Skip to content

Month: August 2025

Sale or Return

Cassy looked at the pictures filling the screen, the latest celebrity couple smiling broadly, their white teeth gleaming as they presented their perfect new baby to the World. They’d used a surrogate, of course, why ruin your figure when somebody else would take one for the team, at a price.

She thought of that exchange between George Bernard Shaw and Isadora Duncan when she had apparently suggested to him that if they had children together, they would have the perfect combination of her beauty and his brains. The risk is that they get your brains and my beauty instead, my dear, he had countered, laughing. That was then and this is now, Cassy thought, there would have been no such chances taken with this baby.

Dead Man’s Alley

I looked at the dead man, his body lying half in, half out of a puddle of water in the alley. At least, I hoped it was water, although there was the pungent aroma of urine perfuming the air. His eyes were open, holding a look of confusion as if his death had come as a surprise, which to be fair, it must have done. But I felt they were directed at me, which wasn’t fair at all, although, I suppose I was sort of death ‘adjacent’.

I looked at Sally, standing to one side; her dress, if such a small amount of material could be called one, was dishevelled and she was on the verge of tears.

The Canvas

Listen, can you hear that?

The rain is coming down again. Softly, like that song Ben and I once danced to, the soft crackle of needle on vinyl, whispers from the past. I can feel the early waters swelling, clean and fresh, rising up to greet us with silver finned cheer. Just like every morning on the water. It arrives with promises, with hints flashing in the depths and whispers riding in on the currents. It is reliable, dependable, predictable as an ancient clock tick, tick, ticking away in a forgotten school hall, a faithful and reliable old care taker. That dry and dusty hall, where I first saw Ben’s awkward smile and dreamed of holding his hand, has long since welcomed the lap, lap, lapping of the waves.

I can hear the young fisher men, their banter boldly bristling back and forth along the quayside flashing and bright, like the fish they hope to catch on the hooks that they’re now casting into the deep waters.

You cannot copy content of this page