Down There
Another night of poor sleep. Ever since lockdown started it gets harder. We went to bed around eleven, and within five minutes she’d fallen into a deep slumber (if the soft pop-popping of not-quite snoring was anything to go by). It was a small mercy – at least I wouldn’t have to lie still. The awful curtains reminded me of …
Vigil For A Mother (for Michael McDowell)
The last time I was a mother, I was waving Darnley off in his dinghy. Polished mahogany flashed under an early autumn sun, the red of his sail slowly melting into the scarlet wall of maples on the great lake’s far side. I’ve learnt when a parent loses a child, she becomes something undefined. Losing a breast in ‘89 ungendered …
You’ll Find Me In The Tall Wheat
The raft is not the vessel I’d hoped for. For a time I had company in the form of terns, a miniature armada of black-prowed yachts bobbing on the becalmed waters around me. But when the barnacle-encrusted flukes of a giant erupted lazily nearby, those feathered ketches became gliders, hanging like M’s from a child’s mobile. I envied them as …
The Rise of Woman
Nobody could recall an actual date when the island appeared off the coast of Lyme Regis, why it should have, or what circumstances conspired to allow it, but one thing universally agreed upon was its portentousness. Mallory, on summer break from the clamour of Oxford’s Magdalen hallways, congratulated himself on the prodigious serendipity of his decision to holiday in Lyme. …
MIBs
Harriet rolled her eyes at her brother’s petulant bleating. She supposed this was about her beating him at real tennis after church. A man of nineteen years should know better! ‘Saints preserve us, Freddie!’ Mother called from the kitchen as she prepared water crust pastry. ‘Whatever this “flying cigar” was, I’m sure there’s an explantation…Did you see it, Harriet?’Harriet wandered …
Suffer the Children
Pigger pulled on his clothes like a zombie. These days he didn’t care what he wore; not since Ne—, not since the accident. That day, he’d walked through the chill five o’clock darkness to the abyssal yawn of Ollerenshaw’s No.8 as Chalky wittered on about Beeching’s Axe. Pigger didn’t care; he was more occupied trying to locate that wet rumble …
Return of the Women
Olenus waited as patient as time. Up and down the November beach was barren save for the stacks of mossy rocks. They weren’t much in the way of company – not even he could offer that, either – so he waited for the return of the women with those men already here, in sentinel silence. Would she ever return? Had …
The Release of Wonderful Things
Yes, I remember Luxor… Not the Luxor of limestone cliffs baked almost to glass, where summer nights are filled with the occasional crack! as heat escapes from stones into darkness; nor dry river-bottom throats leading to tombs of the cursed; not the Luxor where the restless, linen-wrapped hollow their mouths, sighing in their eternal sleep, and turn over for another …
Dead on Seven
Dead on seven o’clock, the curtains to the theatre rise. The orchestra’s bows await their cue in pregnant stillness. Marek Parell awaits his own, fixed under a simple spotlight. He’s not moved an inch, yet already grateful applause rolls over the footlights like loving surf. His first solo performance, and all he can think about is her: the smell of …
Beachcomber
Old Tom, hunched over in a seafront shelter of baby blue wood and stippled white concrete, stared over the salty flats. An ancient beachcomber, familiar, picks over the graph of flotsam hurled onto the dirty sand by a long-forgotten storm. In his solitude, Tom wonders; if I disappeared, would anyone miss me? A seagull offers a squeeee of mourning by …