Summer Flash Fiction Collection 2020

  • Heavyweight Dreams

    “The PureConnect 4 from Brooks is designed as a lightweight running shoe.” “Lightweight’s good,” I say. “It’s just… Do you have the model in any other colour than black?” She smiles and shakes her head. “We can give you neon laces though, if you want to brighten them up.” I wince. “I’ll try them anyway,”…

  • Checkout Girl

    I retreat down the nearest aisle, heartbeat thick with adrenaline. Pink and blue baby grows blur into one. I stalk you, the girl who should be managing the tills. You have your father’s nose, but the rest belongs to me. Customers gape at the waif with the patchy complexion, methadone-finished eyes. You are oblivious, examining…

  • The Ties that Bind

    I slip in at the side door, the exit we used to leave by after Brownies when she was ten and I was seven, and I slink upstairs to the balcony. The peepholes are still here, small cracks in the wood through which we once spied on Brown Owl and her boyfriend as they canoodled…

  • A Womb of One’s Own

    I kept away from WP 468 where the Uterine Disease books were kept with their bloody illustrations. No shelving was done by me that day. Instead I thought of Virginia Woolf and my novel, that lay like an abandoned child, an orphan, in the bottom drawer where I used to keep my secret stash of…

  • Soiled

    The devil’s children live behind big black gates and high stone walls girdled with barbed wire. Seven days a week they work, no clocks, silence enforced. Isolated from the world, windows barred with steel, kept separate from each other to prevent contagion. Behind the heavy, brown door – always locked – it’s airless and hotter…

  • Fragile

    When the removal men came, she told them to take her heart. She handed it to the burly one, not because he was in charge, or because he reminded her of Jack – he didn’t. But because it was heavy and he seemed as if he might be able to bear the weight with those…

  • To See A Star

    The commuter ferry that sailed to and from Amsterdam Central Station reversed into the northern harbour. Elsa pedalled so hard that a rivulet of sweat ran down the valley of her back. A day without seeing him would be a day not worth living. Elsa’s bike skidded to a halt and a German soldier patrolling…