“I’m going to the toilet,” Rich said.

“Okay,” said Steph.

Rich stood and crossed the bar. As he pushed open the door to the toilet he looked back at Steph. She was sitting on a stool at a table by the window, with her fist pressed into her cheek, watching people walk by. She was pretty, in a way, but Rich had thought about breaking up with her today. He still was thinking about it. He entered the toilet.
(more…)

When the doctor left the room I started to cry
I’m so confused, I’m so lost

A lover’s hand is where I want to lie
I can’t see myself anymore
I can’t see right or wrong

I sit in a small room
Next to a man I know as my friend
I start to cry and then my head lays at rest in his lap;
The lap of a man I now know as more than just a friend
I am confused, I am scared. (more…)

Sometimes she wanted to beat her fists against it. But how could one beat one’s fists against life? She threw the puzzle across the room and it splintered against the wall, sending shards of transparent plastic flying and minute silver balls skittering across the floorboards. Her stomach was cramped and it agitated her. She picked up her digital pen and drew another few lines, almost haphazardly. The window went blank. Frozen again. Need a new computer. She growled and hit the keyboard. Processor’s fault really, or the graphics card. Maybe just a new graphics card would do, cheaper. Birthday at the end of the month, could ask Daddy, or Mother.

(more…)

Jenny lay with a paperback novel open across her breast, staring at the lazily swaying leaves above her. She could hear the whine of a remote-controlled plane from across the field, changing in pitch as it banked and swerved. Beyond that came the gentler, resonating sound of a ball striking a bat; the sound of a father playing cricket with his children. On the grass next to her sat Mike with his knees drawn up into arches. He was watching a dragonfly as it flew up the incline, hovered a few feet from his face, then darted away over the trees.

“Dragonfly,” he said.

“Mm?” said Jenny.
(more…)

Recently, since reading Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, I’ve come to a new appreciation of the short story. I’ve always written short stories, but I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, to tell long, grand tales over hundreds of pages. Consequently, I’ve always read novels rather than short stories. And novels are worthwhile, fulfilling experiences. But they take a long time, and it just hit me that maybe, and I think this is true of myself, though I can’t speak for anyone else, I generally don’t enjoy novels while I’m reading them, only afterwards, when I look back on them. (more…)

I knocked on Elle’s front door. The street was silent but for the distant whoosh of traffic, the calls of children in a school playground and an aeroplane passing overhead. The door opened. Elle’s brother, Nick, stood there. He wore a white t-shirt and tight-fitting black jeans with a hole in the knee. His hair was wet. He looked at me.

“Is Elle in?” I asked.

“Rob, right?”

I nodded.

“No, she’s not in,” Nick said, “I think she went to college.”

“Oh,” I said, “she doesn’t usually today.”

“No,” Nick said, “she had to hand something in or something.”

“Oh.”

I rocked back on my heels, pushed my thumbs into my jeans pockets, looked at the door-frame.

“I think she said she wouldn’t be long. Have you tried texting her?”

“I don’t have any credit.”

Nick looked past me for a moment. I turned to see a lady in a brown coat walking a long-haired dog. I turned back round.

“Do you want to come in and wait for her?” Nick asked.

(more…)

Fluorescent supermarket strip-lighting lit her blue eyes, though romantically he considered they might have sparkled anywhere. There were other checkouts open, some with shorter queues, but he had chosen hers: There was something about the lines of her hair as they swirled behind her ear to the loose doubled-over ponytail above her neck, and her slimness, not just in her frame but in her precise economical movements that he liked. He stood, watching her serve the customer in front, feeling inadequate with his frozen pizzas and microwave ready-meal.

“Hi,” she said with a smile.

“Hi,” he repeated, reflecting the smile with a quick honest tightening of his own dimples. Their eyes met, momentarily. Blue. Brown. Did she smile like that for all the customers, he wondered. Perhaps that was why they hired her: that smile. A smile like that brightens someone’s day. A girl like that brightens someone’s day.

No, she didn’t smile like that for everyone who passed by, certainly not for the old drunkards smelling of fags, buying own-brand vodka and whisky, in whose eyes glinted a little semi-concious letch; nor for the shaven-headed twenty-something males in tracksuits nonchalantly dropping packs of Carlsberg onto the conveyor belt; nor even for the haughty middle-aged, middle-class women buying pre-packed, adjective laden, fillets of salmon: for these stereotypes, the basis of which had been one or two regulars, but the labelling of which had been applied whole groups that had all blended into that single entity known as ‘customer’, her smile always felt forced, strained. Not that they noticed.

(more…)

“When are we going to have sex?” the girl asked.

“When you say ‘I love you’ and I say ‘I love you’,” the boy replied.

“I love you,” the girl said.

The boy looked at her and he felt sad.

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11

12

“Mark, sorry about Friday night, just leaving like that. And sorry that I’ve not been in touch. I really owe you an explanation, and here it is: a couple of months ago, I got really involved with this guy, and it was all going well. Apart from his children, and though we got on really well, his kids just hated me for some reason, and it was like no matter what I did, I could not get them to like me. And eventually they kind of just broke up our relationship. Like even though we were getting along really well, he told me it just wasn’t working out, and it was all because of his kids. And it really hurt me.

(more…)

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10

11

“Hi, Mum, I can come pick the girls up today.” It was Sunday.

“Mark, I tried to ring you yesterday.”

“I wasn’t in.” When I got back, I had been overcome with tiredness and had gone to bed and fallen asleep almost instantly.

“I know, but I tried ringing your mobile.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the little telephone. It was switched off.

(more…)