Short Prose
By Caldwell
Mini tales
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- 1353 reads
Barcelona - a moment
Old witch of the barrio.
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- 5 comments
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- 3086 reads
Understanding doesn't come with age
The cashier, 'Debbie' her name-badge read, waited. Sitting in the trolley my patient little boy, waited too. I fumbled with my purse dropping my change on the counter.
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- 1122 reads
TSSB 1979 - Competition Entry
What is that in the blue and yellow cape?
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- 5 comments
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- 3060 reads
Monday morning's inner voice
You sit there, slumped in your chair, eyes glazed as you stare at the mountain of tasks before you. From above, I watch you, observing the weight you...
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- 1805 reads
Plenty
Well, there you have it. Standing at East Croydon with my shopping, train that should whisk me to Redhill in all of seventeen minutes. Seventeen! But...
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- 1835 reads
The Calculator (IP)
The tram was packed, as always, a shifting mass of humanity wedged together on their way to somewhere else. A family sat near the front, the parents...
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- 2899 reads
Pipe dreams
At 7:00 a.m., my alarm erupted with its usual enthusiasm, which was met by a groan from the other side of the bed. "I slept so badly," my beloved...
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- 4 comments
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- 1388 reads
My Grandma, Mai Mai Gee (IP)
When I arrived in Myanmar, the familiarity was immediate and overwhelming. I saw my grandmother in the old women who passed me by, their longyis,...
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- 695 reads
In Suspension
This week I gradually came to understand that I had become unwell. It's odd because it has coincided with the weather: the meteorological kind and...
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- 1468 reads
Off the rails (IP)
I did not come to Dr. Jennings of my own volition. It was my wife’s idea, and she insisted upon it with such an air of resolve that I had no choice...
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- 1942 reads
People say I'm a dreamer
You meet Walter Mitty at a nondescript café on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon. He’s wearing a beige cardigan, slightly wrinkled, and looks like the kind...
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- 389 reads
I lit a thin green candle
I remember when my half-sister came to stay, seven years older than me and full of energy, like a whirlwind dropping into the quiet rhythm of our...
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- 1829 reads
Out of the cold
Amsterdam's wind, slicing through November, carried a chill that clung to every exposed surface. The city’s canals and cobblestones seemed complicit...
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- 628 reads
A toast to all the shamans!
Our visit to the Saatchi Gallery had been unexpectedly emotional. An exhibition themed around flowers—automatically romantic, explosive with colour...
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- 4 comments
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- 371 reads
Labyrinthine Apparition
I find myself in a building that resists definition—part university, part manor house, a place with too many corridors and too much history. The air...
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- 256 reads
Harrow left behind
The bell above the door chimed with a sound so soft it seemed embarrassed to be heard. Ian stepped into the antiquarian bookshop like a man slipping...
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- 241 reads
Collateral
Detective Leon Mercier had been deep undercover for almost a decade. So deep that sometimes he forgot who he was supposed to be. He lived a life...
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- 244 reads
The Shellsuit
All my adult life, I’ve carried a complicated relationship with my father. At first, I thought the solution was distance—emotional, then physical. I...
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- 326 reads
Burma under occupation
In April 1942, my uncle Eddie was seven years old. His father, my grandfather Archibald, was the superintendent of stores with the Burma Oil Company...
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- 5 comments
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- 498 reads
Ken Market
Kensington Market used to sit at 49–53 Kensington High Street, a three-storey indoor maze of stalls and dreams. Between the ages of 16 and 18—1988 to...
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- 6 comments
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- 656 reads
Oh I do like to be...
We spread our towels over pebbles and dream of sand. Windbreakers flap like prayer flags, and the sun, though pale, burns with quiet malice. Children...
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- 808 reads
Jasmine Tea
The call came early on a Saturday. My sister. Panicked. She’d rung our mother and found her breathless, confused, whispering in a voice that no...
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- 1 comment
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- 188 reads
The Gesture
This story contains reference to suicide and mental illness. It doesn’t take a tragedy. Not always. Sometimes it’s a drip from a ceiling, a broken...
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- 4 comments
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- 277 reads
Le magnetiseur
When your child’s skin is red and cracked and nothing works—not creams, not oats, not changing his diet, not even the sea (which did help, but was a...
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- 3 comments
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- 193 reads
Massage Parlour
I generally don’t go in for spas or massage. It’s the pampering that puts me off — the soft music, the hushed tones, the candles. I don’t like being...
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- 138 reads
The Flying Brick
I’d been scouring AutoTrader for weeks — every spare moment, even before I passed my full motorcycle test. What I really wanted was one of those...
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- 3 comments
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- 234 reads
And Yet I Still Watch
I scroll through YouTube’s endless thumbnails and I am bored. Bored of the screaming, the sensationalism, the world set permanently to crisis pitch...
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- 215 reads
Froggy Came A-Courting (And So Did I)
There’s an old English folk song I half-remember from childhood — “A Froggy Went A-Courting.” It drifts in with its lilting tune and strange courtly...
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- 191 reads
Bastille Day, Barbecue Smoke, and the Weight of History
It’s Bastille Day. All across France, sausages sizzle on supermarket grills, fireworks crack like toy guns in the evening sky, and municipal...
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- 309 reads
After Lausanne
Messages continued to trickle back and forth — a song here, a film there, a shared memory plucked from the 90s like an old dry flower still faintly...
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- 7 comments
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- 320 reads
After Geneva
There’s a kind of comfort in failure. It softens the edges of expectation. My father welcomed me home like a prophecy fulfilled. I hadn’t just...
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- 5 comments
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- 215 reads
Funeral Games
The worst part about my father’s death wasn’t the death. It was the circus that formed around it — a slow-moving horror of corridors, signatures,...
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- 2 comments
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- 135 reads
Rue (following on from Funeral Games)
Now that the central figures were gone, the anger hollowed into silence. The performance had ended. No one was left to fight but ghosts. I found...
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- 181 reads
Lausanne Epilogue
Some mornings I wake before the alarm. The dog lifts her head, watches me for a second, then exhales and settles back into herself. I sit there in...
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- 410 reads
The lyre of Orpheus
There was a summer, not long after Breathless came out, when I listened to it on repeat. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — a song unlike most of theirs,...
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- 156 reads
School friends
I was never much for friends. In primary school I was a loner, though I didn’t have the word for it then. My younger brother was the one with a...
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- 4 comments
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- 202 reads
The time I tried acupuncture
The practitioner was a Romanian woman, about my age, with jet-black hair and a round, sweet face that carried a natural compassion. Before our...
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- 6 comments
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- 210 reads
There's an element of The Two Ronnies about this
[Courtroom set. Barker (Counsel) rises, papers in hand. Corbett (Professor Plomb) is in the dock, looking dignified but slightly bewildered.] Barker...
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- 103 reads
In response to Luigi's Morning Mail
I want good news, but not the kind doled out like cute puppies to blot out massacres, sunsets to obscure famine. No. That’s comfort served not as...
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- 12 comments
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- 149 reads
My first new beginning
As a young boy, I grew up in a small village in leafy suburban Surrey, where hedges were trimmed and cars taken for their Sunday wash. When my...
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- 4 comments
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- 51 reads