Tag: 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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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…
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0109: Dead Men Don’t Drown
Dead Men Don’t Drown: Episode #4 (catch-up with all episodes here) No. 4, Dead Men Don’t Drown: The Antique Shop on Rope Walk I walk into town for bread, milk and a box of wooden matches for the coal fire; inheriting a cottage means inheriting an endless list of small errands. Halfway home, a fleck…
