I met Johnny in a pub in London, he had a leather jacket on and light blue eyes with a darker ring round the iris. He asked me for my number in front of my friends, which was a bit brazen. I gave it to him to him as I was lonely and he reminded …
[TW: This flash deals with an emotive topic.] It’s Anna’s 10th birthday. She wakes to the sound of nothing, slips her feet from the bottom bunk, careful not to stand on the empty wrappers scattered across the floor by Joey. He’s her Dad’s housemate, and sleeps here when Anna doesn’t. It’s bad enough that he leaves …
I can hear it. In the silence of two a.m. it makes itself heard. Lying here on the bathmat I’m thinking about pulling a towel off the rail to warm me, because I can’t bring myself to move. Drip. If I could muster the will to stretch my arm, I could lever myself up and …
‘Remember when I hung you upside down by your legs here?’ The boy stands with his hands on his hips, all bravado, surveying the scene of his triumph, unaware that Carys could have righted herself at any time. If she had chosen to. It was the Easter hunt last spring. This boy and his friends …
They stand naked. Each slender girl topped by a head of ebony hair like rows of burnt-out matches. The older women bind their bodies, work knotted knuckles swiftly through fine fabric. The girls stand unflinching while waists are corseted, hips are boned, then plunged deep in kimono silk. Black hair is wound, looped in nooses …
“Nobody loves a pig wearing lipstick,” Bessie grunted to Clara as they snouted through their trough’s scraps. Clara gobbled a turnip-top before replying, “At least lipstick doesn’t make my arse look big!”“I can’t help my body shape!” Bessie stomped a trotter. “Besides, all the wildest boars prefer a little fat around the rump and ribs.” …
Staring from the photograph, he almost winked: Skinny Joe, cross-legged in the front row, squinting up at the flash – Joe of the razor-sharp one-liners and the dirty jokes; Joe who taught us how to inhale cigarette smoke and hold it in our puffed-out cheeks without coughing once; Skinny Joe who showed me how to …
It wasn’t comfortable. The sharp, jagged edges of the rocks dug thick, red welts into our thighs, and with every crashing wave, an ice-cold whip of wind snapped at our legs. It was beautiful though. The heavens had opened. Rain fell thick and fast into the rough sea below. Huge, heavy droplets making the journey from above, …
Black Beauty When I am ten you give me your childhood copy of Black Beauty, a hardback with a battered paper cover, your name written inside in fountain pen. You tell me it was one of your favourites as a girl. I try to like it too but I’m just not that into horses. Decades …
A great sunflower grows in the desert. It stands 6000ft tall and blocks out the sun. The most common question asked regarding it is how?, followed by who did this?, but there are no answers to either. It has been said that the great sunflower looks sad. The desert below is cold and full of …
Norman and Claire had argued on the way to the hospital and she’d ostracised him to an uncomfortable chair outside the delivery room. ‘Don’t you know the pain I’m in?!’ Claire had screeched as he tried to negotiate the A26 around Tunbridge Wells. ‘And you pick now to make that bloody stupid suggestion? No, Norman, …
The cardigan doesn’t yet realize the effect it will have on the woman with the tortoise shell glasses. It hangs, quiet and listless on the rack between a hoodie and a vest, ignorant of the power it holds. How could a simple garment woven together with cotton threads and synthetic fibres be expected to foresee …