Friday 29 April 2011


She looked at the couple sitting opposite them, who were both wearing denim and plain white shirts, and thought about how, just once, it would nice to say something like, "I just prefer wine with soda, it takes away the bitterness, don't you think?" Or, " I really like pickled onion crisps, they remind me of my childhood. What reminds you of yours?" She rolled the start of a sentence around in her head before remembering that they were both tired of the sound of her voice and deciding to suck on an ice cube instead.

Thursday 28 April 2011

Monday 25 April 2011

Sunday 24 April 2011

I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way

"Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket."

Tuesday 12 April 2011

Thursday 7 April 2011

SURFING UNICORNS


When John took Samantha away to meet his parents in Southend that year Samantha said she wanted to watch the waves crashing against the pebbles. She told him that she could see hundreds and thousands of jumping unicorns in the surf. John looked into her small face, while her eyes fluttered from his, to the sky behind him. He kissed her on her pink mouth, which was filled with overlapping teeth. It wasn't for another five years, while watching television on their small television set, that he realised that she had stolen the unicorns from a popular film. He felt cheated of his bohemian, poetic wife as she pressed her own sports socks in the living room.


Wednesday 6 April 2011

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

"Women who have a dramatic haircut are always about to encounter an enormous change in their lives." She cut off the length of her hair, shaving the sides close to the tops of her ears and held tight onto the mirror waiting. When her mother arrived home from work singing and slamming the door she jumped, realising that she had been still for some time and the mirror slipped onto the floor, cutting her shins and feet quite badly.

She sat in the back of the taxi looking at the country that passed, while her mother's eyebrows emulated their concern from the front seat. Her hand was crushed by a brother who had been called back from Law School, until they arrived at the quietest hospital she had ever known and she was injected in several different places. She wondered why she had ever paid any attention to such a stupid magazine anyway.
Despite being horribly concerned she found her mind drifting and began to wonder if she had bought cat food at the supermarket earlier.

Tuesday 5 April 2011

Sunday 3 April 2011

There is a company in California that takes the two of your names and makes a professional mould type thing which they then stamp into the tree. After that they take a photo of it and mail it right to your home address. If you ever happen to be in the area you can even go and check it out and it will most probably still be there if there hasn't been any property developments on the location. For our twentieth wedding anniversary I made an order and as luck would have it the picture arrived on the morning her family turned up with the kids in tow and a huge gift and all that. I've always kinda wanted to impress her dad, Dave, and I could see that he was made-up when we unwrapped the picture, which they had framed with a pearl border. Caroline was staring at it for an age and I guessed that she didn't want to look up cause there were tears in her eyes. So I took a couple of minutes to explain to Dave about what a great idea it was and all but then Caroline looked at me coldly and asked me why I hadn't just carved it in the oak at the bottom of the garden myself. I think it was disagreements like this that led to the eventual break-up of my marriage three years later.