She didn’t torch the place. Not yet. The others could have done it if they’d wanted. She fudged a tear. Anything more might have signalled guilt. Her predecessor, Gestas, would take the blame. They’d be happy to let him have it. They’d needed to crucify someone and Gestas, such an impenitent robber, the one she’d called friend, lover, rose highest. As she knew he would. Somehow she wandered away and washed her hands, thinking of how she might return. Someone would do well out of this. And she had the names and numbers, the secret places, the matchbox and fuel.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Association Games / B-Side’
There were words that disappeared. I contemplated whether it was better to forget them in any case, at this moment. In place of words, handshakes were greeted with smiles, flags were waved joyously. A scoreless draw of an association football game, with fans in fiesta mood, did not reflect the volatility of the nation states involved. There was no mention of boko haram, Isis, Shi’a or Sunni as Hajsafi, Hosseini, Moses and Musa ran lengths of the shining Arena da Baixada, in the Água Verde neighbourhood of the plateau city of Curitiba, Brazil, near where the Araucaria forests are dying.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Association Games / A-Side’
We played word association games:
Levant?
Stump.
Stump?
Sounds.
Sounds?
Music magazine.
Magazine?
Cover mount.
Cover mount?
Flexidisc.
Felxidisc?
Vinyl.
Vinyl?
Black.
Black?
Black.
Is this working? Sorry can we go back to Stump?
Stump?
Stump?
Chart Show.
Chart Show?
Channel 4.
Channel 4?
TV.
TV?
Music.
Music?
Indie.
Indie?
Sounds.
Sounds?
Stump.
Stump?
Ice the Levant.
Isis, the Levant?
This is misleading. Stump’s ‘Ice the Levant’ single featured on a shared EP for Sounds magazine, titled Track On, No1, but on standard weight black vinyl. Other artists on the EP included the Triffids, Happy Mondays, Head and Sonic 3.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Composition at a Toumani and Sidiki Diabate Concert’
It is boat season and migrating humans attempt more perilous journeys across the Mediterranean. Europe is a dream but not always a destiny. Paper-sketched holding centres are a plan for refugees: some sand-blown pop-ups in north Africa and the Middle East – not a solution, just a siesta for peace. News from the front line is of a colossal catastrophe. Humanitarianism becomes hubris in the mouths of the powerful. Razor-wire fences don’t stop the desperate. Riot police have bulldozed camps in Calais. There is nowhere to go. In London, I hear the sound of duelling koras seeking harmony in the night.
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Populist Trick’
In a pub, the winner of a popularity contest, as captured in a reporter’s photograph, balances an empty pint glass on his head and grins a rubbery wet slop of a grin. In the background, unwitting members of the public, alongside some of the man’s friends, are also grinning. Their mirth has been caused by an off-camera remark, now forgotten. The winner has taken a vow of silence. His agents say it is nothing tactical: let his plastic expression speak simply for itself. He has never said anything and never will. And silence will amplify silence, if he’s truly won.
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Cottage’
Can you see it? asked James. Corrina was squinting into the May sunlight.
It was somewhere over there but I can’t make it out exactly.
But the cottage was around here?
Here? Somewhere over there, near the horizon, past the trees, where it’s all blue with the distance and haze.
We could drive around the lake, James suggested, placing an arm round her shoulder. She shook her head:
We’d get lost. I just can’t remember. I can’t remember the room even. Or him. What he really did. I was so young. We drove off. I promised to forget. It’s just…
100-Word Fiction: ‘Clouded Out’
A broad-brimmed black felt hat lies on the tracks below the bridge that crosses the railway line on Shoreditch High Street.
They sip sweet creamy coffee, shuffle and talk of failed interviews and jobs that didn’t work out.
A man by the Tube shouts ‘Freedom out!’ or perhaps ‘Free Time Out!’
They add a pre-meeting meeting to the diary, tapping fitfully while taking a call.
A line of immigration enforcement vans passes by as they hesitate at the wet kerb.
Restless regions shift like cumulonimbus across the horizon. We are heading for a low. A black hat rests on rails.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Thomas Piketty Sells Out’
On the bookshop’s basement computer
A deleted message relates
That Thomas Piketty has sold out.
The email from the book’s printer
Suggests a second run is required –
But the price of paper shows a long upward trend.
Customers leave empty-handed.
Along the city’s cigarette streets
Workers stroke their palms
And bud their ears in silent contemplation
Of Thomas Piketty selling out.
As the fast commuter train stalls
Where a fallen branch blocks the rails
The labouring academic closes
Her old copy of New Left Review
In which Thomas Piketty plugs his book
That all across the land has sold out.
100-Word Fiction: ‘720 Sentences’
07:20 is the time he leaves the house, pulls on his coat, blows a kiss, says goodbye, gets embraced, steps onto the concrete, breathes the air, checks his pockets, flicks his hair, buttons his coat, checks his phone, walks down the street for the last time.
07:20 is the time she closes the door, waits until he finally disappears, and holds her gaze, never wanting to turn her back, however long it takes for him to return, knowing that he won’t, but that if she only believed harder, she could change the fates that the judges decreed. How she cries.
100-Word Fiction: ’18 Sackings’
The man who did too little.
The man who did too much.
The woman left in the frame.
The woman who ducked the issue.
The man who spoke too late.
The man who spoke too soon.
The woman with the loudest voice.
The women you never heard.
The man who no one liked.
The man who was most popular.
The woman who called the shots.
The woman who only followed.
The man who knew everything.
The man who knew nothing.
The woman who told lies.
The woman who told the truth.
The man who ran away.
The man who remained.
MW Bewick 