Category: Microfiction

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…

His scars told individual tales, but they didn’t tell the whole story. The missing tip of his finger from when his older brother Joe slammed the car door on it. The aged slash on his forearm, an angry red smile, from the hot tray of roast potatoes Joe had turned into him with. The dent…

She sat at her grandmother’s rosewood desk, the surface scarred by scissors and pens, a patchwork of fables. Her grandfather’s watch ticked softly at her wrist, heavy and cold. Looking around the rest of the room she wondered what sort of legacy she was leaving her own children. Flat packed furniture filled the rest of…

He wore a suit because he thought it made him look smartly unremarkable. It sat a little too broadly on his slight shoulders, a little too long at the cuffs. The woman across the road watched him at the bus stop every day, gazing at the man who looked like he was hiding secrets in…