Short Fiction
Local God
Shut Up/Look Pretty
“Gig timing is a fine line: a bit late and you emerge to the applause of a waiting crowd; a lot late and everyone is impatient, no one enjoys the gig, and the club owner is pissed at you. We’re still on the right side of the late-rock-star line, but only just. We are Black Brick: the band your mother warned you about. Except that your mother has never heard of us, and neither have you. For a band like us in a place like this, people are not willing to wait long.”
Love in Centralia
Artifice #4
“She
Centralia is a borough and ghost town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, United States. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to 12 in 2005,[1] 9 in 2007, and 7 in 2010[2] as a result of a mine fire burning beneath the borough since 1962. Centralia is now the least-populous municipality in Pennsylvania, with four fewer residents than the borough of S.N.P.J..
Centralia is part of the Bloomsburg–Berwick Micropolitan Statistical Area. The borough is completely surrounded by Conyngham Township. However, a few residents continue to reside there in spite of a failed lawsuit to reverse the eminent domain claim.”
The Last 3,600 Seconds
The Glad Rag #1
“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.”
Coin-Operated Boys
Fantasy Book Review
“The day after the coin-operated boy arrived, Claude came calling once more. Elodie dismissed the maid and swung the door wide herself. In his surprise Claude forgot to remove his hat, and sat on the couch in all his outdoor clothes. It was so rude that Elodie had to avert her eyes while pouring the tea, but she still remembered to provide a silver pot of sugar.”
Renfield at the Stereo Bar
Unswept
“Renfield lives down a narrow alley above the bar where he works. The bar is called Stereo. 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.”
And Watch the Stars Go Out
Necessary Fiction
“Pale fingers dragged along the seamless walls towards the familiar rhythm: water-in-kettle, sitting-on-table, tiny-blissful-smiling.”
Sea of Trees
Suspense Magazine
“Mei’s accent is pure American Midwest; like me, she’s third-generation Japanese. My features mean I blend into the crowd, but I’m London-born and only speak English even after six months in Tokyo. Over hazelnut mochas Mei taught me konnichiwa, domo arigato, and sumimasen (hello, thank you, and sorry) and I use that last one most, as I haven’t mastered the art of not bumping into people on the chopstick-thin streets.”
Sex Lives of the Saints
Tawdry Bawdry
“Just so she doesn’t think I’m hopeless, I run my fingertip along her neck: a raised white scar, soft as fog, the width of a match.
‘My father,’ she says. ‘He was hit by lightning.’”
Punk Rock Love
What the Dickens?
“Ste loves Mavis as thoroughly as any man could love a giant tortoise. He always wears shorts so Mavis can nuzzle his leg hair. He adjusts his headphones to the smallest setting so Mavis can listen to his remixes.”
The Rental Heart
Best British Short Stories 2011
“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.”
Fuck You Too, Pixie Meat
Gutter #5
“Back out by the stage the loserfreak pixie meat has arrived. He’s leaning one elbow on the bar, eyelids at half-mast, plastic cup of something in one hand. If Tabitha and Jennifer didn’t already have pupils the size of pennies, they would have widened at the sight of his t-shirt-draped bones. They hold my arms tight enough to bruise. I glance over to Tabitha and I swear to christ I can see her left tit vibrating with the pressure of her heartbeat.”
100 Years of Wifehood
ImagiNation: Stories of Scotland’s Future
“She can be happy. She just needs to try harder. Alastair is trying, isn’t he? He’s even agreed to take the baby for one night a week so that Margot can visit Dorothy. Just the thought of seeing Dorothy makes her feel lighter, fuller, like a pudding rising up over the edge of the baking tray.”
Rebel Girl
Best Lesbian Erotica 2012
“All four of them are sprawled on the bonnets of the cars – boys on one, girls on the other. They listen to the lullaby of the motorway and stare up at the dirty orange sky. The night air smells hot and dense. Beneath a low moon, the town cowers: smokestacks, car-parks, roundabouts. Everything has washed out to grey. Katia and Evie share a cigarette, ringing the filter with sticky lip-gloss in varying shades of pink.”
Pierced
Bedtime Stories 2
“Lift up your skirt, she says. She isn’t looking at me; her eyes are on the pile of metal on the corner of the table, and I notice she’s pulled on a pair of latex gloves. I’ve always had a thing for pissed-off girls and medical paraphernalia, but I try to play it cool.”
Floating House in the Fleeting World
Stories For Sendai
“We spent the following months sprawled on the couch in my tiny Shinjuku flat, eating triangles of sticky rice and drinking sake from cardboard juice boxes.”
Francis Observes How Babies Are Made
New Writing Scotland #29
“Francis has finished his observations. Some huffing, he has written. And two buffalo walk in circles, and tails flick a lot. Francis puts his notebook on the ground, then leans back in his wooden chair and laces his fingers behind his head. The sun is a blinding kiss on his closed eyelids. He breathes dust and heat. There is not usually a chair here, by the edge of the plain. Francis dragged this chair from his mother’s kitchen because he did not want to get red dust on his trousers.”
Sea of Trees
Mystery Times Ten
“I remember the plots of every scary book I’ve ever read: stories about girls stumbling into dark basements, girls coming face-to-face with bad people who have done bad things, girls being saved by dashing men on horses. But those were just stories in books, and I’m in a forest full of dead people with a total stranger.”
Pancakes Are For Television Boys
Parcel #1
“This is what mothers on television are like: pancakes and flattened aprons and legs pulled tight in their high heels. On television there is a red tablecloth and the dog beats its tail against the carpet without raising its jaw.”
Pierced
Gotta Have It
“She’s looking at me through her eyelashes while pretending to examine the little stack of metal. I look up at the ceiling and wonder how many times she’s done this. I don’t know why I trust her like this; why I’m letting her see me laid so bare.”
We Are He
Gertrude #15
“We lay our coats over puddles for one another. We cook and clean, we fix the car. We open our own doors. We do these things not because boys do them, or because girls do. We do them because they are things that people do.”
Underlying
Algebra
“The machine can pull out the tattoo ink, says Lauren.
And Your piercings might heat up a little.
And Metalworkers have tiny flecks of metal in their eyes; the machine can pull them out too and then their eyes bleed.”
The Mathematics of Waiting
Booth
“Every story I’ve ever written began on a check pad. I write each story over three evening shifts, lurking behind the coffee machine, serving up G&Ts and meringues with strawberries. Sometimes my imagination will not rise above my burned fingertips and I write about pissed-off girls with shitty jobs, girls who paste on smiles, girls who never get to make their own mess because they’re too busy cleaning up after other people.”
Pancakes are for Television Boys
The Reprint
“Inside the house his mother hums as she stirs the pancake batter. The dog is growling low and thick. Behind the clouds the sun is bright as butter and he points the camera up at it, squinting his brow around the eyepiece. The camera is too old to take pictures and there is no film anyway but he likes to press the shutter button. He likes to put people inside the camera and keep them for later.”
Roxxi is an Island Girl
The Northville Review
“She has the flu. Still. It’s been six months and she’s papoosed in her duvet, mounds of tissue boxes and magazines and half-finished bags of jellybeans around her like memorial cairns. She props her laptop on her knees and chain-watches YouTube videos, forcing hollowed coughs to remind me that she’s still sick. Then she’ll forget and the volume on the laptop slinks up and through her bedroom door I hear cotton rustle as she dances in bed.”
This Is What You Must Do
From Glasgow to Saturn
“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.”
Hunting
Pseudopod
“It was the spit of rain, and slick leaves underfoot, and the flat grey sky. It was the birds lurking above the spines of blackened trees. It was the knowledge of deer. These were the things breaking his flat-footed stride through the woods. These were the things making his rifle judder against his back and knock against the knobbed bones of his spine. There was nothing else there, so it must be.”
Underskirts
PANK
“Oh, how I have loved. My days are flaxen and holy with love. My nights are viscous, lucid, spilling over. My finger-pads hum. The roots of my hair feel gold-dipped; the meat of my eyes is speckled with gold; gold dust blows across my cheeks.”
The Romance of History
For Every Year
“If you were lost out on the moors, she says, like because of a snowstorm or a hurricane or a zombie apocalypse or something – and say in this alternate world I was a horse, too – then I’d totally let you disembowel me and then climb inside my body to keep warm. I totally would.”
In Our House by the Sea
Found Press
“We don’t need to speak; our bodies create language. You pour me a glass of wine, I open the window, we scatter kisses on any passing limbs. The sun had finally struggled out from the blanket of clouds, bright as the centre of a burning log, only to set an hour later. Now the sky is stuck halfway between navy blue and the blink of stars. Together we have made this world, just me and you between the sky and sea.”
Incubating
Beat the Dust
“That summer, everyone slept like the dead. The night traffic across the bridge was like the snoring of some giant animal. The dead-hour DJs looped albums so they could doze. The street-lights dimmed and flickered; even they couldn’t stay awake.”
Love Riot: A Manual
FRiGG
“How to Be the Mother-in-Law: Collect dust under your fingernails, then press it out along the top of the television. Realize suddenly that you are allergic to prawns, chilli powder, peanuts, apples, salt. Catch your heels on the carpet tacks. Afterwards, do not look in the mirror. Trust that you are still the fairest.”
Pullen & Bumber’s Catalogue of Particulars
Red Penny Papers
“…trying to see you for weeks. I have left my card for you a half-dozen times, and your mother simply says that you are tired! Cecily darling, I simply cannot believe that even a slugabed such as yourself can spend every hour of the day asleep. What have you been doing with your nights?”
Sealskin
Best Women’s Erotica 2011
“The sea is spread out before me, heavy as black velvet under the darkened sky. The summer air is cool enough to make me pull the jacket tight around me, and it brings up goosebumps on my legs where the night air slips between the coat and boots. It makes my heart beat harder, as if the breeze is the fingers of a dozen strangers against my skin.”
Witch
Best Lesbian Erotica 2011
“I barely glanced at the greying bricks before continuing. I was eager to get back to Emmy for our night of scaring squealing kissing fucking. And that would have been that, except as I was walking past the door of the hut, it opened. Outlined in the doorway was a woman with a head of heart-red curls and arms full of chopped wood.”
Love Riot: A Manual
NANO Fiction Vol. 4 #1
“How to Be a Bridesmaid: Paint stripes on your cheeks. Mutter your retreat. Wear blue because it will remind her of the bluebells thick as dust on the ground and the blue of veins under your stretching tongue; of the softness of two pairs of creeping tiptoes through the woods; of girlhood and its elasticity; of the tightening hood of marriage.”
Choosing a Toy
specs
“She collects loose gatherings of people together on the beach or in the woods; a pile of sticks to make a fire and some salvaged booze. She thinks that love is sex and sex is love and love is most definitely a good thing. She still doesn’t like it when her love-partner (not boyfriend, never husband) slips away from the fire’s heat to stroke the soft bare skin of another girl’s calves.”
The Rental Heart
By Invitation Only (Unbound Press)
“The problems came when the hearts got old and scratched: shreds of past loves got caught in the dents, and they’re tricky to rinse out. Even a wire brush won’t do it.
But the man in the rental place had assured me that this one was factory-fresh, clean as a kitten’s tongue. Those heart rental guys always lied, but I could tell by the heart’s coppery sheen that hadn’t been broken yet.”
How I Learned to Love a Real Man
Eve’s Harvest (Odyssey Books)
“A few years later I tired of childish pursuits – I needed a real man. And that man was the Count of Monte Cristo.”
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.”
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.”
The Rental Heart
Expanded Horizons
“Ten years ago, first heart. Jacob was as solid and golden as a tilled field, and our love was going to last forever, which at our age meant six months.”
Renfield at the Stereo Bar
4’33
“Renfield knows that the dead must be burned. He knows that limbs never stop twitching. He knows that the burning hearts will sing out his name.”
Seal-Blood Soup
Emprise Review
“Seal-blood soup has the consistency of half-melted ice-cream on the ceiling of your mouth, and a metallic harsh that makes the corner of your eye twitch; think of it as a fresh orange without the stringy pith, without the rot-syrup scent, without the ache of scurvy feathering towards your gums.”
Artifact 21
Necessary Fiction
“Every morning he woke at dawn and did push-ups while composing sonatas in his head. He breakfasted on fresh fruit and homemade porridge. He walked to work, the summer air warming the dawn goose bumps from his arms. When my father was young, it was always summer.”
Primogeniture
Spilling Ink Review
“My skin cannot stretch any more, so he grows upwards into my body. I feel his elbows against my spleen, his toes tangled among my intestines, his eyelashes on the inside of my collarbones. My heart still thumps and my lungs still inflate, but space is getting tight.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”