Category: Microfiction

“What’s your favourite colour?” “Pink!” “Urgh, you’re such a boring GIRL.” * “What’s your favourite colour?” “Pink.” “Really? Why?” “Have you ever considered a world devoid of pink? No flushing of skin when someone is embarrassed or in love. No cherry blossoms filling the skies and attracting insects with their blooms. No rich sunsets formed by…

“Happy Birthd…” “Nope.” “What do you mean nope?” “I mean nope. You think I want to celebrate the uncontrollable marching of time? The aging of my flesh as it starts to sag from my bones? The steady decline towards the grave?” “Bloody hell I was just being polite.” They looked at each other through the…

“I told you not to go this way!” “No, I asked if we should go left and you said right, so I went left!” “I meant right as in you’re wrong, go right!” “How on earth was I supposed to know that?” “I thought it was obvious from my inflection.” “Your inflection?!” “Why can’t you…

“Why do you always wear red lipstick?” She smiled, her teeth perfectly white but a little crooked, making her look beautifully approachable. “My grandmother always told me that no matter how tired you are, you should always wear a bright lipstick. That way everyone looks at your mouth and not at your eyes.” “That’s clever.…

She hadn’t been herself. She had felt her battery depleting, the effort of getting dressed taking three times as long as it should have done. She tried to explain it to her mother. “Do you feel like the lights have gone out?” She shook her head. “Not quite. That makes it sound like they can…

He took a crowbar to the built-in bookshelves in the run down house that he had big dreams for. It smelt of dust and faded memories, and he wore a mask and goggles to protect himself from the splintering wood. As he pulled out the last shelf, something caught his eye as he went to…

“Once a bell has been rung you cannot unring it.” The boy lowered the baseball bat and looked at the weathered face that looked into his. The man looked both old and young, the eyes showing the person he had once been. “What are you talking about old man?” “If you swing that bat and…

She was the girl with the looping curls. She was the girl who always ran to the helter-skelter first, craving the turns that made her satisfyingly dizzy. She was the woman who relished the role of sommelier, turning her nose up at screw-capped bottles as she expertly wielded a corkscrew, wine opened with a flourish.…

“Another book? Seriously?” “What’s the problem?” She gestured around herself. At the double layered bookshelves that had books lying flat on the books that were standing tall. At the piles of books on the floor each a precarious metre high. “How many books do you think an average person reads in a lifetime?” She clutched…

The smells rushed in at her, each jostling for her attention, crowding all of her senses. Warm rubber from basketballs passed between hot hands. Powdery chalk used to ease palms reddened by coarse rope. And the sweat, layer upon layer, built up over the years like an olfactory mille-feuille. It lingered in the seats, tucked…