Homemade Weather by Tom O’Brien
What The Fox Brings In Its Jaw by Ian O’Brien
The Impossibility Of Wings by Donna L Greenwood
“These stories demonstrate the thin line we tread in life: between love and hate, friendship and enmity, escape and return.”
Damhnait Monaghan, Prize Judge and author of award-winning novella-in-flash, The Neverlands
Homemade Weather extract
The stuttering cough of the chainsaw rattles my bedroom window, shakes me awake. I have to remind my racing heart that the rising falling angry whine is just my father, back from town, starting work.
Predawn outlines the mountain, like he’s cutting it from the sky.
I close my eyes until the roar of the blades fade down the valley, smothered by its gentle hush. But before I leave my bed, I wait for the bite of his axe to split the stillness.
What The Fox Brings In Its Jaw extract
Another craving has brought him to the window and he is standing there with a cigarette when he sees it. The window is open, he’s not supposed to be smoking, and he doesn’t want to risk another complaint. The cigarette burns down to his fingertips, and he isn’t really looking at anything, perhaps the row of lights in the distance, beyond the pylon-lined blackness, when he sees the fox move into the rectangle of light below. His eyes follow it and he holds his breath. It stops for a moment, as if sensing him, standing up there on the third floor, silhouetted in the kitchen light. It holds something in its jaw.
The Impossibility of Wings extract
The hyenas came for my mother when I was ten years old. They took her in the middle of the night and gobbled up her eyes. When they dragged her carcass back the next morning, her dark, empty sockets swallowed up our lives.
On Mum’s good days, we watched her fly above the earth and bounce around the planets. My sisters and I were never able join her for we were tethered by the ropes of reality. All we could do was watch her play with the moon and hope that she would find her way home.
Copies can be purchases directly from the publisher: Retreatwest.co.uk
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Biography
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