Flash Fiction

  • Marginalia

    Mouse-like, she lived on the fringes of polite society. She was one of the the overlooked, ignored, unremembered and to others, unremarkable.  The last to arrive, the first to leave. “A bus to catch,” she’d murmur, gathering her beige handbag and creamy leather gloves, buttoning her tweed coat. No one offered her a lift or…

  • Blooming Hell

    Envy consumed him. He lay motionless in bed, longing for sleep that refused to arrive. He had turned the spare bedroom into mission control, creating exquisite storyboards of garden designs, works of art in themselves. At work, he had received his final warning for being ‘on planet chuffing Titchmarsh’ and if he used the ‘chuffing…

  • Three for Two

    Always a family affair, today there were three generations behind the stall, including a woman in her late 20s. A toddler in a torn skirt tugged at her dad, telling him in her inaccurate and swoon-worthy vernacular about her grazed knee. Her relish for the bloody mess was more life-affirming than most things round here….

  • Near the Edge

    I bought a window box, painted it sage green like the style mags said.  Planted multi-coloured pansies and red geraniums.  You didn’t notice.  I added a windmill.  It whirled and twirled in the breeze.  Irritated the hell out of the neighbours.  I swapped it for a gnome.  Not ‘on trend’.  You still didn’t take any…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…