I work very hard in the factory and the machines go clitter-clatter. It is so hot. I have not changed clothes in weeks. I wear my yellow T-shirt and shorts and if I smell then we all do. There is a little sink where we can wash. We get to sleep in shifts. It isContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Stitching Up the Future’”
Tag Archives: word
100-Word Fiction: ‘Geography of Years’
My introduction to psychogeography came in 1982 when the Falklands first became real islands – as well as a conflict. The far side of the world crash-landed in our living room and I drank black coffee and watched, aged 11. Later I realised that maps are not just about miles, they are about connections ofContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘Geography of Years’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘The Hollow’
In the spring of that year they dug a giant pit in the shape of a grave. It stretched north, south, east and west, growing as eager townsfolk took up spades and bent their backs to hollow the blackened earth. Over the weeks the pit was filled with millions of words torn from newspapers, TVContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘The Hollow’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Cold Spring: Part 4’
Oh this spring has been ruinous. These reflections, thoughts! And then heating up yesterday’s leftovers of stew, listening to some millionaire on the radio, distracted by the garden’s bare earth and stunted buds. I got a text from friends on holiday earlier: the sun had come out and they had gone swimming. Here there areContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘A Cold Spring: Part 4’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Cold Spring: Part 3’
I watched him stare at his pint for an hour. He barely drank a drop. He does this every day at the same time, with the same words to the girl at the bar, shuffling to the same seat. These days he keeps his overcoat on. It is cold in the pub and word isContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘A Cold Spring: Part 3’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Cold Spring: Part 2’
The stock exchange has declared that trading will be suspended until Thursday. The parliamentary vote on the bailout is being postponed. The man in the shop was in tears this morning; the shelves of his grocery almost utterly bereft. Across the town, cashpoints are running out of notes every ten minutes. Queues are restless, fraught.Continue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘A Cold Spring: Part 2’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘A Cold Spring: Part 1’
There is a queue spilling from a greengrocer’s door into a gentrified street. The customers are affluent and wrapped up in tweed and heavy knits. In a pub round the corner the rugby has just finished. The landlord kills the screen and the afternoon’s drinkers begin to disperse. Everyone goes home to cook or orderContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘A Cold Spring: Part 1’”
100-Word Fiction: ‘This Journey’
This journey, if it is one, in all its shock and awe, seems more a repeated weekly horror than a narrative of years. Statues toppled in cindered market places. The dead forgotten. Repeat. Some things, simply, exist. And others don’t, didn’t. It is decade through a looking glass. A decade of mangled language where liesContinue reading “100-Word Fiction: ‘This Journey’”
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’”
MW Bewick 