Category: Microfiction

“Whose shoes are these?” “What?” “In the hallway? Whose shoes?” “What kind of shoes are they?” “Men’s trainers. Old.” “They’re not yours?” “I think I’d know if they were mine.” “Well they’re obviously not mine.” “So whose are they?” She walked into the hallway and looked down at the shoes. He looked at her face…

“Really look at them all.” She looked again, at mothers and daughters arm in arm, milling around the narrow city lanes where the old buildings leant against each other as if exhausted. “Don’t you think they’re all a bit too alike?” She rolled her eyes. “Genetics.” Just then, a mother and daughter walked past her…

It wasn’t an accident. The police weren’t really interested in an elderly man falling from a window. She had watched it unfold from across the road, the most interesting thing to have happened on their street of pensioners for a long time. They assumed that he had been cleaning the windows and leaned too far…

“Hey what’s this?” She held up a small tube and squinted at it through the cobweb that had caught in her fringe. He took it from her hands. “That’s a roll of film!” He had never felt older under her blank stare. “You’d take photos on a camera and then take this out of the…

“I’ve written a poem about Cheerio!” She looked over at their cat, sat on the windowsill staring vacantly at birds it would never catch. “Let’s hear it.” She had stripes on her back and a heart-shaped nose,And in the darkness eyes that glowed,But her clumsiness often caused a ding-dong,Because her tail was impossibly long. She…

“Inky shroud.” “Bat wings.” “Blackberry mist.” “Uncompromising veil.” “Ooh, that’s a good one!” “Thanks! I think that’s for when it’s really dark. Like you can’t see your hand in front of your face dark.” She nodded, putting pencil to paper with her tongue between her teeth. “Cold embers.” “Dulled onyx.” “The Devil’s breath.” They had…

I swear he came from nowhere. There was nothing I could have done about it. Is he going to be ok? He was distracted by his phone. I don’t know whether to tell the police but he got a text and glanced down at the wrong moment. I think he was worried about me seeing…

The infection tore through the room. It started subtly at first, one person hiding their symptom behind a politely crooked finger. Only one other person saw it, not because they were looking on purpose, but because the sun caught the ring on that politely crooked finger. The symptom took the second person unawares with its…

When they finally entered the house, they found a pan on the hob, its contents burned to something unrecognisable. It had been there for so long that the air no longer carried the acrid scent. Instead, it smelled of an absence. The windows, cracked open to welcome what the inspector liked to imagine had been…

The frail man sat on the same bench every day, his small dog on his lap and a bunch of roses in his hand. He looked like a painting. “They say he waits there every day for his wife. But she died years ago.” He smiled at this most common rumour. It was only partly…