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’”
Tag Archives: story
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’”
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 wantsContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘This is My Job’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘There are No Airports in Zamalek’
The icon on the map says airport, but there are no airports in Zamalek. There are lights in the sky though, from over the river at Salah Salem to the Marriott where westerners eat ful. Helicopters, flares and buckshot bring fireworks. The reports say the streets are filled with protestors and their cars – taxiContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘There are No Airports in Zamalek’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Where Oceans Meet’
At the place where two oceans meet a white foam forms a rough line on the surface. We encounter light and dark, warm and cold. Outside the hotel room the sky was grey. On the TV the skies were all blue. Microphones were pointed towards a grimacing face. In the corridor, staff brought room serviceContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Where Oceans Meet’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Welcome to Suffolk’
Outside the bookshop, where you bang on a can to buy Nathalie Sarraute and a map of the Lakes, and get offered tea and coffee from a man wearing a headscarf, the drakes bask and preen round the pond near the pub, and cabbages dot the garden of a small terraced house next to aContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Welcome to Suffolk’”
100-Wird Fiction: ‘No Mountain High’
That a life builds, grows Is what she had heard. But it sometimes felt The opposite. It was as if a life Started with a mountain A mass of granite Immovable, vast And then things happened: Events, thoughts. The mountain Was chipped away at Incrementally. Tiny etchings, furrows – Surfaces scuffed, worn – From theContinue reading “100-Wird Fiction: ‘No Mountain High’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Storming of Beake Street’
A thin blue line unravels through the back streets, broadens, becomes a gushing force, a flood, across the hunting fields where gelders and nailers worked, land then acquired by the Queen’s Messenger Thomas Beake, by the old houses intended for tradesmen and lower middle-class occupation, whereat the Venetian painter Antonio Canaletto lodged in a roomContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘The Storming of Beake Street’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘(Slight Return)’
‘When you leave you never go back, even if you think you might: it’s impossible.’ With these words he left: took a job somewhere abroad. He never visited, or if he did he kept it quiet. Of course we saw updates online: places he went; achievements; petty squabbles. ‘All as the world turns,’ an oldContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘(Slight Return)’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Like Pollen’
Cow parsley, she calls it. Hollow green stems rising out above lush green grass. I had always known it as Queen Anne’s Lace. White caps of tiny flowers like little parasols, umbrellas. The May rains have come and gone. We take the dogs out down the lanes. They know the hawthorn and the giant rhubarbContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Like Pollen’”
MW Bewick 