Tag Archives: slipstream

Walking Down Walls

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Invisible Theater, Bristol

Looking up, he saw the girl half-open a window on the sixth floor, squeeze through it and walk down the wall to the street.

“The party was a bust,” she explained.

Her voice was flat, thin, a little nasal. He wondered if that was caused by her having walked down the wall. Resistance to gravity must surely have an effect on the nasal passages. She was extraordinarily pale under the streetlights.

“Do you need special shoes to do that?” he asked.

“Do what?” She walked with an easy stride that seemed to cover inordinate Continue reading →

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Pushing Through To The Back Of The Bus

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When Terry begins scrolling through her phone, none of the photos she finds are hers.

Only seven this morning. That’s a blessing. Sometimes there are as many as two dozen. At first (two months ago? four? more?) she’d deleted them as quickly as they came in. But now she checks each one.

There’s never anything extraordinary or striking about the photos, nothing indecent that would prove embarrassing if the people in them were identified. In fact there are no people in them.

She’s done everything possible – changed her ID, the app, her password, had the store clean the phone and return it to factory default, and even bought a new phone. Still the photos keep coming.

And her photos?

She no longer takes photos. They don’t show up on her phone anyway. The only photos she sees are someone else’s.

She goes through the seven photos as she eats her bowl of cornflakes. Taken from Continue reading →

At Dinnertime, As The Crows Gather

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She’s decided on macaroni.

What could possibly go wrong with macaroni? All you have to do is to boil it, then smother it in cheese sauce.

It’s absolutely essential that nothing go wrong.

Jon, Timothy, Sol, Freddie, Barry, Hugo, Ryan… what disasters she’d had with the meals she’d cooked for them.

Martin would eat her macaroni and love it.

She opens the fridge door, takes out cheese, cream, pepper, then pulls out the drawer for the cheese grater, a kitchen utensil she’s always been fond of.

No, no, Martin is absolutely not a shredded cheese guy. He’s more spicy tomato.

She replaces the cheese and cream in the fridge. Reaches for the last two tomatoes that remain in the plastic tub, some red pepper. She slices the slimy soft edges off the red pepper.

A soft rustling sound outside.

crowIt’s only the crows. They always gather around dinnertime. In the trees, on the Continue reading →

The Low Green Door

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“The Low Green Door” is the first of my weekly writing ‘blurts’. You can read why I decided to make this my 2016 New Year’s Resolution here.

 

The Low Green Door

That girl with the curly hair, she looks like a kid out of a storybook, the kind of kid that nips through a low green door half-hidden by brambles and roses and wisteria, the kind you go through and then can’t find again so you Continue reading →