People say it’s the smell you try to hold on to. The smell of a person. Clothes. Blankets. Cushions. After they’ve gone. Of course this is true. I’ve lived through it. What’s less noted is the way voices come and go. The first time I realised I could no longer wholly recall your voice, afterContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘After the tide’”
Category Archives: story
100-Word Fiction: ‘Night Shifts’
Dreaming of Cairo, so I thought, and I was on some concrete balcony at the edge of the desert, with the city in the distance, illuminated by explosions – and the death-rattle of guns and screaming missiles echoed across the void between me and… them. I peered harder and saw that the explosions were fireworks,Continue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Night Shifts’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Gyre’
I looked at the silver mud along the banks of the river. A month ago it was filled with birds. You could see them scurrying even at night. Now they have gone. The seasons are changing and the mud is becoming bare. The gulls’ heads are taking on their summer colour. It’s as if theContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘The Gyre’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Sequences’
First it was what was written. She will not look, she will not look. And get out of this city but once and for all. Yet where, where? Then it was what was done in response. Fleeing from the people who are everywhere, into their arms, out from their arms, delivered, how, how? Then cameContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Sequences’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Cemfjord’
Two rectangles, side by side, colour-blocked in white and red, the line between them vertical. Two horizontal blocks of blue surround this central form; a lighter colour above, a deeper shade below, each flecked with greys and whites. The geometry, the symmetry, the palette of the image is alluring. Looking again, you notice the whiteContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Cemfjord’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Tomorrow’
The air conditioning blows against the office cold while the mice scuttle in the dust of the ducts. The flagpoles of opposing buildings are wrapped tight with their blind standards. A solitary gull circles above the white towers; above the dripping lights of theatreland. Cars choke the arteries all the way to the estuaries whereContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Tomorrow’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘People at Christmas’
I don’t always see the difference between children and adults. Rather, I don’t see adults, only children. Children everywhere, shopping with pushchairs, snoring in suits on morning trains, smoking outside bars of an evening: children all. I see them now with tinsel and antlers on their heads, Santa hats, stressing about the last days atContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘People at Christmas’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Those Who Got Out’
They fell into the light of the streets from behind the flag and the window logos the smell of roasted coffee beans never to be smelled again with outstretched arms like elated and some fast some slow and some hobbling some skipping like no one could remember how to walk faces all contorted like expressingContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Those Who Got Out’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Goose and the Merchants’
After the merchants were pardoned and the townsfolk were sent to the fields, Tom the goose laid three golden eggs. The first hatched to reveal a hundred bronze brooches. In the second were a hundred silver goblets; in the third a hundred golden swords. The merchants pinned the brooches to their hearts, filled the gobletsContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘The Goose and the Merchants’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Hallucinations’
She fell asleep worrying about the tremor in her heart. She awoke wondering about the tension across her skull. Maybe she really was critically ill. Maybe she should see the doctor. Those late-night and early-morning hallucinations of gunshot riots, rabbiting politicians, redactive summit meetings, those rabid howls of the naysayers and cynics and dreamers andContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Hallucinations’”
MW Bewick 