Breakfast
By Viccy Adams
Hanging on the wall in the hallway of my parents’ house is a portrait of my great grandparents on their engagement day. It’s one of those typical, non-smiling sepia photographs. He has a massive moustache and her hair is scraped back off her face so hard it must have been painful.
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Man of Glass
By Catherine Almond
I found the police officers in the waiting room; I had been out with a research student whose dissertation I was supervising. My secretary introduced them, Inspector John March and his assistant, Sergeant Howell. I entered my office and Sarah ushered them in behind me. I paused for a moment and then answered the Inspector’s first question.
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The Circle Line
By Bruce J Berger
“I just don’t get it,” said Ellie as she frowned and brushed her long brown hair from her gray eyes. She focused again at the notebook her, flipped some pages, and looked at Martin across the metal table, puzzled. “I just don’t.”
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Goose at the White Feather
By Joanna Campbell
Everything was the same the day they came. The hum of the fridge, the soft voice of the radio, the eight o’clock sun. Same breakfast of warm bagels and fruit. Same headlines about gypsy camps on our people’s land.
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In Here With Us
By Rico Craig
June 18 1999 London
I arrive alone because Gaston doesn’t believe in protests and I don’t believe in him. I’m thinking the guilty thoughts of a person leaving. I walk from Liverpool St tube into sunlight. I can’t explain why I packed a bag and snuck out of the flat while he was asleep.
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Perception >Reality
By CD Mitchell
He walked up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. The house seemed pleasant enough–with red brick along the front and wood siding painted olive green down the sidewalls and on the soffits. But sections of the fascias had rotted and needed replacing. The new coat of paint covered the weathered areas well, however, and gave proof the owners had decided to wait another year before replacing the rotten trim. Randy Johnson waited for someone to open the door while he admired the simple elegance of the home.
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Walkin’ the Dog
By Ted Morrissey
Tom Gest checks the door of Dorm C to make sure it’s secure and he peers through the safety glass. The inmates seem to have settled down. Their orange jumpsuits hang from the ends of bunkbeds like emaciated spirits. There is a faint light coming from the far end of the barricks-style dormitory, from the restroom and shower area. But that is the responsibility of the guard in the surveillance station. Tom pauses for a moment to notice his own ghostly reflection in the thick glass. His dark hair is neatly trimmed, as is his beard and mustache, but there appear to be a few more filaments of white, and the creases around his eyes are deeper set. There is no doubt about it: Tom is becoming his father.
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Entropy
By Kirsty Neary
‘Pure entropy, like,’ he says, dropping words like coins into my ear. He slides back into the seat alongside, the better to keep his face and form in full view of the audience. They’re still cheering and clapping, a few members inching around to the table upon which sits an artful arrangement of his latest chapbook. All those words for a mere five pounds, signed to your specification, if you so wish. I’ve my eyes trained on the half-circle window over the front door of the bar, still flooding a couple meters of linoleum with mandarin light. Summer is coming. It seems important to focus on simple pleasures.
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Dead People I Have Known
By Charlie Taylor
The first was Uncle Tom who committed suicide when I was nine. I heard my father tell my mother about it when he got home from work. I was skidding Dinky toys across the linoleum square in the parlour, crashing them into one another and making childish imitation noises of tortured metal and exploding fuel tanks. He was dreadfully upset about it, I can remember that much.
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