100-Word Fiction: ‘The Yard Sweepers’

…’kin ’ell, said the new lad. Look at the state of it though.

Better get started then ain’t ye.

But. I mean. Who the fuck’d’ve left it like this?

Been like it fer years mate.

Yer fuckin jokin.

Nah.

Nah, I mean, but mate. My first day n’all?

You got it. You wanna be back again?

Well yeah, course.

Well ’en: s’all yours.

Nah but.

Brooms in the lock-up. See if ye can get it clean n’ keep it clean.

But.

No buts geez. Gotta be done. N’keep smilin. They like a smile.

Who?

Everyone.

…’kin ’ell though. The state.

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Frogs’

Who said there are no poets any more?

There they are, croaking their message in the lake, evading imminent disaster. There they go, to return safely after ten whole days into the rubble and dust. But no one will have listened. Dionysus was waylaid. Aeschylus and Euripedes dead and bickering. Even Aristophanes only hums a distant tune. To hell and back without a hope.

But this is Italy, not Greece. The frogs are toads now, too. The court jester is king. He tells the townsfolk to take a holiday while the walls crumble.

No one hears the poetry of toads.

100-Word Fiction: ‘If Time Can Stop’

When the train stops, time stops; that’s what they say around here. Worlds end and the unimaginable begins. We are smoked out into knowledge from the dark and the dust.

But we are inconsistent, hypocritical, shallow. In other cities the same trains stop and the same people wait, forever at the platform. Frozen in grief as the world flashes by in a crimson kaleidoscope of glass shards.

We file by as events parade past – escalators to opposite outcomes.

This afternoon I found one of your hairs on the floor. I picked it up. But you are no longer here.

100-Word Fiction: ‘Petrified’

When the morning sun can no longer cast its light on the words of the people, and the words of the people are everywhere like an impotent virus, and the virus is dying in a Petri dish, and the scientists stand over and silently stare, and the lab technicians are just marketing geeks, and the geeks report to the politicians, and the politicians report to the multinationals, and the multinationals manufacture Petri dishes, and the Petri dishes are prisons, and the prisons jail vocabulary, and the people don’t want to know, and no one even looks at the morning sun.

100-Word Fiction: ‘Captain’

You’ll be the away team captain this week, the teacher shouted.

Nick stepped out of the line-up and turned to face the other boys. He started to shake. Choose goalies first, then a good striker, then a midfielder – defenders last.

Finally only two boys remained to be picked. One was a big scowling lad who towered over the rest and bullied people. The other was a bighead but he could make things bad for you, real bad.

Nick looked at each. He had a lump in his throat. Oh but how could he choose? He wanted to go home.

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Mirror’

Decades ago, the town’s councillors had erected a large mirror in the municipal hall. It reflected light into a function room where, at receptions, the townsfolk would see themselves in it.

One day, a party at the hall became debauched and the mayor turned the mirror around so that the revellers’ actions could never be reflected in it again. He called it ‘the dead mirror’.

After years of increasing clamour, the mayor again turned the mirror around. The townsfolk came to look. In it, every person saw themselves as a child – with one horrific alteration: they were dead children.

100-Word Fiction: ‘There Is a Moment’

Maybe there is a moment when you shudder and feel a touch more dislocated from the world and even yourself. As if the axis of everything had just been tilted to a slightly more precarious degree. Waves of repressed memory. Cracks found in the waking day. Roads broken. A moment when you are shaken into wanting to know something but can’t tell what it is. The difference between dreams and… what else? As if it has all happened before. The very things in front of your eyes. Weren’t they before you, in a jolt, weeks ago? The sounds of promises.

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Whistleblower’

It had rained all morning and the rain had turned to sleet and then snow. There was a bitter wind too and, earlier than they should, Anne’s colleagues left work and headed to the pub.

Anne had decided to go on record and reveal the big secret. She knew precisely what the fallout would be. Or she thought she did. Then, in the afternoon, her boss resigned. He said he had a moral duty to do so. The implication was that so did she. But she did not see that.

Anne’s colleagues bought drinks and began to plot her downfall.

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Villagers’

They were out into the heat and dust again. There was no road to speak of, not even really a track, just a formless and infinite middle distance of barren land that stretched onwards and onwards, with no horizon visible in the haze of the afternoon sun.

All the villagers were standing outside their mud huts. They always made eye contact but that gaze gave nothing away. There was no reason for them to hide any more and so they just remained. The villagers gave the soldiers their names, but who they were, no one knew. No one knew anything.

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Ballad of John and Wayne’

It was better when we were all innocent, said John, folding up the newspaper: These days everyone knows too much – finds out too much. Secrets were once off bounds. Now we are suspicious. The world is a hall of mirrors. We search for glimpses of people, but where they really are we can’t be sure. We don’t know where the truth lies. Everything is a distorted reflection. I liked it when everything was hidden. Things got done; people just got on with their lives.

There are no reflections any more, said Wayne, just reality – even if you won’t see it.