Category: Microfiction

She heard Pulp’s Common People and was transported back thirty years. She was thirteen and clothes were thrown around her room, nothing fitting right or looking how she wanted it to. Even her favourite navy t-shirt with the heart from Tammy Girl had looked all wrong, now abandoned on her futon. Her ill-advised attempt at…

He knew he looked smart in his suit. Because everyone told him that he did. He liked to look at himself in the mirror to see how it fitted, cocking his head as if he didn’t trust his reflection. His mother would usually kiss the top of his head when she saw him doing this,…

“Why do you collect sheep?” “I don’t.” “Um, yes you do.” She saw the footstool, its grin lopsided and its fluffy white coat grey with age. She saw the clock that baaed on the hour, an irritation she had evolved to ignore. She thought of the stone sheep outside, both welcoming and unnerving. He grabbed…

She didn’t tell anyone about the sun-bleached bone she had found on the beach. As a child it had been a treasure, like the shell that looked like a butterfly wing and the three glass beads from a broken necklace. All were unearthed from the sand during the building of sandcastles that were destined to…

Whenever she walked into a cathedral she felt oddly heavy. When she was younger she thought it was the weight of guilt, pressing her down and telling her she didn’t belong. But now she recognised it as the weight of history, of the songs sung beneath stone towers, the words of promise spoken at altars,…

He remembered the sofa his mother had bought in the eighties. He remembered the cream covers with stripes in shades of blush pink, bright teal and dove grey. He remembered Val from down the road cooing over it. He remembered how at eighteen he had stumbled into it, red wine in hand. The cream had…

“Look mama – there are people in the trees!” Her gaze followed her son’s chubby finger. Through the trees she could see the path of the local park, slightly higher than they were, that indeed made it look like the people and their dogs were walking on the branches. She prepared herself to talk to…

She cried every day. She couldn’t help it. She was made that way. She stood by the river and inhaled deeply as the water flowed past her. She watched as dogs passed her by, sometimes stealing a glance up at her but largely ignoring her. She watched as the rowers moved through her shadow, too…

She tried not to stare. But it was so hard not to. The woman was sat at a table on her own, smaller than she looked on TV, and decidedly more human than she looked on social media. She had what looked like a matcha latte in front of her and her small dog sat…

She was obsessed with cherries, despite her first experience of them. Stealing a chocolate from her mother’s Valentine’s selection, she had gagged as an explosion of cherry liqueur had burned its way down her throat, her mother crying with laughter in the doorway at a lesson learned. But now they were her simplest joy. The…