Tag: Short Story

  • Holiday of a Lifetime by Chris Cottom

    Holiday of a Lifetime by Chris Cottom

    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…

  • Five Brothers by Courtney Welu

    Five Brothers by Courtney Welu

    My first brother died of a disease with no name, or at least a disease with no name seventy years ago. They have presumably named it by now. Only eight at the time of his passing, he was the first of us to break my mother’s heart as she tended to him through the night,…

  • Quebec Snow by Mark Keane

    Quebec Snow by Mark Keane

    Tony France came looking for me in the garden maze where I was pruning the hedges. “You can leave that for now,” he said. “Mr Davidson has a special job for you.”

  • A Trip to the Library by Tharseo Ziyet Jovita

    A Trip to the Library by Tharseo Ziyet Jovita

    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…

  • Amniotic Fluid by Luanne Castle

    Amniotic Fluid by Luanne Castle

    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.

  • Inconclusive by Neil James

    Inconclusive by Neil James

    When Dr Rajan gave me the scan results, that wasn’t the word I was waiting for. It is, of course, better than the other word. The other word slowly killed my dad. It turned his skin grey, erased his body cell by cell, until one day last winter, pumped full of morphine, he faded away…

  • Ismaila of Angwa-Dodo by Fatima Okhuosami

    Ismaila of Angwa-Dodo by Fatima Okhuosami

    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…

  • The Coat by Joel Glover

    The Coat by Joel Glover

    My father killed himself, drowned in the lake at the bottom of the quarry, the week after my mother died. His pockets were full of rocks, and one lonely shell. He left me a note, in his bag on the shore, and a request for his ashes to be scattered on the sea.

  • Lessons by Kathryn Kulpa

    Lessons by Kathryn Kulpa

    Once, before she was my mother, my mother played violin in a local orchestra. She kept her instrument, took it out at holiday parties, her hands gliding the bow over the strings with magical quickness, chin proud, elbow bent just so. In fourth grade, our school offered free music lessons to anyone who wanted them,…

  • The House as a Picture of the Past by Bright Aboagye

    The House as a Picture of the Past by Bright Aboagye

    I grew up in a house that sang. Its walls, wrinkled and grey, blended into the overcast sky like an old photograph left too long in the sun. To the neighbours, it was just another tired building, its shutters hanging loosely, its roof patched in places where the wind had been cruel. To me, the…