Author: Lauren Thomas

She cried every day. She couldn’t help it. She was made that way. She stood by the river and inhaled deeply as the water flowed past her. She watched as dogs passed her by, sometimes stealing a glance up at her but largely ignoring her. She watched as the rowers moved through her shadow, too…

She tried not to stare. But it was so hard not to. The woman was sat at a table on her own, smaller than she looked on TV, and decidedly more human than she looked on social media. She had what looked like a matcha latte in front of her and her small dog sat…

She was obsessed with cherries, despite her first experience of them. Stealing a chocolate from her mother’s Valentine’s selection, she had gagged as an explosion of cherry liqueur had burned its way down her throat, her mother crying with laughter in the doorway at a lesson learned. But now they were her simplest joy. The…

It knew it was ugly. It was too big for every modern house, too low for every modern body. It had tassels where no one wanted tassels to be, and an unpleasantly fruity smell that oozed from its cushions whenever anyone sat on it. Its favourite part of the day was when people smirked as…

He couldn’t tell them what had made him become a mime artist. Obviously. But he could show them. He began by showing his crippling shyness, cringing away from their watchful eyes with his hands over his face. Then he mimed tears and shaking shoulders, an imitation of the complicated sadness of his childhood. Next, he…

He had been upcycling for twenty years, but this was his first piece of treasure. Left on the side of the road by a weary man bent with grief, a hastily scrawled sign saying “free to a good home”, was a Victorian demilune cabinet, the marquetry inlay flat and unloved, wood dulled by neglect. He…

No one could tell just by looking at her. Not even when her nose twitched as if a perfume had crossed her face. Not even when she won the parents’ one hundred metre race at school sports day, even outstripping the man who was known for his running prowess and his talk of his latest…

The nightmares. Some kept coming back. Like the one with the little boy and his black dog, his face melting as the dog snarled. And the one with the goblin armed with his pile of gifts, tempting children who were never seen again. She woke tangled in sweat-drenched sheets, carrying the horrors with her like…

Her days were passing in a blur, night falling with no real memory of the day. She was existing on the edges of life. She threw herself into experiences. She flew to America and drove down highway one. She did a bungee jump, graduated to a skydive. They all faded as quickly as a dream…

Working in a secondhand bookshop was a life that he never thought could be his. The first thing he noticed was the smell. A top note of the earthiness of the paper mixing with the old leather binding, and beneath that a faint scent of vanilla and almonds from the glue and ink softly breaking…