short story
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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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Roscoe tells me he thinks I’m getting better. I don’t know why he brings it up like that, from nowhere. It starts me thinking. I don’t feel much better. I haven’t been comfortable going out after dark for months. I count back. Three months? Four? ‘It’s all ended well,’ he says. ‘Has it?’ ‘It’s…
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We’d bunked off school that afternoon. Me and Pauline were lying in the tall grass. Henry was sitting away, with his back to us. For ages I looked, at his dark hair, deep black, almost purple, like a crow, and the whiteness of his neck, like ice-cold milk. His head was down, and he was…
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We were in a seafood restaurant. Herman was chewing a mussel, over and over. I asked him if it was okay. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s tough. Like meat. I want to spit it.’ ‘Then spit it,’ I said. I looked around for him. ‘No one’s watching us.’ ‘A pity,’ he said. Why, he asked, did…
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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 