The policeman, I forget his name already – Masters? Marsden? – reclines in his seat and regards me with a gaze that is probably intended to be intimidating but can only be described as ‘cute.’ It’s true what they say about the police looking younger as you age.
“Tell me about your conversation with Gina Montrose on Monday,” he says. “You were overheard talking about Marco Conti.”
Continue readingAs Howard opened the washing machine and pulled out his clothes, his heart sank; everything was blue. His favourite white shirt was now tie-dyed, his jumper had shrunk small enough to fit Albie, his grandson.
Margy had only been gone three days and he was failing miserably. He really had tried to follow her list. Some of the things seemed a bit extreme like polishing all the surfaces every day. Why when there was only him there?
Margy, at sixty eight, had got herself a last minute free holiday with Faye, whose husband had a chest infection. It was Margy’s first holiday without him.
Continue readingNY December 2026.
There is an awkward moment on my arrival when an ICE agent insists on me unpacking my case. He tells me there is similar name to mine on their no-fly list.
I realise I can’t remember my PIN, so I put my hand in my suit pocket to get my phone, and he reaches for his sidearm.
“Phone,” I say, a weak grin on my face, withdrawing it slowly with two fingers. I can smell the heat of my sweat rising and try to suppress a tremble in my hand, but only succeed in dropping the phone.
Continue readingOn the 29th of May, I was sent off to Joseph Dahl’s townhouse. He was often seen strolling around Caden Street or by the lake in Muriel Park, wishing everyone a good hullo, usually while dressed in a grey suit tailored from JR Parking’s and wearing a straw hat. A habit which made him the menace of a few penny counters and good Samaritans, but the local policemen regarded him as more an itch than any serious threat.
“Some people,” he said as he gripped my hand in his leathery paw, “can’t understand the spiritual life, they’ll chant their vows come Sunday but rarely put those promises into practice.”
“How about it?” asked his not wife, not girlfriend, Susannah, who at that moment lazed upon the sofa. “Do you swear by Christ or by Odin?”
The scanner in the pilot’s cabin read 852,0 °C outside. Next to a star with a heat burst in progress… that’s expected.
“Opening airlock in thirty seconds”, Heather tweaked some switches.
In the airlock, Tony stood ready in his spacesuit, holding a space surfing board.
“Y’know, that’d be our fiftieth planet”, he said.
Continue readingThe walk to his home filled me with anxiety.
The cold air bit at my red-hot cheeks and my boots clipped along the uneven pavement. Perhaps these were signs. Omens of what was to come. If they were, I did not heed them.
I continued to tramp briskly toward my destination and in the distance, I saw him standing outside his door awaiting my arrival.
This wasn’t the way I wanted to do this. I had wanted to drop the letter in and run away, leaving him to reel in its indulgent vulnerability alone. However, pushed by the needs of others I’d been made to forewarn him, or at least alert him to my impending presence, and now I must face him in a less romantic fashion.
Continue reading‘Who is it?’ asked the youth astride a delivery cycle.
‘An ordinary Joe, mate,’ the fellow with a face as seamed as a nineteen fifties leather football replied.
‘Pretty popular.’
‘Well, he was a giver.’
Continue readingBud pulled Jack to one side outside the cell. ”They want us to turn up the heat on the boy.”
” You telling me they actually believe that kid has an inside track on ‘THE CHOSEN ONE’? He’s paranoid, mad as a box of hares, everyone knows.”
” Ssh, walls have ears. I know people have disappeared for saying less aloud.”
Jack snorted, ”OK, let’s get on with it, suppose we are the moral police.”
Continue readingIt’s been four o’clock forever here. An almost endless afternoon spinning off into the distance, only concluding when the skies darken, and rain falls like frozen droplets of spite on the bald patch at the crown of my head. If they named this spot “Ennui”, I would not be more surprised than I already am. So complete is its banality, it vies with “a rural bus stop” for the listless black hole Victor ludorum.
André Gide once said, “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore.” Gide has clearly never set sail for Gowerton.
Continue readingShe’s a good egg, our Fi. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be suitable for the job. That’s why we allow her keep us. We are the keepers of the keepers.
We see everything. When we buzz around waggling to one another, we’re not only chasing nectar. We’re assessing the mental state of the people and communicating potential danger. Forget being a ‘fly on the wall.’ Flies don’t care. It’s the bees who watch, listen and help.
Take Ian Jones next door. He had a near-miss with death only last month. He was smoking a cigarette beside the azaleas in his front garden whilst I busied myself with the foxgloves. What’s dangerous about that, you ask, aside from the obvious? It’s true that the smoking will get him eventually, but that’s not the sort of thing we get involved in. On this occasion I could tell from his stance, the faraway look in his eyes, and the slightly acidic smell of his perspiration, that he was planning on this being his last cigarette before taking his own life. Well, those things and my complex assessment of his mood over recent weeks.
Continue readingWilf hovered over the birdcage, eyeing it with affection. He had to admit Polly did look a little large and she did seem to enjoy a bit of raw meat.
He’d got the chick from a stranger in the pub who said it was a baby parrot. Scruffy thing it was and looked starving. Something in the way it looked at him pulled his heart strings .
”How much for him, bearing in mind it looks half dead ?”
Continue readingMeasuring time was next to impossible. No clocks, no sunlight, no signs from the outside world.
Smith had called out in his windowless cell, heard his voice echoed down the dingy corridor and yet there were no noises in response. No rumble of traffic, no coughing or shuffling of feet, no bellowing “to keep it down,” not even a crackle from the pipes or the creek of a floorboard. The silence outside was deafening and the only sounds Smith could hear were made by his own body.
Continue readingThe president’s plane took off from Paris. He was going home. Before reaching the Atlantic, there was a huge explosion of lightning in the sky like Armageddon. It struck the plane, a wing caught fire, smoke was billowing everywhere.
‘Parachute! Parachute!’ the captain shouted. ‘Prepare the president for emergency exit.’
Two of the crew bundled him out of the toilet where he’d been tweeting.
‘Hey, what about my pants?’
‘Strap this on!’ one guy shouted.
‘Open exit door!’ said the second.
‘Release!’
The president, falling to earth, trouserless, looked up at the plane wreathed in fire. Next thing he knew his parachute was snagged on top of a metal tower, the heavens still electrically charged with tongues of lightning.
Continue readingA rather puny skeleton squeezed himself out of the cupboard and moved silently around a bedroom. It was a boring job, representing some rather meagre misdeeds needing to be tucked away, but at least he wasn’t locked up and could rove around a bit. He knew of some more burly colleagues whose cupboards were permanently locked, chained and protected by serious legal teams standing in protective readiness. What horrors they were representing was kept firmly under wraps.
The real downside of being a low status skeleton (and who knew, maybe it was the same, or even worse, for the stars of the skeleton-in-cupboard world) was that there was very little to do. He had to make his own entertainment.
Continue readingHe swept into the room as if he owned it; every head turning as he strode across the parquet flooring, his heels clicking. Even Queen Elowen Lumina looked up from the sheaf of demands she was studying.
“This is,” she started to say, ‘this is a meeting of the Royal Council to which only members and invited guests can attend.’
But then he pulled back his hood, and recognition spread across her face. “Oh, Inspector Ironbell, I hadn’t expected to see you.”
“Ma’am,” Inspector Camden Ironbell kneeled at her side and took her hand. “I believe you have a problem.”
Continue reading“NO. Not back there! Can’t do it. Don’t give me that 30/180 degrees clash shit. It’s my weekend with the kids. Surely Pika can do it?” Jon, voice rising, was fearful he had overdone it. Following the marriage breakdown he needed the money. But how he had hated that farmyard location,- the greyness, the endless rain, the sucking of his every welly step in the mud.
“Not there yet. Still learning.” Cinematographer Alastair and editor Mel joined forces anticipating his objection. They did not share his unease. AI was their bread and butter and Pika one of the most respected programmes.
Continue readingShe told him it was over.
Sure, she loved him, but she just wasn’t in love with him if that began to make sense.
He looked down at his lap and blinked a little to hide the welling tears. Then rising without a word, he marched upstairs.
She knew he didn’t want her to follow, and she lingered there in his living room, knowing this was a heartless way to end the relationship but God, was there ever a right way? She plucked his housekey from her keychain and wondered if he’d return the key to her flat.
Continue readingNo-one can explain the expansive nothingness of flying through space; it makes you wonder if movement is an illusion hurtling through the flat darkness – everything looking the same as though you were stood still.
Our hero, our returner, Frank 4000, had been enduring this journey for six months. His automated system forged towards his pinpointed base on Earth; that beautiful, colourful, noisy, all-consuming, wondrous place that we take for granted. His slick, silver shell yearned to feel the heat of a human hand once again and his giant eye wished to devour something other than the same stagnant view he’d experienced for so long.
Continue reading“Save it for best,” Mum always said, squirrelling away the fancy china and silk pyjamas.
The saddest thing about sorting through Mum’s possessions is that there are no memories attached to most of them. The house is full of relics that, like Mum, have gathered dust for decades, waiting for a day that never came.
What would have been a special enough occasion to don her finery and leave the house? A meeting with the Queen? Certainly not lunch with me. My wedding. A day out with my children. That is why I stayed away, even as her health declined. It made sense that Adrian, my brother, should look after her, given his closer proximity and the fact that he doesn’t have children.
Continue reading
“If yer want my opinion,” says Bill. He looks up at Alana, with his runtish face twisted into an intense expression.
“Frankly Bill, I don’t,” Alana interjects before he can launch into one of his tirades about the subject at hand, one of his favourites—why elves would be better employed getting some time in—and monopolise the conversation with tired but well-practised jeu de mots and superficially plausible conclusions that pay scant regard to any logical rigour.
Continue reading