Author: Lauren Thomas

They looked forward to the maze reopening every year. The hedges reached eight foot tall, preventing even the tallest people with the most powerful jumps from seeing their way to the centre. Despite its proximity to a busy road, the maze felt other-worldly, muffling the sounds of the man-made world whilst heightening those of the…

He told everyone that the tree grew pears. The fruit that dropped certainly looked like pears. But when bitten into they became something else, showing the consumer their deepest desires and the path they needed to follow to fulfil them. He was particular about who was allowed to eat from the tree, mindful of those…

She was a thief her entire life. As a child she swiped penny sweets from the tubs in the corner shop. She graduated to chocolate caramels from the Woolworths pick and mix and eventually grapes from fat bunches in supermarkets. She thought everyone did it. When she entered the workplace, she took credit for the…

Getting ready for this first day of secondary school, Rupert chewed thoughtlessly on the toast his mother always managed to burn at the edges and blame the toaster for. She could never remember which of her sons preferred peanut butter and which marmalade, and inevitably she would hand him the wrong plate and a flurry…

In winter she swam, cracking the ice on the surface and holding it up to the camera like a trophy, grinning through chattering teeth, a hat tight on her head. In spring she swam, her toes wet from the dew on the grass before she even entered the water, the morning light warmer. In summer…

After she became bored with paper, she painted every surface she could find. At first it was the bathroom mirror, a mountain range in shades of burgundy and brick red, her mother’s lipsticks decimated to stubs. Next it was the garage door, this time with permission, which she turned into a tulip field, ablaze with…

She left social media, not because of the rampant falsehoods or the adverts for things she knew would never work but still wanted. She left because it was filled with ghosts. The friendships that had ended badly taunted her with snapshots of drunken nights out, heads squashed together in the frame, hair plastered to foreheads.…

She was well known at her local supermarket. Not for the red velvet hat she always wore, or for her leopard print Doc Martens. Not even for her lace parasol. It was for Clive, the silvery cat she walked on a lead, her constant companion on oversized paws. He attracted stares and sounds of wonder.…

Her mother always said that a clean recipe book was unlucky. She had inherited her book of recipes with the broken spine from her own grandmother, its pages stiffened by tomato sauce and crusted with split sugar, the writing inside as delicate as spider webs. Niamh liked to put it to her nose, the scents…

She stood beneath the streetlight that had been out for a few months, lending her a black cloak outside his window. She saw the glow of the TV flicker across their faces, his arm draped across the red-headed woman’s torso who laid with her head on his lap. She remembered what it had felt like…