Category: Microfiction

She depended on her routine. She had porridge with blueberries for breakfast every day. She had a wardrobe full of pencil skirts and silk blouses that she wore to work, leaving at exactly 8:22am to walk the twenty-three minutes to her office. She finished her day at 5:37 to be home at exactly 6pm for…

“You’re not going out like that are you?” “Why not?” “Because look at yourself!” He looked in the hallway mirror and took in his too tall frame and his too wild hair. She had always said that she loved the fact that he was unconventional, and that he didn’t care what other people thought. He…

It had been five months since the accident, five months since she had an open fracture of the tibia, a collapsed lung, a ruptured spleen. Five months since she had been dead for a minute. Five months since she had first seen the dark mist in the corner of her room. Five months of watching…

What is a childhood without fully formed memories? While others can tell hour long tales of a single summer’s day, mine are like a book with all but one of the pages pulled out. My next door neighbour, stiffly poking at a plant in the garden with his cane as opera bursts from his house.…

She saved the dress for special occasions. It had never been worn. Occasionally she tried it on, admiring the drama of the green bodice and the voluminous skirt that sounded like whispers of admiration when she moved. But then she would fold it away, berating herself for ever buying it. He put his head around…

“Ooh isn’t this weather lovely?” “Have you been outside today?” “It’s sunny! It’s actually sunny!” God she loved spring. She loved how people chattered, buoyed by the change in weather, the season represented in their step when they dared to go outside without a jacket for the first time. She loved the way dogs would…

She sat beneath the pale light of the slim moon, the stars watching from their vantage point. She had always climbed on to the roof to watch the quiet unfolding of the night, the birds enjoying one final swoop to their homes, the lights in the houses winking off one by one. When the foxes…

He always had a guitar slung over his shoulder. It made people notice him, whether he was walking down a street crowded with harassed workers and staring tourists, or sitting in a bar with a whisky in front of him that he never tasted. Occasionally someone would ask if they could play it and he…

She saw art everywhere she looked. Because she made a point of looking, turning her eyes skyward and crouching to examine the world beneath her feet. A slick of hasty graffiti, unfinished by a panicked arm in a flash of blue lights. An impossible flower growing where it shouldn’t. A crack in a building that…

He watched the man living the life that he was meant to live. They had met in drama school, and he lost out on roles in school plays to him. He was Rosencratz to his Hamlet. Howard Wagner to his Willy Loman. They crossed paths at auditions and he watched from the wings as his…