“Let’s go,” growled Comrade Hondo, shouldering his battered AK 47 and smashing his beer bottle against the wall of Mr Mutarara’s store. Hondo was a genuine war veteran, now in his fifties. He was wearing a police uniform and had been given a temporary force number, and a temporary designation: Chief Warden. With him were […]

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He’s waiting at the bottom of the ramp, just inside the steel fence that cordons off the entry to the station. He said to give him a ring from her mobile when the train passed Gosford. She quickens her pace, adjusts the overnight bag on her shoulder. She is close enough to see the soft […]

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Half asleep, she reached up and touched a chin, her chin, which she couldn’t feel six months earlier, when it was just newly her chin. This chin, this jawline, the cool tip of this nose still amazed and shocked her. Almost every morning when she awoke, she still wondered if the whole crazy thing had […]

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She had been in the sea forever; not near the surface where the waves endless heaved upwards and fell, the water turbulent, filled with bubbles and noise, but deep down where all was relatively still. She liked its cool embrace and the feeling of weightlessness, the way her hair floated about her face like tendrils […]

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“Of course, you wouldn’t understand,” said Margot. “You’re a man; it’s different for you.”             This took me by surprise. I had always thought of Margot as an intelligent woman. She was my ex-sister-in-law, if one can have such a thing; after my divorce I still saw Margot from time to time to have lunch, […]

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When my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away …                         —St Augustine, Confessions, Book 10.6 These memories seem to belong to someone else. I share a name and a place of growing up with the eighteen-year-old boy who inhabits them, also […]

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The pawpaw Jean Thornton How strange are the ways of memory: decades after a happening it can spring vividly to mind. Whenever I see a pawpaw I am instantly transported to another time, another country, another pawpaw. Travelling in Sudan on long-service leave from nursing, I had spent some time at the Red Sea Hotel, […]

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Solveig Foss Time on my Hands Now that I have so much time on my hands I find that I’m thinking about you more than I want to. Every day you’ve been in my mind a little more, intruding yourself. Today I realise that I’ve been thinking about you nearly as much as about Sebastian […]

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Police Constable Kevin Long crouched low in the bushes beside the bend in the road. He was beginning to sweat profusely and flies buzzed around his head. His knees ached. He was having great difficulty operating the “speeding gun” he had been told to use. “Look, lad,” the Sergeant had said, “this morning I want […]

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