Daddy. Who was not where? Beards at the kitchen table. Dad. Ties styled wide to thin. A holiday in Somerset, golden evenings and tractors. A rainy motorway and shouting. Father travels first-class now. Him and Vic. Vic Benson is important. An important name. To me. I went away. So did dad. Pinstripes blurred. Dad tookContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Perspectives’”
Tag Archives: Bewick
100-Word Fiction: ‘Freedom Fruit’
They lift from the hedgerow Light as cobweb and spun sugar A shroud of lace for a season’s going Displaced migrants, the bramble’s other Temporary lover: Jenny Long Legs rise in a cloud In pestilent numbers this September As hands shake the limbs of briar For black berries and rose hips On foraging trips. PeaceContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Freedom Fruit’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Autumn Passings’
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 theseContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Autumn Passings’”
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, turningContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Andalusyria’”
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 viewsContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘They Wrote His Obituary’”
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 itContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘The Pictures On the Wall’”
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 prophesiedContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘A Leviathan’”
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. EarlierContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘What He Did, Where He Went, They Will Never Know’”
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.Continue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Sometimes When’”
MW Bewick 