Creative fiction
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My Mother
They yanked me out of my mother with a pickaxe. They took us in our thousands, each bucketload stealing away a hundred of my brothers and sisters. Electric lamps cast everything in harsh white. Sifted, sorted, milled, cut. Steel rolled over our bodies, and we became dust. Water baptised us…
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A Drink With Death
Death spared my life once. She’s never told me why, and I’ve never asked. We’ve always skirted around the subject She lights up my waiting cigarette with a flash of her celestial eyes. “Smoking kills, you know,” she teases. An old joke. The whole back-from-the-cusp-of-death stuff, it’s a one way…
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Hannibal’s Favourite Elephant
There was a lot of foolery involved in crossing the rivers on the way to the Alps. The animals were terrified of the water. The Carthagians scattered soil on their barges to give the illusion of solid ground. A cheap trick, but it was enough. With the beasts stood still,…
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Unwishing
Wouldn’t it be a joy to pour darkness into a jar, thick and solid to the touch? I picture it like slick, heavy oil, infinitely dense. Light would be cotton candy, the airiest of fogs. Scoop them up in buckets and shape them for hours until you’ve mixed the perfect…
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Gaze
She was porn star pretty, in that 80s softcore beach photoshoot kinda way. The sort of girl you can only capture with a Kodak - words don’t stick to her. Go pick up an old copy of Playboy, cut out the first dozen sunkissed California blondes and swap their body…
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Red/Green
I sleep in half a bed, with one eye open. I fill half a bowl with cereal, ceramic split cleanly down the middle. The milk spills all over the table, and the cornflakes form soggy yellow islands across the polkadot surface cloth. With only half-an-engine, my half-a-car stalls at a…
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Goodnight
Of all the retirement plans in the world, shooting the Vice President is perhaps one of the more outlandish. And yet here we are, crosshairs lined up, one shot away from the fattest paycheques of our lives Dan glances at the digital display of his watch in the dark. “Eight…