From the sand. From the swiping of palms on commuter runs. From the tossed-off free-sheets. From the grinding trucks on dirt tracks. From the furnace hulls and eyes and mouths of salt. From the white hunchbacked desks. From the discounted cocktails and vapid pavements. From the tortuous late-night news-talk. From the canvas cells with tornContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Please Help Us’”
Tag Archives: Africa
100-Word Fiction: ‘At Calais the Koras Sound’
Imbarcaziona etagiona a migraziona somo tantativo più paricopoeo viaggi attravareo ip Meditarranao. P’asropa è eogno ma non eampra sn daetino. Carta-abbozzato nai cantri di raccopta eono piano par rifsgiati: sn po’ di eabbia eoffiati pop-spe in nord Africa a dap Madio Orianta, non eopsziona, a eiaeta par paca. Notizia dap fronta è di sna copoeeapaContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘At Calais the Koras Sound’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Tunnel’
The waiting is worst. He can feel the tension beneath his fingernails, his throat parched, dry with dust. There are maybe twenty of them loitering, shuffling off the attention of security, trying not to look as if they are eyeing the trucks and trains. Night is soon. Some of the jostling is for distraction. FourContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Tunnel’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Water Memory’
I was told that water has memory. I can believe it. I think of how a drop – the cold moisture of a cloud, somewhere a continent away – might precipitate itself upon an azure sea. That it might get pulled this way and that, become submerged, forgotten, embroiled in the waves and the churnContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Water Memory’”
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 newsContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Those Moments of Doom’”
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 lineContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Composition at a Toumani and Sidiki Diabate Concert’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Raft for the Medusa’
A decade’s unreported anarchy brings blood and dust, charted in numberless rusted cells where violence tells and torture proves. They flee across the desert by truck, in the hands and debt of gangs, to make border disappearances. In Libya and Yemen the smuggled bodies pay for thieved papers with degraded favours. Honours are all lost.Continue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘A Raft for the Medusa’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Raptor’
The bird’s wings scythed through the morning air imperiously as it locked its position over some ground prey, unseen, scuttling in the wildnerness below. The long arc of those wings; I had seen something like them before. An owl, perhaps, or a bird of prey, a falcon or harrier, a raptor. Was an owl aContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Raptor’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Kora’
Kora of calabash, the bottle gourd lute, cowskin resonator, bridge and strings. Kumbengo riffs and birimintingo runs, across the wires of the dancing desert harp. Griot storytellers of Mali’s Mandinka, keepers of memory, ancient people of Sundiate Keita. Plucking notes that quiver into being, hardly heard above the arid air or the brushing of sandContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Kora’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Surveyor’
The first we knew was when the surveyor came to the village with measuring equipment. And armed guards. Then the trucks and helpers came and a fence was built between our houses and the subsistence crops. They lifted the vegetables too early and threw them away. We villagers shouted and asked many questions as theyContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘The Surveyor’”
MW Bewick 