Shadow Laughter

Erwin’s Catch 22

That bloody interfering woman drove him mad.

His temporal microscope and paradigm shifter had been moved so he nosed around them. Nothing.

‘Darling, have you seen the compsognathus?’ he shouted.
His wife entered with a cloth and bottle of Singularity-Be-Gone. ‘What, dear?’
‘The dinosaur.’
‘It was weeing on the Wedgwood. I popped it into that box of yours.’
He looked at the steel box. It was silent.

‘You going to open it, dear?’
‘I daren’t,’ Schrödinger replied.

Feline Fatale

‘You flirt with all your clients?’

‘Only the skirts, Miss McKitie.’

She’d slunk into my office; more

curves than a Fibonacci spiral; a golden mean of blonde.

Trouble.

‘I’ve been framed like a two-bit Rembrandt!’ She blew her Lucky in my face, ‘Damned pigeons. I’d never—’

‘But now McKitie’s is selling something called Pigestives?’ I coughed on her smoke, ‘I need some air, cookie.’

‘I’ll give you air.’ she cooed, pulling out a 38.

Christopher Bean

My first published work is the story ‘Jumbled-up Jack’ in The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel (Woodbridge Press, 2016) anthology (See Cemetery Dance review here). Since then I’ve had several flash fiction pieces published by Haringey Unchained, some of which are included here. My first long-form, Victorian horror novel The Pegge and the Pendrel is finished and looking for a home. I’m working on companion books set in the same universe, designed to be read in any order. I started writing in 2009 focusing on shorts and awkward, wretched little things that were too long to be short and too short to be novellas. On Bluesky, not Twitter.