It was the best Christmas break of my life. We spent most of it in her bed, but we did take the occasional trip off-campus. Under cover of darkness, lest anyone still lurking around after finals see us together, we’d sneak out to the store for ice cream; or to the gas station for the
Josephine cooked the fish I did not want as I stood on the back porch smoking. The garden was alive and moved with unusual sounds. The wine tasted like metal on my tongue, cold red, that’s how she drinks it and that’s how it is. Ice ice baby. The forty degree heat sizzled my cool
Just now, while you’re walking through the park, if you look up at the right-hand corner of the third floor of the hospital, you’ll see her, Bryony. You know she’s seen you; she has keen eyes and a sense for the coming and going of things. Back in her early twenties, when she was studying
He arrived on Nathan’s tenth birthday. It wasn’t a shock; it was as if Nathan had been waiting for him to appear all along. It had been a nice day, a little chaotic, but nice all the same. After opening the presents and tucking into a mountain of sandwiches, at three o’clock they cut the
Find cheapest option – of course Diane didn’t have any savings to pay for her own funeral. Stacey said it’s down to me seeing as I’m “the one with the fancy London life and my own business”. If the garden wasn’t all concreted over, I’d be up for just digging a hole and dropping Diane
There is something quite comforting about knowing that this is the end of human existence. It doesn’t matter that we all die; that everything is pointless and that I’ve not achieved anything. I must be special if I’m one of the last people to walk the earth, before our self-inflicted extinction. It’s the same perverse
Surrounded by bamboo trees, Molly lounges in her stained oak rocking chair, observing her spotted male cat and wondering which Goddess showered the boy with the gift of true patience. But not the kind exhibited by humans, who simply fall into a momentary lapse of reason and stare with vacant eyes at their immediate surroundings.
Every Saturday, Luna walked to an adoption center. She put on a coat and two scarves. More often than not, she carried a piece of fruit. One Saturday, it was a peach. She rolled it between her fingers, by turns gentle, then violent. Luna needed a family. She wanted a child that wasn’t too young
About two thirds of the way through ‘The Fabric of Tombstones’ there’s a line – short and sweet though it is – that perhaps sums up what we should expect from B.F Jones’ debut flash fiction collection. ‘All these souls, here momentarily, before going there permanently, trying to get on with their lives and make
The moment he throws the first jab, he’s conscious of a songbird out in the yard. As he feels the jarring impact and at least one of his knuckles coming apart, he imagines the bird trawling the very latticework of spring for a mate, indifferent to this uncoupling of some other kind of couple. With
