Quickies: Short Stories For Adults

Eyeball scrawls: designing the Flashtag Quickies anthology

If you were to judge our first book by its cover, you'd expect pages of purple prose.

What you see above right is Quickies, a collection of smutty stories produced by my writing group #flashtag and numerous other writers. It was truly a group effort, but the final production fell into my hands. I'd never designed a book before. Google was my teacher.

sandra sue

i hate sandra sue. she used to pull my legs off in college and I never forgave her for it.

when i was sitting next to her in mr morton’s class, i used her pen to write my essay about minerals. i thought she hadn’t noticed, but then she grabbed the pen off of me and broke my fingers on my right hand. i swear she deliberately chose a pen that looked like mine so i’d make that mistake.

[read the rest of this in Adropiean Galactic Lego Set Blues]

I love you

Drunk puddles

We have doubts

The bird catcher

Alexander said guard the church. I guard the church.

Next to the church stands a thicket of wintery trees, petrified, trunks silvered with what looks like ash from the war.

The church is half built. Until Alexander told me to guard the church, kids with spindly legs climbed the stonework in dirty school shoes, bed sheets bundled under arms...

Continue reading at 330 Words »

Lists of occurrences in the first married days of Robert and Susan Furniss

A list of occurrences on the occasion of the first married day of Mr Robert Furniss and Mrs Susan Furniss. Written by Mr Robert Furniss.

1. Informed Susan of homosexuality.
2. Long silence over cooling toast at hotel breakfast. She ate fruit, I had full English.
3. Lost glasses case in hotel room. Susan unconvinced about importance of loss. Reminded her of hassle to replace case. She reminded me of cost of wedding.
Continue reading at Word Gumbo (1.2mg PDF) »

Well

What do you call a stinking, dirt-smeared hole in the earth whose only contribution to fiction is as a device allowing stupid boys or hapless puppies to drown in its hidden watery depths or die of isolated starvation?

“Well” is the word you’re looking for. Wells kill children. They kill puppies. They also provide valuable drinking water for some of the most vulnerable people in the world, but for the purposes of me painting wells to be humanity’s greatest threat, LET’S PRETEND THAT NEVER HAPPENS.
Continue reading at We Hate Words »

Michael is a beautiful horse, a dangerous horse

Michael is a beautiful horse, a dangerous horse.

He will smash in your jockey face. Michael will not be beaten.

You lean into his field, lifting your cardiganed arm clear of the fencing, and hold out a sugar lump with a trembling hand. You make shushy cat sounds because you could never do a clicking noise when all the other kids could. It's the only noise you know.