Short Prose
By Caldwell
Mini tales
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- 1316 reads
Barcelona - a moment
Old witch of the barrio.
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- 5 comments
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- 3029 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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- 1110 reads
TSSB 1979 - Competition Entry
What is that in the blue and yellow cape?
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- 5 comments
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- 2985 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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- 5 comments
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- 1727 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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- 1773 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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- 9 comments
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- 2786 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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- 1326 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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- 622 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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- 4 comments
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- 1419 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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- 1847 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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- 360 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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- 3 comments
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- 1791 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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- 6 comments
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- 586 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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- 327 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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- 1 comment
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- 233 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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- 2 comments
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- 214 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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- 206 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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- 2 comments
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- 303 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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- 440 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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- 553 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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- 5 comments
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- 733 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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- 140 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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- 194 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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- 118 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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- 93 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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- 155 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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- 2 comments
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- 151 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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- 117 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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- 3 comments
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- 187 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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- 171 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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- 108 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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- 69 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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- 109 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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- 9 comments
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- 180 reads