Strange Tales
A Sample
The Well
The summer we moved into Riverbank Cottage the Kennet dried up. Stranded creatures clustered in shrinking pools. As the heat continued unabated, the last water evaporated and the cracking, stony river bed began to sparkle again with flapping, dying fish.
This Lonely Strand
The surf folds into the rocky shoreline like the slowly turning pages of an endless book. Above it runs the road, straight and unwavering into the far distance. It is bounded on one side by the crashing waves, regular as the churning of a piston, and on the other by neat files of pines. Above is a grey featureless sky; below, faded unmarked tarmac. The only irregularity in the whole scene is our ticking, crumpled hire car.
The Great Game
While the rest of India lay helpless and beaten on the anvil of the sun, waiting only for the monsoon to roll like hot wet clay across the land, the British hill station of Simla readied itself for the season’s Great Game. The previous year had seen the rise to prominence of Mrs Forsyth, a war-galleon of a woman, thick of arm and proud of bearing, with a spider’s mind and an appetite for complex but complete destruction of her enemies.
Mirror Games
It is late afternoon and we are walking up the rough, steeply angled driveway to the farmhouse. Some farm houses are twee but this is utterly functional. There is a broken down flat bed van outside, rust climbing up its dull red paintwork. The walls of the house are dank, pebble-dashed prefab. I turn and look at my wife and she raises an eyebrow at me, digs her hands deep into the pockets of her Craghoppers coat and walks closer to me, so that our arms touch and the fabric crackles.
Waiting for Spring
The night’s rain had washed down topsoil and silt from the moor, then the frost had frozen it solid. It covered the roads like rendering, clogging the gutters and forming weird patterns on the pavements. Astrid thought that it looked like some flooded Guatemalan hill village from the news. She stepped over the debris and tiptoed across the layer of frozen clay so that she didn’t get any of it caked on her boots.
Old Photographs
I never liked going into my parents’ loft. It was always hot and stuffy, lined with fibreglass like lethal yellow candy-floss. Everything was caked with dust and age. Once a sparrow flew into the loft through a hole in the eves and my father was unable to catch it. In the end we sadly lowered the trapdoor and let it careen around the low space until it bashed itself to death on the beams. Then my father grimly went back up the ladder and carried it down, cradled reverently in a tea towel. It looked much smaller dead.
Daddy Crow Bones
When the wind changed direction and began to blow bitterly down from the Highlands, scouring the long grass and bringing flecks of snow in its wake, Thomas Fallon knew that his past had finally caught up with him.
Childrens' Stories
A Sample
Barrington Frog's Legs
Once upon a time there was a big forest, and in this forest was a small and secret pond, and by the side of this pond was a tiny village, and in this village lived frogs.
Don’t listen to what teachers or the television tell you, frogs live in small houses made of tiny mud bricks. They boat on ponds on lily pads, hold markets every Saturday morning and on Sundays hop around their villages visiting their neighbours with gifts of fly-pie and fried-fly.
The Moon Moth
Once upon a time there was a little moth that lived in a hedge by a streetlight. The streetlight glowed with a fascinating orange furry light that seemed to promise warmth and fulfilment.
Little Wave
Once upon a time there was a little wave, just taking its first tentative steps across the surface of the ocean. It scampered and skittered, at first no more than a ripple of spume blown by the gusty sea breeze.