In the Hour of Need by Dan Brotzel
On the morning of Billi’s funeral, I woke very early. I still didn’t know if I should go, I barely knew her. But mum said it was a local tragedy and we…
On the morning of Billi’s funeral, I woke very early. I still didn’t know if I should go, I barely knew her. But mum said it was a local tragedy and we…
Will Tesco still deliver? She thinks this while her fingers sting through the freezer on a numb hunt for anything to make a passable meal. She pulls out half bags of green…
There’s video of the then-Prime Minister, over 75 years ago, staring down the TV camera and addressing the nation. ‘I have an announcement,’ she’d said, teeth glistening at the corners of her…
At the dinner table, his mother’s flesh spreads like warm, pale jelly over her chair. His father sits at the head of the table; he is simmering and sour. Tom covers his…
His eyes flicker in the screenlight as if they’re following an autocue on turbo. Every frame saturates his pupils faster than a nuclear iceblink. I lift the top plate off his stack…
It doesn’t begin like you thought it might, back when you dreamed on ballet-pink sheets under a patchwork of airbrushed pop stars. Back then, you would have thought it began when he…
This plan records your hopes for your labour and the birth of your child You can change your mind about these wishes at any time. Your name: You will answer to your…
Will you walk now with me Writers, along the hall of mirrors of your fiction? Consider your catalogue of work. Here’s one mirror that elongates your features: disproportionate and stretched – a…
“How many they got back there?” he asked me as he pulled a wooden pencil out of his shirt pocket. The pencil tip, dull and coarse, sharpened no doubt with a knife,…
I lie on my back, trapping bonfire-coloured leaves and cold light inside the telescope of my cupped hands. My father ambles on, not watching. I unglue myself from the ground and tiptoe…
Before the magic and before the fairy and before the whale and before the donkeys and before the cricket and before the wish, there was a man and there was a stack…
Jade remembers how excited she felt when she first saw the advert—the one promising the culinary delights of a long-forgotten culture. She switched off her phone so she could listen, without distraction,…