“I loved that house,” said Jack, staring at the ruined roof. At his feet, animals milled around in unknowing condolence.
Continue reading After the fall
Category Archives: Short Stories
A Little Hoarse
“Well?” he yelled from his spot on the village green (In truth more of a village brown, carpeted with crisped grass and churned mud). “Is it a crime? To be a horse? To be a horse head on a stick in a bin? Is it?”
To begin with.
“And there’s no way to appeal?” The figure shook its head. Marley fiddled with a lock, licked his dry lips. It had seemed, at the time, the sensible option. Christmas Eve, how many years ago? Too many to count now. Another dozen, another score of links on this chain. He could count them later.
Among friends
She had lived with the pigeons for so long now she had left behind all memory of her life as a human. All she knew now was the beat of wing on hot summer air, the nervous stuttering grab at abandoned food, the snug reek of the night’s roost. She tended her fellows’ gnarled and broken feet, smoothed their grease-ruffled feathers and reassured them in whatever jabbering language pigeons used.
In my beginning is my end.
He looked up, and God answered. The buildings about him spun; his head remained a still spot in the centre of the city’s merry go round. The light of the Sun bore down on him, squinting shut his eyes. God was there, in the sharp light of the frost-pinched winter’s day. God spoke to him, in dousing heat glowing through his skin. The crowds fell upwards, spiralling with the buildings into the blank stare of the open sky.
12 Steps
"Oh, hello. You’re new."
"Yes, I thought it was time to, uh, try to. To take steps."
"Well, you’re in the right place, steps are what we take! But we’ll get to that. Have you got yourself a drink?"
A Night Walk
He’d been out across the Thames a couple of times, at night in his bare feet. Padding near-silently over the erratic wavelets, just to see if he could still do it. It came to him the second time that it might just be a dream; it was probably a dream, it was a dream when he was a child and he played out there, running under the bridges to hide, and wandering past the moored ships, touching their massive sides with his fingertips, wondering how they stayed afloat.
Cold War Diplomacy
It had been cold for as long as any of us could remember, but memory is short when you’re a child. Four months of bitter winter felt like four years; imprisoned in duffle coats and bobble hats, playgrounds icy, gloomy battlegrounds where we fought with the very concept of fun.
It was 1986 and we were ten. Well, Martin and I were ten – Peter and his twin sister Dawn were both nine, and the distinction was powerful. They would be ten in the summer, but the summer was a lifetime away. Dawn was, as these things go, taller than all of us already so we grudgingly let her play in our gang. That, and Peter’s Mum said we had to.
A Safe Place
London, potbound, winds its roots deeper into the clay soil of its basin and pushes upwards, questing for sunlight above its flyblown glass canopy. Fox Tower was one of three (Winslow and Pastor were its siblings), as rooted in the ground as it was possible to be with 22 floors sprouting from its grim, piss-soaked core. The stench of everything clung to it, a feast of human waste fertilising its foundations as, inside, people lived through a thousand lives every minute.
It was not the sort of place Michael would choose to live in. His life had been lived in nicer parts of London, save for his time at university in Staffordshire. He would not even visit somewhere like Fox Tower, given the option, but the option was not there. Pettigrew, his dog, had slipped the leash and made a run for the front entrance, flying past the barely there front door into the slate grey darkness inside.
Fox House reared into the flat sky above him, encircled by a sparse vortex of dry, joyless snowflakes. Every floor was wrapped in balconies, and every balcony was a riot of bric-a-brac; broken bicycles, hard plastic rocking horses, laundry airers, half-inflated plastic footballs. They were not used to admire the view, even if there was anything worth seeing. Michael wondered if Pettigrew was even now sniffing at the doors to those flats, and how far up she might have got. ‘Petty?’ he called, tentatively. ‘Petty! Here girl, back here!’ It was pointless – he was going to have to go in.
A Perfect Place
In the early hours of the morning, or the late hours of the night (depending on how you look at time), the towpath was quiet, still and very dark. No light from the surrounding houses, roads and ill-fated gastropubs filtered through the dense cover of willow. It was a perfect place for a quiet run, or for an accident, a murder.