The Catch
Whilst the North Sea commits suicide over the rocks of Northumberland, the town’s fishermen repair their nets and pots. It’s hard to figure the coarse, knotty meshes piled at their feet for the silken webs the men back home spin over their heads; like the most skilled pizzaiuolo, my fellow Florentine’s artistry set their nets so delicately on the Arno. …
The Rime of the Brackish Mariner
The wind speaks in Roquebrun. A labyrinth pond there I once fished as a boy, where darting, infant mullet kissed a fallen mirror. Away, behind eyelashed dunes, mother languished and father malingered on a Martian beach. Ahead, a choppy fringe of mountains loomed and in between, and all around, the Mediterranean’s zephyr played and urged: This way, not that! And …
Breaking the Seal
As Provost, I found myself in that agreeable position rare of antiquarian scholars in that my summer was unplanned. I (in those days of my earthbound hubris, a Prospero of the sciences man can measure) decided on the Purbecks, perhaps playing the links of Swyre Head. Rambles along the Suffolk beaches had lately bored me and I longed for the …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …