Stuff that I have actually written – stories, reviews, that sort of thing.
The end of the world is always the same; the day dawns downy with ghosts, red sun casting shadows of things that can no longer be seen. Every moment is pressed with meaning, significance, this is the last time this will happen, take in this detail. You won’t see it again.
You only notice in retrospect.
John shivered in the damp. It was July, but had been raining so long that the heat of any Summer sun was long forgotten. Every tree in the grey mist of the morning looked like the looming head of some giant figure, hauling itself across the landscape on its belly. The birdsong cut sideways through the glum, a cheery reminder of a season that should be happening. Was maybe happening elsewhere.
Continue reading Flight
The air was heavy; baked and left to cool, it smelled like the screen of an old television set. Her feet flexed inside her close-fitting shoes, grinding tight circles in the dust. She breathed in steadily, fighting the urge to cough, seeing in her mind the oxygen reddening her blood. The blood reddening her skin. She ran her hand over her bare arms, a nervous gesture, and shuddered in the heat.
“They said I was mad,” he said. “They said it would never work.” I wondered who ‘they’ were.
“I work mostly in the genre of metafiction,” I said, not looking up from my monitor. “I’m not really interested in your story.”
There were three crows, sat on different branches in the same tree. I lay on the soft grass beneath, staring up as the crows stared down.
Pig of a day, thought Marty Sinclair as he made his way down the back stairs of the precinct and out into the blazing heat of the lot. He turned it over in his memory. The woman, crying cold tears. The lost man, eyes scoured blind. Brushing off the warning tape at the scene like a wasp through a cobweb. Blood, heat, flies, a haze of stink. Kneeling in the dust, saturated in sweat and red at the knees.
How had it even begun? Out here, by his car. He was almost out, on his way home, when he heard the sobs. Delicate, tidy, unfelt; a crocodile weeping for the gazelle. The kind of tears that meant there was something someone didn’t feel too bad about, but they wanted you to know that they should.
Twelve hours later, here he was. Suit dusty, and gnarled around his limbs like old bark. Face a mess of stubble and bruises. Nowhere closer to where he thought he might be when he followed her out to the field behind the old cable factory. She wanted him somewhere else, his fate growing towards it as surely as if she’d planted his destiny in that cracked dirt, watered by the blood of the body he’d found there.
Fine. He didn’t have anywhere else to be, may as well see where this would take him. He half-fell into his car and slept, right in the heat of the morning.
They were just diving. Jumping from the edge of the boat, they giggled and gurgled, collapsed, foaming, into the cooling sea. One of them essayed a clumsy somersault, another simply fell as if pushed. His arms pinwheeled for balance then he dropped like a cartoon character with whom gravity had caught up.
