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  1. Writing
  3. Fiction
    4. (Page 7)

Fiction | A Botanical Garden Movie by Jay Merill

Fiction, Writing

I am standing by the edge of the ornamental fish pond. Late Friday. The water isn’t spurting now. They must have shut down the mechanism. After I say mechanism I think of my mother and the odd way she behaved when we used to come here. Which was quite a lot, or as she would have put it: regular as clockwork. By the time I was seven or eight I noticed there were certain phrases she loved to repeat. Saying Botanical Gardens out loud made her go […]

Fiction | The Anthill by Julianne Pachico [Extract]

Fiction, Writing

It’s the faded pink building down the road from the grocery store. An hour by bus from the Metrocable stop. Telephone wires cross the sky, chickens cluck from a nearby balcony, a dog with enormous testicles flees uphill. 1 p.m. Here they come. Chattering busily, streaming through the propped-open door. Ponytails bouncing, shirts untucked and speckled with dust from Tocineta and De Todito crisps. Some are in school uniforms, white socks pulled up to their knees […]

Fiction | Alysm by Irenosen Okojie

Fiction, Writing

I am walking our dog in the park when the burning sensation infiltrates my throat as though it is new-found land. The burning sensation makes me want to slip into the abandoned baby harness slung over a bench, then run towards a baying that escapes the heat in my blood. The burning sensation has instructions for daylight. In you. Out of you. Beyond you. The burning sensation says the fog expanding in your brain has accomplices. The burning sensation warns […]

Fiction | Your Story, My Story by Connie Palmen [Extract]

Fiction, Writing

To most people, we exist only in books, my bride and I. For the past thirty-five years, I’ve had to watch with impotent horror as our real lives were buried beneath a mudslide of apocryphal stories, false witness, gossip, fabrication, and myth; how our true, complex personalities were replaced by hackneyed characters, reduced to mere images, tailor-made to suit a readership with an appetite for sensationalism. And in all of this, she was the brittle saint […]

Image of light coming in through a window,

Fiction | Signal by A. E. Macleod

Fiction

‘Not until later does he pose to himself the question: why does he imagine it is a woman bound in the basement and not a man?’

New fiction by A. E. Macleod.

Fiction | Asphyxia by Violette Leduc

Fiction, Fiction, Writing

My mother never gave me her hand… She always helped me on and off pavements by pinching my frock or coat very lightly at the spot where the armhole provides a grip. It humiliated me. I felt I was inside the body of an old horse with my carter dragging me along by one ear… One afternoon, as a gleaming carriage sped past, splattering the leaden summer with its reflections, I pushed the hand away right in the middle of the road. She pinched the cloth […]

Fiction | It Was Night by Colin Fleming

Fiction, Writing

My brother’s head sounded like a rabbit’s foot drumming against the baize-coloured carpeting of our room. I had been dreaming about Sarah Claire at our school. She had rabbits. Lots of 4-H stuff, which was why I was mulling signing up. The spittle at the edges of Maxwell’s mouth made him look rabid and he was contorting as if he didn’t have a backbone. I think I said ‘Go, Max, go!’ even though I knew something was well past wrong and death could be here […]

Electro-vital particles drawn from an artificial forehead (pad of chamois leather) impressed by the hand, to match the plot of head injury in the short story by Louie Conway.

Fiction | Un by Louie Conway

Fiction

‘The baby has come to understand the world as reducible into categories, an indefinitely vast space populated by discrete objects with dedicated names and stable locations.’

Runner-up in the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize 2024: Louie Conway’s ‘Un’.

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