Short Fiction

Googling Her Jim Ward ‘Will you have a glass of something? Jameson?’ me Ma asked. ‘Naw. Can’t’ he said ‘whiskey don’t agree with me.’ ‘Oh’ she said, considering her next move ‘a bottle of stout then?’ ‘Yes please.’…

The caretaker Jock looked round his five cleaners as they had a quick cup of tea in their closet amid the smell of old mop-heads before school finished for the day and they went off to clean their classrooms. His gaze lingered on David, who…

Is love a practice or a place?  And where does it go, when it comes?   "Paco came from the sea," she said.  It was all she had ever said. Long before the wind was captured.  Before a word was ever spoken.  Before darkness became…

A handful of lentils boil in water with a generous dash of turmeric to forget the taste of death coating the tongue. On good days, you add some chillies and garlic. Not today. As you drink it, you succumb to a raking cough. It’s a while…

Slump  Mister Bayliss, of Bristol, businessman, makes his way steadily down O’Connell Street, squinting into the low sun, eager for breakfast, the essential ingredient of any successful day. The portly gentleman could have taken a taxi…

L.P. Hartley once said that the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. For the mostly nameless women in the eight stories which make up Nicole Flattery’s debut, Show Them A Good Time, the present seems like a foreign…

***CONTENT WARNING: Suicide*** Today is the day I commit suicide. It has to be today. It's Rebecca's anniversary. I have to top hers. "Alone...sleeping pills...overdose". She died as she'd lived, a cliché. Her romance novels were…

Harley got out of bed and shone the torch into the car park. V sat up straight, switched on her lamp, then waited, like a hospital patient. ‘Can you see anything?’ Harley moved the light over to the trees, seeing the man moving like…

Dear Richard, Remember that pact we made? Signed and sealed with spit-slicked hands. Time’s up. I’ve decided to keep it. It’s weird of me to write a letter, I know. Why not just text, or even an email? I’m writing you a letter the…

Before her there were others.  After, there will be more.  Right now there are plenty.  Plenty.  Causing his head pain.  ‘She won’t shut up, man.’  Gunner’s voice down the phone is like a knife stabbing his head.  He feels the hotness…