100-Word Fiction: ‘Those Moments of Doom’

Dark thoughts could creep in like a virus. Like if he got Ebola, if someone gave him it, or if he went and made contact with someone and got it. You couldn’t check all the people and the places they went, and the sanitary conditions of places.

People buried such awful fears.

On the news they showed aeroplanes and runway tarmac, doctors all scrubbed and polished wards…

…except it wasn’t about Ebola, it was just about fear, some terrible imagining that under someone’s fingernails was the possibility of real harm, real crazy harm. There were days when he felt doomed.

100-Word Fiction: ‘August’s End’

On the quay in a cagoule, with a north wind blowing in rain and echoing through the halyards of the Essex smacks. A cormorant headed up the estuary; the Roman River was full and the silent black-headed gulls bobbed on the choppy water. There was no one there, no one at the pub or in the café. The swallows were gone; the golden fields now steely stubble. She was trying to make a phone call for no particular purpose other than to keep in touch with someone. The signal was dead. There were times when something just needed to give.

100-Word Fiction: ‘Here It Comes’

Here it comes: the football back on telly, the root around the wardrobe for a jacket, the predictions for the bank holiday weekend weather, the TV trailers for autumn’s best viewing. It feels like a final sign-off. You will hear no more from us until Christmas. What you haven’t got done won’t get done. And it has come early this year. As if hibernation is a given. We are not done. We cannot sleep. We cannot rest. We are still blowing craters into history, watching an endemic virus become pandemic, rescuing the refugees. Our nights cannot be darker, not yet.

100-Word Fiction: ‘What She Gave’

Do you remember that she’d laugh but in that sharp manic way and then cover her mouth with her hand as if to apologise? She could tell you all about everything except herself; be your best friend and not ask for anything in return. Sometimes she gave so much it amounted to a barrier you couldn’t get over. I know some people said it was all an act, but it was just her and the only way she knew to get by. I worried for her sometimes. Worried that she’d one day lose the energy and the show. It happened.

100-Word Fiction: ‘And If I Do Not Speak’

I can’t get into it, said Alex, shaking his head, turning his palms upward. The conversation is one that is built around a vocabulary linked inextricably to a standardised and, yes, populist argument put forward by the ruling classes. It doesn’t matter which side you take in the argument, the fact that you’re using their words is always used against you to prove you’ve accepted their terms, accepted the proposal, the game. You’re midwife to the delivery of your own subjugation. But let me ask you a question: do you think silence is really just silence? Or something else?

100-Word Fiction: ‘If At Times There Is Not Enough Time’

Please please just stop it with this talk of tunnels and fences and walls and rubble and rockets and us and them and who is stronger and who said what first and what might happen only if and all about the media and bias and how you keep interrupting and making accusations and that everyone is wrong and that the terrorists are elsewhere and use civilians and not you and that there is right or wrong because it is not words not words and the real blood is there not words it is children the blood of children nothing else nothing.

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Graves Above’

That our lives are nothing less than fissile
is a blind spot on a blue retina.
We arc our actions, our thoughts, like missiles;
sing praise, hope the heavens make us better;
behold the sky and hold it high, careful
not to see the cracks that let the light in –
or the umbra, its foretelling, which, shared,
might point a compass towards compassion.
The shadows of celestial bodies
fall to earth with no poetry, reason
or goal. We are better than this, we say.
But when we play gods we soon discover
those graves we think beneath us are above.

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Missiles Over Gaza’

Soviet-era artillery rockets
Heavy mortars
Grad rockets
Qassam rockets
Longer-range Fajr-5s
Khaibar-1s from Syria
Israeli B-300 shoulder-launched rockets
Matador shoulder-launched rockets from Singapore
Mk 47 Strikers from the United States
Spike anti-tank missiles from Israel
M-47 Dragon anti-tank missiles from the United States
M270 Multiple rocket launchers from the United States
FIM-92 Stinger shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles from the United States
US Patriot and Hawk surface-to-air missiles
Israeli Spice glide bombs, Penetration bombs and cluster bombs
Israeli B500A1 laser-guided hard-target penetration bombs
US AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface anti-tank missiles
Sticks
Stones
Bricks
Rocks
Names
Phrases
Insults
History
Religion
Ethics
Ideology
Rhetoric
Lies

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Sycamore’

Nails hammered into the trunk let him climb to the tree’s big branches. He edged out and hung his legs over, swinging them in the air. The sun was on his face. Then he pressed his palms down into the branch, feeling the tension, lifting himself up and pushing out, out, into the sky. He braced his legs, locked his knees, and then he hit. The earth was soft but the jolt was huge, a giant tremor up through his bones, and an impact that forced his thighs into his hips, breaking his pelvis as he crumpled on the ground.

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Truth Tied Down’

Tie the history down. Me and little Kenny running in the dewy fields under the crackle of electricity pylons. Tie the family down. Aunts and uncles filling up my grandfather’s little sitting room with their cigarette smoke. Tie the present down. Me and my lonesome workplace banter and the nights drinking and looking at girls with Johnno and the crew. Tie the romance down. How something came to nothing so soon and she’s better off in any case. Tie the future down. The plans I make daily and the bucket list I email to myself. None of it is real.