It’s when, these mornings, that someone passes in the road and says hello and I don’t know what to do, and I clam up, or I hang my head slightly and whisper Hi, or Alright?, like the sullen teenager I was. And I wonder why I can’t reply confidently, head up, even now, after these years. And somehow then I notice the fat blackberries and rosehip in the hedgerow and the first fallen leaves already sludge on the muddy path, and I wonder about all the railway platforms I’ve stood on and the people… and there is one word: autumn.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Andalusyria’
The largest of the pines is full of sparrows. Soon the birds will rush to the roadside wall flushed with the electric bloom of bougainvillea, then to the tables and chairs of the beach club as restaurant diners return to the pool, the loungers and the canopied beds, to sleep off the lunchtime cava, turning gold in the sun. In the hotel room a TV speaks to itself. The grave voice of John Kerry explains that no one will get hurt. Attacks will be incisive. No one will get hurt. Attacks will do great damage. No one will get hurt…
100-Word Fiction: ‘They Wrote His Obituary’
I am told that Robert had been a radical. He certainly shirked definition, never committed to anything. I’m not sure that makes someone a radical, just an arch-critic, a cynic, a difficult bastard. Others say genius; I’d argue a fantastic populist. They say he was an intellectual; he was simply willing to share his views loudly, eloquently, forcefully. I do know he was a misanthrope, a miser and a drunk. He gave little away to anyone, probably hid from himself, but liked gifts. I met him and he glared at me, had nothing to say. And now he is gone.
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Pictures On the Wall’
He spent an hour removing pictures from the bedroom wall. Images of icons, cars, animals, slogans, pin-ups, friends. He saved the blu-tack from the corners of each piece of paper and combined them into a ball. He put the pictures into a black bin liner, then he took the ball of blu-tack and dabbed it across the wall, removing any stubborn sticky debris. But the wall was pock-marked. Stains remained; blemishes that would never disappear. It was like a desert terrain, marked for ever by the craters of missiles and bombs once used to hold up some culture, some ethos.
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Leviathan’
It was during one of the best summers in living memory that the destruction of our village began. The tremors came first, echoed by rumblings of public fear. Soon visitors arrived, seeking to bear witness to our doom. Arrests were made as families barricaded themselves into their homesteads. But the momentum became unstoppable. Elders prophesied the monster was an incarnation of the god of chaos, Cuadzilla, who lured innocents to their deaths with visions of waterfalls of gold, before the terrible leviathan of the deep earth broke through the heavy rock and fine soils of our lands to wreak its havoc.
100-Word Fiction: ‘Bird-house’
100-Word Fiction: ‘What He Did, Where He Went, They Will Never Know’
It was a summer evening and steam rose from the warm wet rails of the train tracks and as he paced along his legs were brushed by the wet grass and blackbirds hopped and pecked for worms in the earth and everything was warm and his lungs heaved and heart pumped and head pounded.
Earlier he had typed threats, nasty words. She deserved to be scared, he thought. And the police could search but he was gone anyway, out in the wilderness of the World Wide Web, where no one ever was lost for breath, running from life itself.
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Migrant Waders’
Maps chart tomorrows
Finding the distance
Between faultlined selves
And coordinated belongings
Closer to free
Perspectives are scythed
This heady summer
Of clear truths
Pollen strewn and
Seeds soil-felled
*
Butterflies skim by
Tortoiseshell, browns, fritillary
A field full
Barley, wheat, maize
Green, yellow, gold
The distant water
A silver foil
Thin behind reeds
And the woodland
Chestnut, birch, oak
A steam plume
Cooling factory chimney
Blows against horizon
And still sky
Like a cigarette
*
Time when weighted
Bows towards harvest
Drys leaves bronze
Looses the grain
Cracks the earth
The migrant waders
Will soon return
And call this home
100-Word Fiction: ‘Sometimes When’
Sometimes when it feels to her as if everyone is waiting for some small event to breathe life into a suffocating world, she is found attending to memories.
She tries to catch absences as they arrive; the past as it claims the present; the futures that crumble at a touch; the goings as they’re coming.
She notes how glister turns to gloom. (Her words.) And how gloom soon unfastens.
Over lunch, in the park, a man sits on a bench and chews a sandwich. She gathers up her phone, keys and pass, and heads back to the office. Time up.
100-Word Fiction: ‘This is My Job’
Downstairs in the shop it is sweltering. I am at a designer furniture launch. This is my job. Bring on the canapés, I should be eating dinner. Sean works for a competitor. He tells me about when his wallet was fat, when he was drunk every evening. Across the room Seb shakes hands. Everyone wants to meet Seb. But I can tell by the way he pulls at his ear that he wants out. Away from sales, marketing and clueless creatives. My forehead runs with sweat. The kids won’t want to go to bed tonight. I wish I was home.
MW Bewick 