My father sat in a thin blue shirt with buttons undone, his breath seeping out the corner of his chapped lips in lazy coils. The windscreen had frosted over during the night, barbed spirals of ice like bacteria in a petri dish. He hadn’t bothered to scrape it off on my side and only an
Adam Lock is someone that has been going about his craft in a subtle, under-the-radar kind of way, building an impressive list of publications where his work has feature either in the short story form or flash fiction – both online and in print. We’ve been watching Adam Lock’s development as a writer like proud
At first Dom seemed okay about selling the Z3. We posted it on Auto Trader then spent hours poring over Which Car? weighing up family-friendly designs. We had already sold the flat and bought a four-bed house with a garage, now home to a BabyJogger buggy. I had no intention of holding on to the
Louise the health visitor is coming today so I need to spruce myself up. She comes once a week on a Monday at midday, has done for a year. Today is her last visit, though she doesn’t know it yet. In the shower I scrub my body with the loofah mitt until it burns, singing
I was working late in the library translating an old manuscript when the blackouts first rolled in. The sharp-scented musk of ancient books has always made me feel at home, and in the subterranean stacks it’s easy to imagine yourself elsewhere. The brittle pages of the Aesopica crackled beneath my white-gloved hands, and the dim
I’m running through the cold shallows then a low dive and I’m under, opening my eyes to the milk white, green then black, working my limbs, pushing into nothing before I’m up again, often against a wind that stirs the water to frisky waves slapping my face till I have to turn back. Wading the
…any kind of mixture that does not in some way or other possess measure of the nature of proportion will necessarily corrupt its ingredients and most of all itself. – Plato, Phlb 64d. Attributed to Socrates. Kimiko accepted meeting at fixed regular intervals. In return, I tolerated some rather unusual proposals. Foremost among these was
The machine is a shining oblong, with a slant of window running along one side. Through this, a world of slow, painstaking preparation can be seen; a factory in miniature. They are nearly always the same size and shape and are nearly always the same shade of brown, with golden sides, risen to just the
On the morning of the 26th Mr. Withers sits at his kitchen table spreading chocolate truffles on toast. He places them in the centre of the bread and waits for them to melt, before expertly steering the screed towards the crusts, an equal portion to every side. The knife moves innately, like a big fish
Sara’s coworker Rita puts hands on hips and assumes a mock frown. And why aren’t we in school today, Miss Melissa? Sara holds one of her daughter’s shrugging shoulders. They seem to be making, um, adjustments at pre-K, she says, so I thought, why not spend a day at mom’s work? She can sit in
