Category: Flash Fiction
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29.09: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #8 (catch-up with all episodes here) Episode number 08: Dead Men Don’t Drown That night I sleep badly, pitching from one side of the bed to the other as though the cottage has come loose from its foundations and we’d gone to sea. At dawn I give up, pad barefoot downstairs,…
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29.09: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
The Alcove The Heist (episode 1) Chris, aka La Raconteuse, opens her laptop, a fork stands flag-pole-straight in our shared slice of Mimi’s Chocolate Cake for Challenging Days — she types so hard the keys chatter as she chases through New York landmarks records, Madison Avenue plans, façades, floor layouts, and every architectural scrap the city has…
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27.09 The Copse
The Copse “Copse,” whispered the small barefoot boy. “Where?” His friend looked about. “I don’t see any cops.” “Copse. Trees. Limbs. Great for fishing poles.” And so they went about bending and twisting and tugging at long, straight limbs until two finally gave up and broke into their hands, while the sun climbed to noon…
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2309: A Six — SSC&B Alcove
Strikethrough a book called “Le Grand Herbier en Françoys” I am wearing time’s dust skin here: this is Montpellier University Library Archive, and beyond the tinted glass lies a flame-singed copy of Le Grand Herbier en Françoys — a sixteenth-century root-system of human knowing — it has brought me full circle, and something in me goes very still grows very…
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2209: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #7 (catch-up with all episodes here) Dead Men Don’t Drown When I tell the volunteer that Jacob Macleod was my grandfather, her face changes by the smallest degree, not surprise exactly, but the expression of a woman who has just heard a floorboard answer back. She does not ask whether I…
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1609: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #6 (catch-up with all episodes here) The next morning I take the spaniels’ silence in hand to the local history room above the museum, not because I have never heard of Love Dogs, but because family knowledge is a slippery thing and I want paper beneath it. A volunteer with hair…
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1409: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
The Alcove #3 Strikethrough Salisbury District Hospital; Wednesday; rain crawls streaks down the sky window; TV on mute the TV mutters silently; the medicine trolley rattles in the hallway beyond the door; my tea cools beside his cloudy juice; he says everything the air tastes metallic of foil; the oximeter pops slips from his finger; alarms set the room complaining, and oh how we laugh. He…
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0909: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
The Alcove: Strikethrough two on the fence, one grey squirrel motionless, an the other — its tail a rudder steering through speed, crimped and flagging semaphores messages; a spiderweb at the window, delicate as Brugge lace, a breeze inflicting coaxing teasing a minute tremor through its lattices; autumn arrived two months early, as though woollen socks had some private grievance against summer the world had grown impatient with…
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0809: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #5 (catch-up with all episodes here) “Hi Mum, it’s me — ay’okay, well, sort of, because I popped up the shops for milk, bread, and a few bits, and saw two pottery Staffordshire dogs like Gran’s in the antique shop, so I went in to see whether they were worth anything.”…
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0409: Six Sentence Story
The Alcove: Afters Last week’s Poetry Slam has ended, the scent of cigars lingering hungry for fire to catch from a match. The proprietors gather at the end of the bar, hugs and laughter — how little separates laughter from crying, I think. Denise looks up from polishing water marks from a wine glass; “Hi…
