Kate North ‘Mask’ was sparked by real life experience and then veered into imagined territory. I started writing it while I was cat sitting at a friend’s house in France, just like the protagonist in the story. I had gone away to work on a novel and I was struggling with it. I ended up…
Alan Bilton There’s a wonderful old black and white Czech film from the sixties called Josef Kilián, in which an anonymous citizen discovers a dilapidated shop on a strange side street offering to rent out cats. Intrigued, he dutifully hires one, but when he returns the next day, the shop is closed and our hero…
Some come to writing because they ‘simply adore the written word’, they’ve always been avid readers, and come from families full of bibliophiles, crossword puzzlers, Scrabblers; families whose pets are named everything from Homer to Holden and whose youngest members carry themselves off to bed early, eager to be read another instalment of Paradise Lost……
Susan MaierMoul My work pretty much always begins with material substances. I loved it when I read Martin Puryear’s description of having a sapling and wanting to do the right thing with it. The sapling came first, and Booker T Washington came after. I collect material a bit in the way of Betye Saar or…
Irfan and Imran, the father announced proudly. Irfan gave her a salute and then flipped over. Imran winked at her. Paula stared at them, unable to move. How should she react, she didn’t know. She was aware of the rest of the family staring at her, waiting for some movement. A wave of anger flooded over her. These boys were not exhibits to make money out of.
In spite of the fact today is no kind of anniversary, I decide we should eat out tonight. I am sat alone at the kitchen table, my back to the window, a mug of coffee cooling against my palms. The heating is off, has been off all day, and behind me the thick autumn cold presses its face against the double-glazing. I feel its breath on the back of my neck
All those brassy trumpets, said Parry. The flowers were insane. But it was the heat that ruined it for me. Or made it too difficult. I was used to a sky the colour of oyster shells. But Adelaide was blue, accusing. The mirages in suburbia trembled like cellophane.
Its four pm, that time of the day where you are divorced from the daylight but not quite ready for night, a halfway point. I like halfway points. I lie in bed; ‘bed’ is a bit misleading, it’s really a mattress tucked into a corner of the room, my boxer shorts pulled low, a little…
My arms weren’t supposed to be trumpets. I’d wanted my arms to be flab free, to be more finely tuned. There was an option underneath the ad that I didn’t see. One slip of the mouse click was all it took: ‘Trumpet Arms — Free Painless Connection’. Declan laughed at first, of course — who…
The new girl cuts across the sunken garden, late for class. Lit by the sun’s nascent summer haze, she almost looks flustered, she certainly looks lost. As she gets her bearings, there’s grace and poise, a balance in her run: she skips and glides across the grass like an okapi or a gazelle. We watch her through classroom windows in anticipation. There’s always something special about new kids joining a school midway through the year: not only that, but we’re just back from Easter holidays today, so we’re already over-excited and over-stimulated and pent-up.
When I was young my parents were never able to afford the cost of me joining the cub scouts; but my dad, who hated the fact that the human race had become reliant on GPS devices and mobile phone maps, had always spoken to me in terms of compass directions. Consequently, I always kept a small thermometer/compass key ring attached to my house keys, which lived in my left hand jeans pocket. I led us south.
Layla’s walking down the hill again. I watch her every day. Marching down, then up, then down again, a relic from some childhood rhyme. Until. She turns and goes back up, past the iron gates, kept open just for her; gates that hide the halfway house she’s supposed to call ‘home’; up, on, up to…
“This isn’t how I imagined a Train de la Belle Epoque,” Bella said to her husband, as they watched the narrow-gauge steam locomotive hauling its line of period carriages out of the sheds at Montreux Station. “I was expecting something more like the Orient Express or a Pullman at least.” “It’s only a cog-railway,” said…
She thought of the sea as her beating heart and so its violence on certain wild nights frightened her. On other days it seemed to have shrugged on a green cloak that rippled with shifting mysterious shadows. Despite this she was glad to leave the provincial town and join her brother in London. Later…