Categories:
Fiction
Politics
David killed the Queen. It was nothing personal, he said. It was just politics. All he wanted was to make a political statement about the abuse of power in the country.
Categories:
Fiction
Birch
1997: Business boomed. Optimism was shooting up everywhere and bursting into flower. Music was jocular. Sport was effusive. Soon it would be possible to do the most wonderful things with computers.
Categories:
Fiction
Above the Fat
His hand hovers above the hot fat — not so hot as to be spitting and scarring his skin, but warm; warm enough to cook something; warm enough to be tender; warm enough for an egg.
Categories:
Fiction
A New Face
I took a bus to the very tip of Australia, which, if you know it, looks like a finger pointing north. And then I swam or else I took a small boat, or a chartered aeroplane, to Indonesia.
Categories:
Fiction
Sister Luz
Once or twice over the years I have peered out of the bathroom during Sister Luz’s gatherings. I have watched three or four of them, aging women in soiled habits, making themselves as small and inevident as physically possible, their bodies scrunched up and pressed to the ground…
Categories:
Fiction
The Negritas
That’s them, said Gabriel, and he turned about in his chair and looked back at the blue kiosk. Gabriel was squinting and holding one knee up in his arms. The negritas, he said.
Categories:
Fiction
The Mother
The tired Queenslander where my mother lived, and in which I had grown up (with, and then without, a father) was too big for her now and she had students and migrants living in the rooms.
Categories:
Fiction
The Village Where Everyone Keeps Punching Themselves in the Mouth
The guys in the office laughed when you were assigned this one. You’ll know them by their scabbed knuckles, they said, by their clawed right hands cradled always at chest level like twitching beach-rescued starfish.
Categories:
Fiction
Pinniped
We know they must smell like the dustbins behind a seafood restaurant, although we can’t smell them from here. They look as cold and alien to the touch as the part of your leg that finds its way out from under the bedclothes in winter.
Categories:
Fiction
The God Quetzalcoatl Has Retired and Now Runs a Pub in South Manchester
He likes this new work: granting, recurrently, the single recurring prayer of the drunk; the way the sallow light drags ruby through the bottom of a pint of stout.