short fiction
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I woke in the dark. The cabin stank of stale cigarettes and beer. I pulled on all of my clothes, but couldn’t find my shoes. I walked barefoot up the steps, leaving Cubby’s hulk snoring in the dark. The moon was huge and the light falling on the deck was bright grey and harsh. The…
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Ali says: “He started coming in a few weeks ago, and after a few days I assumed he was going to be a regular customer, and that he was going to buy the same thing every time. We smile at each other, and he tells me about simple things, like the weather.” This is reminding…
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Julie places cutlery, plates and a lighted candle onto the kitchen table. She looks at the clock. Ali will be home soon, after closing the shop and locking everything up for the night. It will be just the two of them for dinner tonight—the girls are already in bed. She sits and closes her eyes…
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He sat down, leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes. His train wasn’t due for another eight minutes. Two trains, then his. Someone, a man at the end of the platform, was shouting about how he hadn’t said something, “…you’re wrong, I didn’t say that, that’s not the way it happened”. A voice…
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Of course, I was just holding out for adventure. I had a filmic view of the world, taken from watching movies on television with my mother. I tended to leave the room before the endings—I dreaded the sudden shift from film-world to reality. So I learned to love the snatches more than the whole. To…
Barry Lee Thompson 