Category: Fiction

They sit on the step, side by side, hips touching. She covers her ears and squeezes her eyes closed until tiny tears form in the corners. She waits, and only silence and crickets and an occasional siren on the main street blocks away from their house can be heard. She waits, opens her eyes and…

In June, my mate Mike will be seventeen, so we’ll buy a van, fit it with mattresses, and go continental. It’ll be the five of us from last summer at Sandbanks, except it’ll be St Tropez and no mums mithering us about missing the sunshine when we sleep until tea-time. Mike had better pass his…

Writhing and rolling. Written around his body in the colour pale of dim moonlight was the word pain. Morning comes.He survived. Today is going to be a good day, he’s sure. Food first. Like everybody who understands that it’s about the fill and the nutrients, he puts everything in the pot and turns on the…

I look down at my lap and find it gone, replaced by a big bump. Eight months and one more to go. Building a nursery, one small purchase at a time. Circus bears in blue, green, and yellow.

Ismaila slipped on a puddle of dog piss, landing face-down on his neighbour’s bingo. His rectum, hosting a potpourri of cassava, bitter leaf soup and sukudai, pushed hard against his anus. It was still dark out and the muezzin of Angwa-Dodo central mosque was singing the call to prayers in a loud, one-note wail. “Who…