“Vlad” and “Your Fire”, two of my very short prose pieces, appear online at Kitchen.
“Vlad. Poor Vlad. He doesn’t understand English. Doesn’t understand the country, the strange place he’s somehow ended up. Vlad fizzes. He’s got so much inside him and it won’t all come out. Won’t come out smooth anyway. He has to bite it off. To spit it out in so many words, so drowned in ums and ahs, like kittens spilling from a cement mixer.”
My very short story “Dear Diary” appears in Issue #3 of The Adroit Journal.
“Toby says that the world has edges now, that the bomb gave it edges. Walk far enough from the city and you’ll walk right off the face of the earth–what’s left of it, anyway. Toby says a lot of things that I don’t know whether or not to believe, like the dying man near St. Michael’s who asked him for chapstick, or the crazy woman with flowers in her hair.”
To my immense surprise, my story “Days Necrotic” has won the Manchester Fiction Prize. Further information about the prize can be found here, and you can read all the shortlisted entries here.
“The night after the funeral he found her crumpled in the shower, cold on full blast, earth and blood clinging to the tiles. Her eyes were closed; she looked like she was trying to be sick, gulping and hacking. Still dressed in the stiff old gown in which they’d buried her, now drenched grey against grey skin.”
My short story “Dumb Creatures” appears online on the Volume magazine blog.
“Ingleman kills penguins for God. They were a mistake, you see, in the first instance. God realises now just how stupid they look. He is embarrassed he ever created them, graceless waddling monsters that they are. So he and Ingleman spend their days driving from one zoo to another, gradually erasing the mistake. God drives and Ingleman does the killing.”
My short story “Eugenia” appears in Fractured West.
“She lives on a farm ten miles from anywhere, dreams of escape in its loosest terms, more an idea than the thing itself. She lives on a farm ten miles from anywhere, dreams of escape in its loosest terms, more an idea than the thing itself.”
My short story “Special” appears in Flash.
“Teacher cried again during quiet time, while all the broken kids lay face down on their folded arms on their tables, sleeping or feigning sleep. She sat at her walnut desk and held her mug with a picture of a bumblebee on it. By degrees, she started to cry.”
My short story “Teeth” appears in print in Riptide.
“I had been drinking, probably too much. I don’t remember. This was way back, before the white van, before Steve lost his job. He’d been bringing home crates of no-brand beer every other night. Four boxes to a crate. Twelve tins to a box. I must have gone out for some food, and then I woke up to them carrying me inside. Hands under my armpits and my knees. I couldn’t move.”
My short story “Sexy, Hot, Sad, Tragic, Accident” appears online in Eclectica.
“In the film she dies of a heart attack. One minute she’s standing there with her friends, and the next she’s on the floor jerking and twitching as they try to hold her down, breathe air into her foaming throat. The camera shakes, jostled, as they crowd around holding her hand, calling for her to come back, survive, wake up, please. Sound fades out. Faces stretch. Em convulses weakly on the floorboards.”
My short story “The Keeper” appears online in Rumble.
“She loves him enough to ask no questions. When he leaves the office for his break she slips inside and cleans up what mess the morning has generated: she sweeps the crumbs from his desk, wipes away the sweat on the wristplate of his computer. She empties the bin, pinches lost hairs from the headrest of his chair, opens the window to disseminate the faint smell of urine.”
My short story “Today” appears in Volume magazine, online and in print.
“I found a plane’s black box once, lying there in the nowhere dust like a secret or a tooth. It was red, armoured, weighed as much as I did, as if it were some fallen star full of perverse gravity. A strange find, mottled with age-dust and shattered paint; the last surviving fragment of a machine that might have really been something once, but wouldn’t be again.”