The slugs ate the lettuce, the greenfly decimated the sweet peas and the roses got rust.  The grass though was magnificent.

You’re not going out like that, Dad exploded.  Yesss!  Exactly the response she was looking for.  Her heart soared.

**Originally commissioned by Cartwheel Arts

Geoff had always been known as Hamster on account of his protruding teeth and plump cheeks.  Lived up to it when they found best part of ten grand’s worth of peripherals from the firm where he worked squirreled away under his bed.

*Originally published by www.the-phone-book.com (now archived)

 

At night she snaps the light off and steers her way to bed guided by the red glow of the extension cable.  Her very own runway.

There was an impression, just like the Turin Shroud, she told the neighbours, but a back view.  When they’d taken him away she’d run her hand round the bowl his head had made.

*Originally published by www.the-phone-book.com (now archived)

There was a moment, on the coach, as the sun licked the sky light, when she wanted to weep for the precious loveliness of it all.

The average woman spends £124 a month on clothes, shoes and accessories.  The rest of us are just trying to find something halfway decent that fits.

**Originally commissioned by Cartwheel Arts

In the lull between the tides of traffic she hears a woman screaming abuse.  Imagines bruises, broken cups, a dying marriage, an ocean of bitterness drowning out the soft summer day.

*Originally published by www.the-phone-book.com (now archived)

Hopes tumbling like broken teeth as he began to speak.

*Originally published by www.the-phone-book.com (now archived)

I used to be a flute, thin and reedy, shrill.  Now, all of a sudden, ka-pow, I’m a viola.