Watches the joggers run past the flats as she towels her hair dry. Hums along to the radio and eats toast, drinks orange juice. Waits at the bus stop where all the men cough into the cold wet street. Stares at the passing shops, swaying as the bus jerks. Walks up past the park and hangs her coat in the back of the café and begins work. In her mind, her cousin – blankets across her shoulders, running through the streets and tugging little Darja along and squeezing into the minibus, fleeing from the tanks rumbling on the horizon. It hurts.
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 came the social divisions.
And where are her family now? Her colleagues? Cohabitants?
And then the dawning of night.
She realises her predictions are wrong, the enemy is not the enemy, she is entrapped. The mess they have made of this land.
It is not over.
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 white rectangle is in fact a trapezium of sorts and the red rectangle is rounded at the top. A small black square dots the white. There is an inscription: Cemfjord. The sky is grey. The sea is rough. The prow of the ship is sinking fast.
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 where the mud has frozen for the oncoming night.
Dog walkers, somewhere, reel in the leash and head for home.
Against the hallway’s silence, the letterbox rattles only with the empty wind.
The year closes up, squeezes us out, out towards the barren ghosts of 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 at work, meeting up with family, squeezing in their end-of-term office drinks with suitcases and bags of gift-wrapped presents, rushing round the supermarkets, loading up their cars with their own children. No one gets much beyond childhood. But some have the chance to live for longer.
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 expressing anything had been forgotten in the long hours when everything everything outside had been cancelled and the brave and the scared all looked at each other or were afraid to look and the ones who tried to text for help and those who got… out…
100-Word Fiction: ‘Some Old Queen or Other’
And so what if they thought she had nothing to offer and nothing to say? If they thought she had no place in the modern world, then what? She would ride it out, keep going, fix herself on being there, again, always. What would they know about independent thought? They dieted on whatever fodder they were thrown, gorged themselves and got fat. And if it was said she was a figure of repression, then it was just a spiteful cry of envy, heard only from a miserable few. She thought of the flags that had lined the Mall, yawned, smiled.
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 goblets with ale and drank till they were mortal drunk. Then they cursed each other, took up the swords and fought till they were dead. Tom shook his wings and flew above the city, which had grown in its own egg, and waited to be born.
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 and do-gooders, the sheer wall of white noise as rhetoric reflects ceaselessly around an almost voided mind and beats hard through the bloodstream in a fast, mounting surge. She was dying. She went to the doctor. The doctor confirmed her suspicions. Everyone is dying, he said.
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Off-Stage Terror’
The off-stage scream terrorises.
We are caught off-guard. On-stage actions cease.
Whose scream is it? Why has it occurred? What will the consequences be? What awful truth awaits us?
What does it mean?
It means things occur elsewhere.
It means we have been diverted.
It means we have been looking in the wrong place.
It means we are unready.
It means there are things we do not understand.
The writer or director has held back information. Or lied.
For a few moments we are convulsed with the realisation and horror of our own not-knowing.
*
The beheading was not filmed.
MW Bewick 