White jaw bone hanging slack until the boy beneath the sheet pulls on the wire, making it clack clack clack. The adults laugh and cheer, children scream with delicious terror, some very…

Husbands, wives, mothers, brothers, lovers. These, of course. Yet what of the tiny black cat mangled by a speeding car on Church Hill in 1963; you cried for three days after your…

One My mother plonks down a bottle of ink, dips an index finger in it, and presses it on the centre of the page lying before me. I want an army of…

He showed up in their little town when the weather began to bite, treetops the hue of sticky honey.   The scrappy sort; straggled hair, patchy beard. Bobbed and bolted around like…

Syd bumps. Syd gets bump notes.  Lots. Four a week, most weeks. Syd had three on the same Wednesday last term.  “Record breaker!”  Everyone smiles.  Syd can’t remember why he gets them.…

The sky is so green today, greener than it’s been for a long time. The sun bakes the earth hot and hard beneath our bare feet, while reptiles scuttle through the dust.…

When Blake died, I saw his soul emerge from his body. At least, that’s what I assume it was. He took a final breath, a laboured drawing in of air, and when he…

I flip my dampened pillow and stretch my arms, the bed too wide for one. Through the window, starlings punch the sky in a liquid mass. A blood-orange sunset edges the treeline.…

[CW: Grief] “Strictly speaking, water doesn’t belong to the rivers or the oceans. It belongs to the mountains from which it ran.” She nods. She knows this but a brain isn’t rust-proof,…

No silver bells for pretty maids in my eyrie of iron-tongued giants. I was molded in their humped likeness, but my voice was a broken clapper, a tortoise’s lurching cough; the music…