fiction

fiction   January 23, 2026

Gerberas

Mr and Mrs Williams live on a large property where they raised their children. The children are gone and now there is too much house. At first, they liked spreading out, claiming rooms for their hobbies. Mr Williams designed the Gym, the Library and...

fiction   January 10, 2026

Smiley face

The dementia ward door was tucked behind the cheerful little cafe, sporting salt-and-vinegar chips and paper-thin birthday cards on wire-frame racks. Rosie turned right and trudged down the other corridor, following the faint-but-growing scent of...

fiction   December 20, 2025

Wading in

Here’s something Jen would never, ever have dreamed of doing, back in the days when she was married – listening to relationship advice from her barely teenage son. “Mum,” he’s saying, “there’s a lot of good guys out there.” “I can’t believe I’m...

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...