Second in Line

It was Saturday Dance Club at The Ballroom, two bob to dance all morning to records played back to back by a novice DJ. Serena and I, we danced every dance unless a pair of boys split us up, but we liked dancing together better. We’d worked out moves in her bedroom on homework nights….

Under the Pier

Jake knew it must have been one helluva of a binge; he remembered starting out with a group of his work mates, all cheery and joshing, before the verbal sparring turned nasty, then the evening became blurrier. He’d ended up on his own, after ‘last orders’ in a chair-throwing brawl, before being turfed out onto…

The Ladder

Nothing much happens in our village, except now it has and I’ve made a fool of myself. I’ve broken my ankle and I can’t settle down to the way things were. We’re not a proper village exactly, no farmers, no village hall or school. Most of the people who live here are retired, the ones…

Relative Connections

“Ready for inspection?” I’d salute and stand to attention in my camouflage Tee and black trackies. It was just you and me, no Ma to fuss and dress me like a lady. My pyjamas always spread out in dead man’s pose; empty arms crossed at the chest. Breakfast was always 7:30a.m. “Routine. That’s what will…

Heraklion

On Crete, butcher stalls bled into gutters; rabbit carcasses grinned from hollow faces. I wondered how they skin such delicate ears and just who buys those rabbits; I never saw anyone carry one home. There was lamb too, and occasional chicken, but rabbits filled most of the stalls, multiplying cadavers like babies. I couldn’t see…

Saint Valentine’s Day

“It’s the 12th of February,” I say to my mother. “I’m not stupid,” she tells me, “I know what you’re doing.” I have driven all the way from Montreal with gifts of diabetic chocolate warming in the backseat. It is a full three hours to my mother’s house in the country, past miles of dead…

The Smallest Boxes

They took the thing we did and put it into a series of smallish boxes, which they then handed around to everyone in the hemisphere, along with a cheap cotton tote bag filled with attractive brochures. The thing we did was gentle and ill-defined, violent and urgent, vast in scope. In the little boxes its…