KRIS ( Read more... )

It was awful of him to come round here, to her cottage quite out of his way. He held his head at an angle and looked out of the window, while she hid her hands beneath the table. He seemed to be waiting for something, rather than at a loss what to say. She made brief sounds in her throat to fill the silence that was all they shared. He'd lost his ( Read more... )

My hands are clasped around six rings of heated iron, and they burn me as I hold them to my bare chest with a noise that transcends the pain. It is the hissing, and my tremulous voice shouting, that reaches me in the sunken climate of my mind. The palace walls are near, and before the gates six thousand slaves revolve around millstones that may or ( Read more... )

FRED the Brown was the woodcutter in an obscure Russian fairytale. No-one knew why he was called Fred the Brown, but some speculated that it was because of the colour of the trees when his breath blossomed in the ever-autumnal air, or the rust that covered his face and hands, like children’s tears leaving trails over an ever churning, robotic ( Read more... )

Fred the Brown Chapter 1, Tangent 2

The small child slept alone in the dark house for perhaps the second time in a week that night. Lips trembling and white-faced, she presses the sheets to her burning mouth and shakes until the traces of the tears have faded into the mattress. Six inches beneath her, bedlice swarm in the rotting cavern of the bed ( Read more... )

Fred the Brown was a photojournalist who had become lost in a desert in Sudan. No-one knew for sure why he was called Fred the Brown, but some thought it was a Franglais version of his real name, which by declension must have been Fred Brown ( Read more... )

the dry river ( Read more... )

Here it is, written through impulse rather than inspiration. I don't think I ever wrote anything faster in my life. Subsequently it's a torrid, workmanlike affair: but at least I finished something. ( Read more... )

Well, I'm back already. I get itchy fingers when I don't write; I also forgot that I hate doing revision .. so here I am ( Read more... )

If I were ever to die of spiderbite, my last words would be 'Fucking hell! Fuck you, fucking spider!' I know this because this was my automatic response in church with my grandmother yesterday upon finding one such creature making its way along my arm (and momentarily through the air). I also jumped up with a gesture that my brother has made into a ( Read more... )