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’”
Tag Archives: word
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’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Plato Laughed’
Argue it hard, said Socrates, puffing on a pipe. Argue it well. Argue it endlessly. Because they will forget. They will muscle in ideas, weedle out flaws, overstate detail, underestimate the nuances. But most of all they will forget. They will forget the logic, deny experience, erase memory, bury the truths of our lives. TheyContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Plato Laughed’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘Abstinence’
Not obese, not even chubby, he decided to commence a diet plan, not for health or vanity reasons but because he thought the world overly plentiful with, as he put it, junk. He committed to two days of abstinence from food a week. He felt great. Then he turned his attention to his job andContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Abstinence’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Physical Geography of Celebrity’
Attrition: erosion of celebrity caused when new information distributed by the media collides with the narrative of a particular personality and shatters it to pieces. Collapse: when a great celebrity ‘falls’ after a loss of support from peers and public following media revelations. Corrasion: gradual wearing away of celebrity. Fault: a large crack in publicContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘A Physical Geography of Celebrity’”
MW Bewick 