Category: Flash Fiction
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1111: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
Strikethrough #5 A Forest Gone I settle in with a mug of breakfast tea and Mimi’s cake, and begin editing my notes: the small forest of birch and oak beyond the village is gone, leaving only stumps leaving the pale wounds of stumps where the trees once held their ground. When last I was here,…
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1011: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #14 (catch-up with all episodes here) Clive doesn’t look surprised when I return with Jacob Macleod’s ring in an envelope, which is either professional discipline or proof that solicitors are born knowing how badly families behave. He opens the insurance bundle again, dips his pen though he has nothing to write,…
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04.11: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #13 (catch-up with all episodes here) I write Mairi on the back of an electricity bill, then Mary beneath it, then cross both out as though ink can be bullied into telling the truth. The names look almost alike if I want them to, near enough for a husband with salt…
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0211: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
The Heist a double Six this week The Heist — Episode 6: Another Door in the Wall The gargoyle on the right is still quibbling with the Soup Gobbler on his smartphone — “no, not that wall, the other wall” — when the signal breaks into static and dies exactly as we step through the…
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28.10: A Six – SSC&B The Heist
The Heist (episode 5) Dinner with the Soup Gobbler “I took it from a reclamation yard on the East Side,” the Soup Gobbler says when Chris admires the long wooden table, dark and scarred enough for a medieval feast; “you mean an antique shop,” says the gargoyle on the left, grinning, “you filched it from…
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27.10: Six Sentence Story
Of Wood and Biblichor la bibliothèque – l’Université de Montpellier It’s a strange wistfulness, old libraries. Outside, the heat made the cobbles seem to rock underfoot, and sometimes the sun struck my eyes so directly that I went momentarily blind; but inside, the air was cool and loose, light met the floor at different angles,…
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27.10: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #12 (catch-up with all episodes here) I obey the conservator for exactly twenty-three minutes, which is long enough to find an old manila envelope, write DO NOT OPEN on it in block capitals, and place the spiral lock inside as though firm handwriting has ever saved a woman from herself. The…
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20.10: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: #11 (catch-up with all episodes here) Dear Ms Macleod, thank you for the photographs, which show what appears to be a folded letter secured by a spiral lock, though I agree the name is unhelpful, since the finished packet looks less like a spiral than a paper tongue stitched through its…
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19.10: A Six – The Alcove
The Heist (episode 4) (a letter from the Soup Gobble) The postman arrives carrying an envelope addressed, with admirable confidence, to The Gargoyle Sitting on the Right. “That’s me,” shouts the gargoyle who appears to every mortal eye to be sitting on the left, but perspective has always been a treacherous little beast and gargoyles…
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14.10: A Six – SSC&B Alcove
The Heist episode #3 Aurelia has three sets of plans open now, her latest computer-science coursework having taught her to distrust anything that pretends to be simple, and she works across the pages with the same excitement she brings to kernels, processes, and hidden structures, pausing only once to curse when two boundary lines refuse…
