fiction

fiction   December 13, 2025

People like us

Under the rusty annexe that must once have belonged to something else, that is held together with cobwebs and ribbons, we don’t mean to mention dead mother but we do. Dead mother, who aren’t in heaven, we say in unison, in deep voices as if we are...

fiction   November 29, 2025

Anchoress

Peace, she worried, might have even more intractable dangers than war. All the people wondering about what they should do, filling the spaces of peace, rather than war, with danger. This person that person saluting, pointing, as if when you weren’t...

fiction   November 22, 2025

Would you believe it

My Journal 2025 Friday 31 October Dear Journal Remember I was born in 2010 so that by 2022, when ChatGPT went to its debutante ball online, I was 12. Cherry, ripe for the picking. I would in fact say (or whisper) that I was therefore on the...

fiction   November 15, 2025

The flood goats

In the town known as the flood town, every kind of object – living and dead – floated down the river in flood. Chairs, trees, cars, snakes and once a goat, which came to be called the flood goat. No farmer claimed it, no child cried for her pet, and...

fiction   November 1, 2025

Winter and Pippy

If this land was made by anyone, it would be you. You always had a crucial role. Woodend is the beauty of your making. Our mountain is grey like the freshwater pearls you wore just in case he came home. The wet mud looks like one of your letters to...

fiction   October 22, 2025

The people of the movie

When my son was small, I used to listen from the next room as he tried to draw the godlike eye of whatever movie he was watching away from the plight of its people. Hey, Movie, look at this, he would say, waggling a blue plush dog in front of the...

fiction   October 18, 2025

Across the border

1 . Every day we must pass the building site at the end of the street. 2. We ask ourselves, what stage is it at? Complete abandonment or complete destruction. Or perhaps a stage new to us that we do not have the words for. 3. We slap our hands...

fiction   October 11, 2025

The Terrible

On a spring afternoon in 2018, the man leaves Tretyakovskaya station in Moscow unable to remember why he’d come. His backpack, light on his shoulders, contains Dostoevsky’s The Double and a change of clothes. He hadn’t planned a long stay. He has no...

fiction   October 4, 2025

Olympic lion taming

Carl’s got a problem. The problem, he’ll tell anyone who asks, is that the International Olympic Committee is about to cut the most entertaining sport in history from the Games.

fiction   September 20, 2025

Is it for sale, the bird?

I came across the painting of the eagle by chance. It was hanging in the display window of this gallery I sometimes visit and a small group of children were standing on the footpath pointing at it. It’s like it’s going to die, one of them said. It...

fiction   September 13, 2025

The universal joint

It was the first anniversary of her father’s death and Angela was drifting in a world between magic realism and romantic fiction. She shut the massive front door of the elegant mansion behind her as she set out for the office, descending the steps...