IVMy wire-threaded claws are attached to the door, but i choose. i choose to pop out four times at four o’clock.  Out-in, out-in, out-in, out-in.  i choose to open my red-painted beak when the two bellows blow the paper whistles.  Cu, says one. Coo, says the other.  But actually that’s me.…

A man in one of those hideously ugly ‘retro’ shiny jumpsuit outfits was ahead of me in line. “There’s just no more time,” he said, as though the clerk at the desk was going to magically be able to produce an extra century from his back pocket. “I’m sorry, sir,…

Professor Gladstone’s age? Cindy had guessed fifties with his steel hair and bushy eyebrows, but at close range, surveying a face of furrows, upped the estimate to mid-sixties. He sat behind a beige metal desk with faux oak top and beckoned with his left hand. Cindy, briefcase clasped to her…

There once was a boy in a tree in a forest.  This was his home, in that forest, in that tree.  It was a young forest, not overgrown or forbidding, a place of verdant life and cool earth, a painting all browns and greens.   The boy would walk for days under the…

It was the best thing, perhaps the only really good thing, I did as a journalist. Or didn’t do. My noble omission. I was 24 years old. I had been following them for two weeks; Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan, his mistress. He had known her for eight years and had somehow…

“I heard the land is cursed,” the blond says to the young boy. They work on planting tomato seeds. We made the ever-so-silent-acknowledgement-eye-contact when I walked into the gardens. But nothing more. “If you listen in the middle of the night, you can hear the wails of those who died…

The thick, starless night enveloped the lonely figure with the smell of autumn, the season of mists. He didn’t know how long he’d been waiting in the abandoned bus shelter, he wasn’t even quite sure why he was there. He felt like a forgotten, unfinished rhyme. The world was stirring…

She has always hated the cake.  She says it to her brother the moment he presents her with the favor.   “I despise it, Robert.” He is six years old and she is eight and she has only just learned the word.  Despise. He had help making it, but the credit is his, the…

His coat was a mix of yellow and brown, and he had eyes of two different colors, one blue, and one darkish yellow. He had been Mr. Edwards’ only roommate and companion for the past seven years, attending to him in the mornings during walks, which people around were never…