Tag Archives: surreal

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 →

If Not The Ghost Man, Then Who?

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I know Oliver claims to have been the first to see the ghost man, but in fact it was Tommy.

Tommy was heading home for breakfast with two brook trout he’d caught in the stream that meanders through the town when he caught sight of the ghost man emerging from the forest.

He’d wolfed down two helpings of french toast before he thought to mention the ghost man to his parents.

Word spread in no time. By elevenses there was quite a crowd in the park where the ghost man had installed himself on the bench beneath the big old oak.

No, that wasn’t the ghost man. This fellow was far too solid to be a ghost man. But if not the ghost man, then who?close-up of bannister finial

“The mushroom man!” said the mayor.

Of course! Of course!

The first thing they all noticed about the mushroom man was obviously that he was extraordinarily pale.

Of course he’d be pale, they told each other, with the forest so dense and tangled that no sunlight could penetrate. (But really, how would they know? Which of them had ever dared venture into the dark, dank, silent forest?)

The second thing was that he looked at them with eyes that saw more than they were comfortable with.

The third thing? That Continue reading →