– Amanda Saint We wanted to be nurses. What a wonderful past-time it seemed to be; not like a job at all. When mum was in her uniform, ready to go to work, we coveted her upside down watch. We wanted one too, so that we could count heartbeats. Our visions were of hospital wards…
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– Rebecca Johnson It is 1 a.m., my stomach is growling, and I am out of reading material. I step off the curb and walk toward the neon light that spells “TATTOO.” I left the Laundromat only moments ago with the intention of getting a quick snack at Ralph’s, but suddenly I have the urge…
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– Bernard O’Rourke The psychiatrist says: “You do get them sometimes, of course. The crazies. People who live for their pets. Obsess over them. Buy them gourmet meals, furnish their beds with designer fabrics. End up living their whole lives through their animals. Sad really, that sort of thing.” But he doesn’t understand – he’s…
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– Orla McAlinden Blood splashed onto the clean, white bedcover; an obscene bouquet tossed onto snow. Cathy touched her face- incredulous- before rushing to the bathroom. She turned the key in the only door which locked; a fiction of security. Already the blood was slowing down. She could count each separate drop. So her nose…
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– Rebecca Gimblett Oh the little games we play. Is that blood running down my back, or fear? Another day, another batch of promises washed through a machine, completed for a list in a notebook, to be drifted to dreams and regrets by 4pm. Red pools on the floor but it is just a distraction,…
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– Michael Carey ‘You. Are. A. Wanker.’ Rob squeezed the words around a smile and waved the car through. Kate had said to be home for six, and be ready to go soon after that. Bit mysterious. He looked at his watch, his timepiece he reminded himself, six fifteen. He’d be back soon enough. He…
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– Alison Wells My name is Hope and that’s where it ends. My father was a nasty man. But you’ve heard that story before and I’m tired of telling it. They wrung it out of me during therapy, religion cleansed my soul, my brother Stevie drowned in misery, my mother washed away in a torrent…
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– Fiona Sherlock Cryonaut is one of 4,000 new words to enter the Oxford English Dictionary. Meaning a person who is cryogenically frozen with the hope of being revived in the future, the word joins sexting, five-second-rule and brain candy in the 2012 edition. Time congealed in her bed sheets. It was St Patrick’s Day…
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– Chris Connolly I had hidden the whisky a few weeks earlier, during one of Hugo’s thrilling rages. He had been up for three days, finally disintegrating into an angry madness and unable to convey his fury through speech, unable to manage the movement of his body and limbs. He was ‘getting spiky,’ as Sandy…
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– Trish Orr At least eight hours of driving ahead of him, but Lee wasn’t in any hurry. He took a sharp left and pulled off to the side of the dirt road. Just stretch my legs for a few minutes. Then I’ll go. I have to. There’s no getting out of it. The sun…
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