explore how human longings are repressed and revealed. This collection includes stories that have won or been shortlisted in competitions including Bristol Short Story Prize, Bath Short Story Award, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Exeter Story Prize and …
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He pours already boiling water from a kettle to a pan for eggs. I tell him I’ve not seen it done that way before. Saves time, he says, and I explain that I have been conditioned to serve time rather than it serve me. He lines up a trio of toucan-print eggcups a stretched hand …
Sitting in the campervan staring at the sea she no longer gets in because Ned isn’t with her, Ava feels a throbbing in her lip at the same time as a faint ticking starts up inside her head. She pulls the rear-view mirror round to look and there’s a miniature grandfather clock embedded in her …
White frothing water surges over boulders down the seam of the valley. “Take it away,” she murmurs over the noise. Bitterness has eaten holes in her like moths. She feels spools of ache wound tight within. The woman picks her way down the shepherd’s path, flat shoes and black stockings poking out of a calf-length …
The fragments of their lives settle in grimy heaps like fallen leaves. A ragged pair of football boots, melted DVDs, blistered photographs. They remind me of artefacts from Pompeii or Herculaneum. I say this to the boy, but he simply reminds me that he is dead. I fold the seared remains of his school uniform …
The villagers gather like crimson clouds over the cobblestones, looking up at the Mayor’s gleaming-granite balcony, thirsty for blood. They call her The Eighth, The Pure, The Hope, The Youngest. Anything, but her name. They’ve given their fattest swine, sweetest wine, their life’s harvest, and their wives, waiting to wash the stained sheet by the …
Lealeh’s hair is snow white. Snow white and wrapped in a hair-net. A hair-net that glitters. Glittery studs in her ears. Her ears are small and elegant. Elegance of her fingers, wrapped around the cigarette holder. Her cigarette holder is long and silver—she blows in delicately, then exhales. Exhaling, she says, “I was addicted as …
Look, I know it ain’t much, a bottle of fizzy pop, nabbed after last night’s shift at the Golden Dragon, but your mom’s got foil, paints borrowed from working today’s kids’ club, and paper, all crinkly like, for flames from them thrusters – bog roll’s ours, at least – and I know it’s not the …
When she picked me up from arrivals for the first time, she was wearing a soft jeans-coloured overall amounting to little more than a tank top and shorts. Her bare arms and legs were golden brown, her breasts girl-like, free from constraints and, from what I could perceive, evenly tanned. It was the summer of …