There were words strewn like spilt cereal all over the kitchen floor that morning, piles of subjectivity to be pushed aside before breakfast.
Every year, they arrived overnight—hulking beasts of steel, purring in anticipation under the harvest moon. Their shoulders jutted over the trees.
I wasn’t expected to live long. Born in the shadow of a great war, it was casually assumed I would perish in the next.
The sky had slipped from bold in its blueness to a softer pastel, its pink-tinged glow reflected in the limpid sea. The local fishermen were busy at the far end ...
I didn’t even hear him come in. Just walked into the kitchen and found him sitting splay-legged at the table, cleaning his nails with a tiger claw threaded onto a ...
It was difficult for Myra to chop vegetables without the knife she’d driven into her husband’s back. Carrots, potatoes, onions, all ready on the worktop, but her good knife was ...
She didn’t like the way he was staring: that bald, red-nosed old ‘gentleman’ in the tweed waistcoat. Respectable as you like, but for the hawkish look on his face. It ...
Orla started seeing Dan in secret. Hotel afternoons. Dan the man, was well off. Orla, not so much poor as unpractised in the pleasure of spending money, luxuriated.
Kamelija meets her at the little airport in Zagreb. She is driving a beat-up VW Passat with no driver’s side mirror. They squeeze Elise’s suitcase and bag into the trunk, ...
Amelia lies back against the cool cotton, splaying hands like white spindles.
I wanted to tell her all of this, but when I tried to speak I had no answer for the gorilla. Instead I let my mind wander until I settled ...
When I left for school, I said, “Bye, Grandma,” but she didn’t hear me at all. It was a windy day yesterday.
Leo wished he could tell his son how sometimes a thing like love can hurt too much, how it is like a string that vibrates, creating sound.
The pitiful creature has been caught in a net of his own design. See how he struggles and gets more tangled up. It’s too much for my delicate sensibilities: so ...
“It shouldn’t be exposed like this,” she’d whisper. “We’re supposed to be ignorant. It works best that way.”
It is a little stunted, and the kernels are not always plumped out like fresh pillows, but it does well enough as bulk cattle feed, pellet chicken feed.
There were a handful of minor rules and two major ones: don’t cross the rope bridge without a Scout Master present and do not cross it at night under any ...
I dislike the shift in speed induced by Earth’s gravity, the subtle but recognizable odor of decay and the gust of freshened air that’s puffed into the spacecraft to mask ...
Now disheveled like an old beauty in her tattered dressing gown. Gravel disorderly mixed with dirt, gnawed hedges.
We also watched scorpions making their determined way on the sand or across the road, and in the evening, we walked with our heads bent towards the ground, so we ...