Cherrypicked stories

Gold cherry

The Prayer of the Pike

Quietly, your tea coloured world seeps into scales that have no desire to impress the sun, a brown lump moving in brown water that has no hankering to rush over whitening boulders.
Cherry

Healing (Part Five)

A couple of weeks later I was called into the office for the second round of my interrogation.....
Cherry

Healing (Part Four)

“Have you ever said that you intend to beat up a colleague?” he said, finally finding his confidence and getting into the swing of things.
Cherry

Molly Mandy

Fat lot of good it done me, that so-called ‘special school’
Cherry

THE FIGHTER PILOT'S LAMENT

I do not hate them, those I kill; All strangers in a foreign land; I do not love them, those I guard, Nor do I see them close at hand. Yet to the skies my life I pledge
Cherry

Four reasons to fear love

buried up to my neck in the husks of a billion taciturn stares
Cherry

Healing (Part Three)

I guess my new job started turning sour when a staff member called Donna Cooke and I took a couple of residents to the pictures to see a Disney movie.
Cherry

Healing (Part Two)

I flung my first murder and the horrifying guilt that accompanied it into the deepest, darkest mental dungeon I could find.....
Cherry

Healing (Part One)

I was travelling through a dark, seemingly endless tunnel when I wrote the first draft of this tale a couple of years back.....
Cherry

The Strangers on the Trains ( Part 3)

Emily makes a discovery. Then hears some disturbing news.
Cherry

A Winter’s Tale

A twisted tale ... for slightly twisted children.
Cherry

On Arriving at 70;

Looking to the future.
Cherry

Netherfields

Four sails of the seas To navigate a dry-dock vessel, Square and stationary To turn the air to Dutch advantage. But at last the dyke has burst: derelict Stands the house of industry;
Cherry

Girders

Skeletal children born of industrial flame, Called into being to serve the outgoing ships, Before the Navy came to service the Firth. The frightening rush of Dreadnaughts
Cherry

Maypole

Centre of the village, focus of historic fears, Children dance to the old songs, dark rhythms in their blood Unconsciously following the final rite in innocent passage,
Cherry

Ars Poetica

I intoxicate as rain drunk from a loch...
Cherry

...thaw...

'...slush to slush...'
Cherry

A Sudden Stillness

Being abnormal doesn't mean you're not normal ... or does it ... or doesn't it.
Cherry

Whalebone

The west’s prevailing onshore winds have finally fleshed your ribs with the coarseness of limestone, granite and quartz, a curling cavern scrimshawed only by travelling

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