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.
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.
Continue readingWilf 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 ?”
Continue reading“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.
Continue readingMeasuring 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.
Continue reading“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.
Continue readingThe 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.
Continue readingA 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.
Continue readingHe 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.”
Continue reading“NO. Not back there! Can’t do it. Don’t give me that 30/180 degrees clash shit. It’s my weekend with the kids. Surely Pika can do it?” Jon, voice rising, was fearful he had overdone it. Following the marriage breakdown he needed the money. But how he had hated that farmyard location,- the greyness, the endless rain, the sucking of his every welly step in the mud.
“Not there yet. Still learning.” Cinematographer Alastair and editor Mel joined forces anticipating his objection. They did not share his unease. AI was their bread and butter and Pika one of the most respected programmes.
Continue readingShe told him it was over.
Sure, she loved him, but she just wasn’t in love with him if that began to make sense.
He looked down at his lap and blinked a little to hide the welling tears. Then rising without a word, he marched upstairs.
She knew he didn’t want her to follow, and she lingered there in his living room, knowing this was a heartless way to end the relationship but God, was there ever a right way? She plucked his housekey from her keychain and wondered if he’d return the key to her flat.
Continue readingThere was never any question of a reconciliation. There hadn’t been a dramatic rift, just a dwindling, eroding sense of partnership. What remained was an exchange of items and after that, their disentanglement : all that had been done was to be finally undone in this ritual handover.
The separation had been efficiently accomplished. The flat was on the market and new living arrangements were in place. Guy and Freya showed no animosity, indeed they intended to remain on friendly terms.
Continue readingWhen she’d entered the church, she’d felt trapped. At the altar just one thought: I don’t want to marry. But it was too late. She couldn’t let the crowd down, nor Colin, her boyfriend since schooldays. She blamed herself for her negativity, swore her vows emptily, and walked out of the chapel on Colin’s arm displaying a forced smile to the many pairs of sugar-sweet eyes offering her love. But there was no love inside her and she left Colin six months later.
That was a decade ago. Here she was again, in a registry office, no ostentation, just the two of them and a witness. Did she love Tim? The question whispered gratingly, as the woman registrar studied her with, she fancied, laser-like insight.
Continue readingNo-one can explain the expansive nothingness of flying through space; it makes you wonder if movement is an illusion hurtling through the flat darkness – everything looking the same as though you were stood still.
Our hero, our returner, Frank 4000, had been enduring this journey for six months. His automated system forged towards his pinpointed base on Earth; that beautiful, colourful, noisy, all-consuming, wondrous place that we take for granted. His slick, silver shell yearned to feel the heat of a human hand once again and his giant eye wished to devour something other than the same stagnant view he’d experienced for so long.
Continue reading“Save it for best,” Mum always said, squirrelling away the fancy china and silk pyjamas.
The saddest thing about sorting through Mum’s possessions is that there are no memories attached to most of them. The house is full of relics that, like Mum, have gathered dust for decades, waiting for a day that never came.
What would have been a special enough occasion to don her finery and leave the house? A meeting with the Queen? Certainly not lunch with me. My wedding. A day out with my children. That is why I stayed away, even as her health declined. It made sense that Adrian, my brother, should look after her, given his closer proximity and the fact that he doesn’t have children.
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“If yer want my opinion,” says Bill. He looks up at Alana, with his runtish face twisted into an intense expression.
“Frankly Bill, I don’t,” Alana interjects before he can launch into one of his tirades about the subject at hand, one of his favourites—why elves would be better employed getting some time in—and monopolise the conversation with tired but well-practised jeu de mots and superficially plausible conclusions that pay scant regard to any logical rigour.
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Low lighting and heavy drapes held the evening at bay. Valerie Trent sat across from her new client, Anita Wallace, who was devoid of makeup, her hair chopped short, her shoulders hunched.
”Anita can you tell me why you are here?”
“My husband died six months and five days ago and I keep thinking I killed him”
”Did you?”
Her eyes filled with anguish. ” I don’t know, he tripped over my foot as I scrambled away from him and he went over the cliff to his death.”
Continue readingHOMEWORK for deadline Thursday midnight, 23.01.25.
TASK: ‘Returning’. Write 500 words or fewer about ‘Returning’. Your story title isn’t included in the 500 words.
Homework to be in by midnight, Thursday 23rd January 2025.
Meeting at 1.30pm, Sunday 26.01.25, Discovery Room, 1st floor, Central library. Finish at 3.30pm.
It was a hollow victory, Hugo thought as he tucked into his last meal. Now that the initial excitement of escaping the care home and boarding a plane to Switzerland had worn off, the stark finality of death began to sink in.
After all his dear friend Ron had done to help him – booking the Dignitas appointment, fetching his passport, lying to the staff and Hugo’s family, and driving him to the airport – he felt bad even thinking like this.
Continue readingMy first game was not going well.
“Terger?”
Me ….“Wiktionary’s definition is ‘a person who teases, taunts, aggravates, angers’”.
As organiser and chair of the scrabble tournament Bryn bristled with self importance…. and incredulity.
“Translated from Norwegian! Come-on Charlie. You know the rules.”
Using a practised left hand to flick through the T’s of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, his right hand twisted first one greasy handle, then the other, of his handlebar moustache.
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