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
Tag Archives: Short story
Calliope
“They said I was mad,” he said. “They said it would never work.” I wondered who ‘they’ were.
Working mostly in the genre of metafiction
“I work mostly in the genre of metafiction,” I said, not looking up from my monitor. “I’m not really interested in your story.”
Three Crows
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.
Mark is a ghost
Pluto double feature.
On eggshells
Pre Cards
“Keep writing,” the tone wavered between hope and command. “No. No that. It wasn’t that.” She flipped past another postcard, reached for a cigarette and took a shaking drag.
Taking A View
“It’s rubbish, though, isn’t it?”
“What’s rubbish?” She sat up. Her sunglasses were pointless in the dimming light so she pushed them up to nestle in her salt-tangled hair.
Limbless Trees
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.