Short Fiction
2010 : Print
Rebel Girl
Girl Crush (Cleis Press)
"Katia smokes like she's sucking a cock; slow and deliberate, a performance. She knows Evie is watching her out of the corner of her eye, and she arches her body slightly on the bonnet so Evie can see the curve of her back-hips-tits. Katia knows that Evie has a crush on her, because she's older and always has a boyfriend. Katia has a crush on Evie too, because she has high round tits and a rosebud mouth and makes amazing noises when she fucks. Evie likes Katia because she is jaded, and Katia likes Evie because she is not."
The Man From the Circus
Woman's Work (Girlchild Press)
"'Last week,' I said, 'on the radio, there was a competition. The DJ played a sound-bite of a car going over a cattle grid, and people had to phone in to guess which cattle grid it was. I didn't phone in, but I knew the answer.' I waited for the man to tell me that in the circus there were no radio competitions, no DJs, no cattle grids."
Feeding
Sushirexia: 32 Stories About Hunger
"She’s been in the garden since dawn. She doesn’t even bother dressing any more, just kneels in the dirt until it coats her skin. Her palms are so rough that the calluses form ridges like the cracks in the earth. She doesn’t wash, so our bed is full of the grit of ochre dirt, tiny dried-up leaves, flakes of skin from her sunburned back."
Peach Cigarettes in Tokyo
Pear Noir! #4
"The first time I ever smoked a peach cigarette, I was wearing a dinosaur suit and sitting on my friend’s balcony in a Tokyo suburb."
Anchor of the Suburbs
Weave #4
"Sandra lined up her anchoress supplies in a row outside the laundry room: a bucket, a selection of Danielle Steele novels, a blanket, and a refillable water bottle. ‘You won’t make it to the end of spring,’ I shouted through the crack of my bedroom door."
The Last 3,600 Seconds
The Moose & Pussy #6
"It’s coming, it’s soon, I know it, there’s no time left. The dog is chewing his feet and the planes are so close I can see the logos on their tails. Tiny fires have broken out all along the horizon, brighter than the approaching stars."
The Owlatorium and the Cat-King
New Writing Dundee #5
"I tried to think of something clever to say, but she was wearing these backless sandals and every time she took a step I could see the white flashes of her soles, five shades lighter than the rest of her skin, and all I could think of was the flash of a rabbit's tail as it runs away, and I was too busy chasing the rabbit to think straight."
Queer Zombie Disco
Lock Up Your Daughters #4
"Tukie’s got the high-hats unscrewed and she’s practicing her smash-action on the bigtitted babydyke sound tech, who’s giggling and feeding Tukie the falling shreds of earlobe and eyelid, so I figure it’s a good time for me and Mara to disappear. I twirl the guitar lead and lasso her in for a kiss. Jawbones scrape, dry tongues rasp; she presses her sternum against my nipple, and I’m gone."
Waitressing: A Lament in Four Parts
Lady Jane's Miscellany #2
"At five to nine they take the metal grilles off the window-frames. When they lift their arm muscles tense to the size of garlic cloves. The roots of their hair grow in the same colour as the coffee grounds."
This Is What You Must Do
100 Stories For Haiti (Bridge House)
"Before you look around the bar, you must prepare yourself. Outside – through that club, down those alleys, along those streets – people hide their deformities. They hack off their wings, file down their horns, saw off their tails. They think the scars are better."
The Rental Heart
PANK #4
"The day after I met Grace – her pierced little mouth, her shitkicker boots, her hands as small as goosebumps writing numbers on my palm. The day after I met her, I went to the heart rental place."
2010 : Online
Beauty
Annalemma
"By then, she’d already decided not to tell. Silence is easier, that’s all. She has no proof and wants no fuss. It’s not even a crime, not really. Nothing would happen except that she would never be herself again. She’d be That Girl. Did you hear? She was asking for it."
How To Be A Writer: Part 1 / Part 2
Metazen
Part 1
"When you are tall and frantic and stuffed belly-high with stories, you may pick up your pen. Make sure that you stare at the blank page for a while; at least as long as it takes to drink several cups of something. Write your first line. Delete it. Write a different first line. Delete that. Write the first thing you wrote and delete it and write it again. Now stop fussing and keep writing. Think of the words behind you as a serial killer trying to catch you, or a burning fuse leading to the dynamite on your heels, or the things you are trying to forget."
Part 2
"When you wake, your walls have become hedges of constellations and your ceiling a spyglass of thorns. Caterpillars have bivouacked along the arms of the couch. Someone is pounding at the door, and when you get up to answer it you will trip on your trouser legs. You have shrunk, you think, and then you remember the weight of the envelope you fed to the postbox. You reach up for the door handle and pull. Outside is an agent in a velvet hat with a huge cheque consisting only of zeroes. Congratulations! he shrieks, before picking a stray caterpillar off your shoulder and popping it into his mouth."
Renfield At The Stereo Bar
Flatmancrooked
"Renfield has a theory that every city in the world has a bar called Stereo. He doesn’t travel much, but he has Googled it. Montreal, Alicante, Frankfurt, and Saint-Petersburg all have bars called Stereo. Renfield still eats bugs."
Unfolding
elimae
"she doesn't lie wakeful about that so she doesn't make the runningout about that, she makes it about the things that hide behind her eyelids. her eye. her i."
On Losing My Voice For a Fortnight
Birdville
"The bark of a dog, the rustle of the trees, the squick of my wet trainers on the pavement: all these things are the soundtrack to the world, which human conversation does nothing but drown out. Words do not add anything useful."
Chelsea + Dagger
The Still Blue Project
"When Chelsea dances, she keeps her eyes shut tight. If she opens them she might be tired-eyed with wrinkles around her lips. She might be tangle-haired and bow-legged, barely balancing on her stilettos. If she opens her eyes, she’ll be in Glasgow, just another stripper in Glasgow, where the lighting is never right."
Bibliophagy
elimae
"he loves his children but they are not verbs. they are only pronouns and he is a fragment. he is surrounded by the dregs of words and no matter how many he swallows he cannot focus on the moon."
dear god
On Earth As It Is
"I told the neighbour that her baby was boring. I told my mother that heaven looked boring. it's just a thing that little girls do, right? I had just stopped reading the mustard-yellow book when I met Her."
Milk + Meat
>kill author
"The mother stumbles on the steps, once, almost; the daughter puts out a bruised and steadying hand, which the mother does not take. They walk down the spine-straight pathway.
– How long?
– They won't say."
Imaginary Birds
BluePrintReview
"You will wipe soot from leaves, soak oil from birds. You will weave shelters from torn branches with ends still weeping sap. You will build things up for others to break down."
Pobrecita
Metazen
"Kate is uncovered, white flesh on black sheets, and Connor pulls off his t-shirt one-handed, an afterthought."
Home
Slash/Stroke
"In the midst of the damp, the dust, the death: her hand, familiar skin. She squeezes with every inhalation, every lungful of strangers’ skin cells. And you know what she’s thinking, because you’re thinking it too – this is it, kid."
Tiny Meat
Alice Magazine
"How silly to want a screaming, scrunch-faced bundle of skin. Kittens were softer than a breath, and the most noise they made was a petulant mew. She didn’t understand why anyone would want a baby."
it's hard to say meaningful things
elimae
"the sky was so low then you could bump your beehive but you were both into that, formica diners & drive-thru, chilli burgers & soda fountains but your shitty northern english town was just pylons & skipping records."
Pullen & Bumber's Catalogue of Particulars
Reflection's Edge
"Item #155-6755 Selection of ladies’ white cotton undergarments
Garments are rent and torn, as if pulled away in a frenzy. Damage appears to be the work of some sharp object, such as fingernails or teeth. Items appear to have been discarded; no attempt has been made to mend them."
Storytelling
Seven Letter Words
"She’s off again, the pins in her hair catching the firelight like tiny stars. How is her hair still black? I am barely thirty and already my blonde is fading, uneven white streaks like I've been left too long on a windowsill. But hers is still black, her skin powdered white, her lips painted shiny as apples. She is pale, fragile: a china doll. My mother."
Untitled
Mud Luscious #10
"maybe it should have been a ghost story about a children's book."
2009 : Print
Origami
Let's Pretend: 37 Stories About (In)fidelity (Freight Press)
"During her lunch break, she paused mid-sandwich to fold intestines from her newspaper. Walking out of the office, her nervous fingers made an ear out of the tissue in her pocket – luckily the thin sheets wouldn't hold the shape, and unfurled as she threw it on the pavement. On the journey home, her bus ticket became a tongue."
The Last 3,600 Seconds
The Forest Book of Bedtime Stories
"She’s always taken up too much space: big tits, big mouth, always so loud and hot and restless. Wherever I wanted to be, she’d already be there. Brushing our teeth at night, she’d always have her head over the sink when I wanted to spit."
Dresstrees
.Cent A/W 2009
"On Saturday the vans arrive at the farm, spilling over with fabric. The drivers stack the boxes by our door, their talk and laughter making their cigarettes wiggle furiously. Their bellies hang over their belts, pushing out their t-shirts like balloons about to pop."
No(w)here
Letters From the City #2
"I stopped calling my friends. I stopped going to my job at the bank call centre, which is where all Philosophy graduates go. I packed my records, bedsheets and teacups into the boot of my Mini and started to drive."
Dresses
lip #18
"We pour out of the house and tear open the boxes. Piles of dresses, all the same beige-white like the underneath of a tabby cat. We sort them into piles: dresses to be reddened, pinked, purpled, yellowed, and blued."
2009 : Online
All-Night Cartoon Party
Wigleaf
"I had a drink in each hand, so I didn't care. I didn't care that I couldn't take the nice things in the kitchen. I didn't care that no-one here watched cartoons. I didn't care that I had vodka on my dress."
The Man From the Circus
Moondance
"The town was pitch-black: no stars, no house lights. Everyone was inside the circus tents. The only lights were from the Subaru, directing us through the hills. I hoped none of the sheep had wandered into the road. I didn’t want to die with only a sheep and a very tall man from the circus for company."
Imaginary Birds
Scapegoat Review
"On the red-checked tablecloth in a clapboard house somewhere in the middle of your country: a china white saucer of butter and rye crackers, muddy lettuce, still-warm bread, a cluster of beers and some water that you’re sure is drinkable despite the reddish grit."
2008
Extract from Little Dead Boys
Queer Zine Lit
"They’d had night after night together: nights spent fucking in a haze of steamed-up windows, night curled up without needing to talk, nights on opposite sides of the bed. Slippery night, hot nights, quiet nights. But what else were they there for, except to be in love? So they had loved. And now it was time for something else."
dear creatures
Scapegoat Review
"i fell in love with her when she told me she collected fruit stickers in a little notebook because her uncle and grandpa did."
The Last 3,600 Seconds
Circlet
"I can hear the world beginning to shift. Sirens frenzy, streets protest, every animal in the city is whining or screeching or crying. We settle on the roof, backs to the chimney, and secure the bottles between our knees."
Queer Zombie Disco
Verbicide
"Tukie stops nibbling on the sound tech and starts wiping the gore off her high-hats. Mara winks at me — she has both her eyelids at the moment so it looks hot as fuck — and goes off to find her mic stand. I sling on my guitar and load up my pockets with plectrums."
Nature Girl
Writers' Bloc #5
"Her kisses were as hard as just-bloomed roses, as weak as the trunk of an oak, as mysterious as a cherry stone."
Anchored
The Foliate Oak
"It was cold the day of her enclosure. The grave had been dug for her, spread open in the corner of the anchorage. The fresh earth smelled sweet and musky, flesh-like. She might have thought it smelled like sex, but instead she thought of the orchard behind her mother’s house, the smell after it had rained. Her mother was a hundred miles away now, in another tiny town, scraping her knuckles on someone else’s washing, watching for someone else’s children."
Bessie Anne's Post-Apocalyptic Tea-Shop
Membra Disjecta Vol 2 Issue 1
"Every regular customer, once they’d escaped from their homes, came straight to the teashop. Some were missing extremities - even a limb or two - but they were sure they’d feel better after a wee bit of cake."
The Gold In Her
Neon #21
"You will look for gold in her; scrounge through her insides for the glint of coins, so sure that there is treasure. You will find kidneys and anger and bent cogs and red blood cells and mixtapes and tarnished keys and bone marrow and everything except that glint of gold."
Sweeten
Neon #21
"And behind them someone's baby was screaming, and the radio in the kitchen was stuck between stations, and the waitress was coughing as steady as a metronome, and was there really any point in them adding to the noise?"
Narcissa
Circlet
"I peek over the lip of the pool, smiling eye-to-eye with the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. The sky is caught in her eyes, and her skin looks as fresh and firm as unripe fruit."
Afterwards
Circlet
"Into the bathroom, your knees still unsure, and I wash the molecules of myself from you. It takes twelve years for the hot water to run out and your skin has not even begun to prune."
The Imploding Empress
Six Sentences
"A million pounds will buy a lot of things, and the empress had most of those things. Trust me said the salesmen, and she did."
Minimum Wage
Swamp
"They could only be told apart by the details: one had hair the colour of lemonade, another cheeks pocked like the surface of a golf-ball. They were all twenty-something, minimum-waged, uninterested."
Coffee Break
The Pygmy Giant
"This is why he thinks he can smell her perfume – sweet and tart like fresh apples and grass – even though she isn’t wearing any perfume. This is why she can see nothing except their hands on the magazine, their thumbs not quite touching."
Extract From an Unfinished Novel
From Glasgow to Saturn
" What I need is an eerie, sprawling forest, through which I must battle beasts external and internal, to reach the chicken-legged hut at the centre. Or a marble temple at the top of the tallest mountain, surrounded by dragons, full of silent monks with shadowed eyes. Or a labyrinth with a minotaur often heard but never seen, whom I must defeat with a sacred sword before discovering the truth hidden in its guts. I read every leaflet in the Tourist Office, but Glasgow doesn’t seem to have any of these things."
How I Learned to Love a Real Man
BURST
"I was five when I first fell in love. He was handsome, he was brave. He had a horse, which I think was the main reason he caught my eye. His marriage to Cinderella, though, was something of a problem."
