No-Fly List

Posted on by under 2025, April 2025 - The List

NY December 2026.

There is an awkward moment on my arrival when an ICE agent insists on me unpacking my case. He tells me there is similar name to mine on their no-fly list.

I realise I can’t remember my PIN, so I put my hand in my suit pocket to get my phone, and he reaches for his sidearm.

“Phone,” I say, a weak grin on my face, withdrawing it slowly with two fingers. I can smell the heat of my sweat rising and try to suppress a tremble in my hand, but only succeed in dropping the phone.

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Prompt for April 2025

Posted on by under 2025, April 2025 - The List

HOMEWORK for deadline Thursday 10pm, 24.04.25.

TASK: ‘The List’. Write 500 words or fewer about ‘The List’. Your story title isn’t included in the 500 words.

Homework to be in by 10pm at the latest, Thursday 24th April 2025. (This time deadline will be helpful to both Martyn and Pat).

Meeting at 1.30pm, Sunday 27.04.25, Waterstones Bookshop,1st floor, Oxford Street: subject to confirmation. Finish at 3.30pm.

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Portrait of a Man on Fire

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

On the 29th of May, I was sent off to Joseph Dahl’s townhouse. He was often seen strolling around Caden Street or by the lake in Muriel Park, wishing everyone a good hullo, usually while dressed in a grey suit tailored from JR Parking’s and wearing a straw hat. A habit which made him the menace of a few penny counters and good Samaritans, but the local policemen regarded him as more an itch than any serious threat.

“Some people,” he said as he gripped my hand in his leathery paw, “can’t understand the spiritual life, they’ll chant their vows come Sunday but rarely put those promises into practice.”

“How about it?” asked his not wife, not girlfriend, Susannah, who at that moment lazed upon the sofa. “Do you swear by Christ or by Odin?”

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H. E. A. T.

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

The scanner in the pilot’s cabin read 852,0 °C outside. Next to a star with a heat burst in progress… that’s expected.

“Opening airlock in thirty seconds”, Heather tweaked some switches.

In the airlock, Tony stood ready in his spacesuit, holding a space surfing board.

“Y’know, that’d be our fiftieth planet”, he said.

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Mangoes and Mangroves

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

“Nothing worse than unripe tropical fruit”, muttered Garnet to no-one in particular as she stabbed the pallid orange cubes in their plastic punnet. Mango was meant to be fleshy, aromatic and messy, not like these bullets of sadness.

And that’s all it took for Garnet to book a one way ticket home to northern Queensland. London had seemed like a good time, at the time. Snow, centuries old buildings, Big Ben, quick trips to the continent, the promise of a French boyfriend. The reality was a low wage nannying job, a mouldy bedsit, gun metal skies and loneliness as a constant companion.

Queensland didn’t have a summer; it was either the wet season or the dry season. The wet was Garnet’s favourite. It came to her in her dreams through the smell of watermelons, ylang ylang and warm rain on hot tarmac. The memory of humidity hugged her like a long lost lover.

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Love Letter

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

The walk to his home filled me with anxiety.

The cold air bit at my red-hot cheeks and my boots clipped along the uneven pavement. Perhaps these were signs. Omens of what was to come. If they were, I did not heed them.

I continued to tramp briskly toward my destination and in the distance, I saw him standing outside his door awaiting my arrival.

This wasn’t the way I wanted to do this. I had wanted to drop the letter in and run away, leaving him to reel in its indulgent vulnerability alone. However, pushed by the needs of others I’d been made to forewarn him, or at least alert him to my impending presence, and now I must face him in a less romantic fashion.

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A Warm-hearted Fellow

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

            ‘Who is it?’ asked the youth astride a delivery cycle.

            ‘An ordinary Joe, mate,’ the fellow with a face as seamed as a nineteen fifties leather football replied.

            ‘Pretty popular.’

            ‘Well, he was a giver.’

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Heat Hub Heist

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

As the poor got poorer, local councils  were inspired to think about the optics of people dying alone in unheated homes during the chilly winters. Small grants enabled local organisations with free space to keep their heating on and invite local people to come in and warm up, sometimes offering  soup and sandwiches as part of their welcome to the heat hub.

People certainly benefitted from the warmth, and they also met other people.  For some this went no further than the chat and the bingo.  For others it presented opportunities to establish some common ground: to build solidarity.

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ONLY SO MUCH HEAT

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

Bud pulled Jack to one side outside the cell. ”They want us to turn up the heat on the boy.”

” You telling me they actually believe that kid has an inside track on ‘THE CHOSEN ONE’?  He’s paranoid, mad as a box of hares, everyone knows.”

” Ssh, walls have ears. I know people have disappeared for saying less aloud.”

Jack snorted, ”OK, let’s get on with it, suppose we are the moral police.”

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One Scout Went to Mow

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

It’s Joe’s turn to tell a story by the campfire.

“One night, a boy went missing on Scout Camp,” he whispers. I shiver, despite the heat, and huddle in closer. I’m not scared, it’s just that it’s hard to hear him when he’s whispering like that. Behind him, the shadowy outline of tree branches could be horns growing out of his head.

“Every year, on the anniversary of his disappearance, another boy goes missing. But right before he does, he sees the missing boys. No-one else can see them…”

The fire spits and we all jump, then we’re laughing uncontrollably. This is way more fun than singing boring camping songs.

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The Heat Death of the Multiverse

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

It’s been four o’clock forever here. An almost endless afternoon spinning off into the distance, only concluding when the skies darken, and rain falls like frozen droplets of spite on the bald patch at the crown of my head. If they named this spot “Ennui”, I would not be more surprised than I already am. So complete is its banality, it vies with “a rural bus stop” for the listless black hole Victor ludorum.

André Gide once said, “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore.” Gide has clearly never set sail for Gowerton.

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Task for March 2025

Posted on by under 2025, March 2025 - Heat

HOMEWORK for deadline Thursday midnight, 20.03.25.

TASK: ‘Heat’. Write 500 words or fewer about ‘Heat’. Your story title isn’t included in the 500 words.

Homework to be in by 10pm at the latest, Thursday 20th March 2025. (This time deadline will be helpful to both Martyn and Pat}.

Meeting at 1.30pm, Sunday 23.03.25, Discovery Room, 1st floor, Central library. Finish at 3.30pm.

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Black Honey

Posted on by under 2025, February 2025 - Rescue

She’s a good egg, our Fi. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be suitable for the job. That’s why we allow her keep us. We are the keepers of the keepers.

We see everything. When we buzz around waggling to one another, we’re not only chasing nectar. We’re assessing the mental state of the people and communicating potential danger. Forget being a ‘fly on the wall.’ Flies don’t care. It’s the bees who watch, listen and help.

Take Ian Jones next door. He had a near-miss with death only last month. He was smoking a cigarette beside the azaleas in his front garden whilst I busied myself with the foxgloves. What’s dangerous about that, you ask, aside from the obvious? It’s true that the smoking will get him eventually, but that’s not the sort of thing we get involved in. On this occasion I could tell from his stance, the faraway look in his eyes, and the slightly acidic smell of his perspiration, that he was planning on this being his last cigarette before taking his own life. Well, those things and my complex assessment of his mood over recent weeks.

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IT’S NOT A BUDGIE !!

Posted on by under 2025, February 2025 - Rescue

Wilf hovered  over the birdcage, eyeing it with affection. He had to admit Polly did look a little large and she did seem to enjoy a bit of raw meat.

He’d got the chick from a stranger in the pub who said it was a baby parrot. Scruffy thing it was and looked starving. Something in the way it looked at him pulled his heart strings .

”How much for him, bearing in mind it looks half dead ?”

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The hunted

Posted on by under 2025, February 2025 - Rescue

“Hello?”

Beams of light sliced the darkness, and she shrank into the corner, shivering. Hopefully they’d not see her, move on, and she could get back to eking out her existence on whatever she could forage at night time, and the small creatures that fell into the crude traps she lay near the entrance to the cold, dark, cave system.

Maybe, she thought, as footsteps echoed, getting louder and closer, that was what’d drawn them into the depths, that she’d been careless and left signs, indicators of her existence. Whatever had got them here, they weren’t leaving.

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I’m here to rescue you!

Posted on by under 2025, February 2025 - Rescue

Measuring time was next to impossible. No clocks, no sunlight, no signs from the outside world.

Smith had called out in his windowless cell, heard his voice echoed down the dingy corridor and yet there were no noises in response. No rumble of traffic, no coughing or shuffling of feet, no bellowing “to keep it down,” not even a crackle from the pipes or the creek of a floorboard. The silence outside was deafening and the only sounds Smith could hear were made by his own body.

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Rescue dogs make the best breed

Posted on by under 2025, February 2025 - Rescue

“The sedative is starting to take effect now”.

I began to tell the vet of her uncertain start to life but hesitated. That didn’t seem important anymore, it was the here and now, this exact moment, and I found myself lost in the vibrations of her gentle snores, the soft rise and fall of her warm breath.

She was absolutely and unashamedly my child substitute. As one half of a childless lesbian couple, a puppy was bound to become our baby, and neither of us ever denied it. Still, it was my idea to go looking for a pup and when I met her, I knew she was the only one that would do.  

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Blackpool Rocks

Posted on by under 2025, February 2025 - Rescue

            The president’s plane took off from Paris. He was going home. Before reaching the Atlantic, there was a huge explosion of lightning in the sky like Armageddon. It struck the plane, a wing caught fire, smoke was billowing everywhere.

            ‘Parachute! Parachute!’ the captain shouted. ‘Prepare the president for emergency exit.’

Two of the crew bundled him out of the toilet where he’d been tweeting.

‘Hey, what about my pants?’

‘Strap this on!’ one guy shouted.

‘Open exit door!’ said the second.

‘Release!’

The president, falling to earth, trouserless, looked up at the plane wreathed in fire. Next thing he knew his parachute was snagged on top of a metal tower, the heavens still electrically charged with tongues of lightning.

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Not exactly Danse Macabre

Posted on by under 2025, February 2025 - Rescue

A rather puny skeleton squeezed himself out of the cupboard and moved silently around a bedroom. It was a boring job, representing some rather meagre misdeeds needing to be tucked away, but at least he wasn’t locked up and could rove around a bit. He knew of some more burly colleagues whose cupboards were permanently locked, chained and protected by serious legal teams standing in protective readiness. What horrors they were representing was kept firmly under wraps.

The real downside of being a low status skeleton (and who knew, maybe it was the same, or even worse, for the stars of the skeleton-in-cupboard world) was that there was very little to do. He had to make his own entertainment.

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Ironbell to the rescue.

Posted on by under 2025, February 2025 - Rescue

He swept into the room as if he owned it; every head turning as he strode across the parquet flooring, his heels clicking. Even Queen Elowen Lumina looked up from the sheaf of demands she was studying.

“This is,” she started to say, ‘this is a meeting of the Royal Council to which only members and invited guests can attend.’

But then he pulled back his hood, and recognition spread across her face. “Oh, Inspector Ironbell, I hadn’t expected to see you.”

“Ma’am,” Inspector Camden Ironbell kneeled at her side and took her hand. “I believe you have a problem.”

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