Category: fiction

Where are you man? Bates stared at the four word subject line.  He didn’t need to open the message, that would be all there was, just the subject line, no body.  Typical Thomas efficiency.  But he liked the italicized verb.  Added a touch of urgency.  He liked that Thomas was feeling some stress. And why…

Wyecomb was training the pulsing blue point of a laser scalpel on a factory seam behind the felled unit’s left ear when, distantly, he heard the cough of a jeep’s engine followed by the slam of his screen.  He did not look up, but called out. “Leave them on the table, Lieutenant.” “Leave what?”  Wyecomb…

Middleton had only been inside The Bitter Edge maybe half a dozen times – just enough to maintain what his conduct guidelines deemed ‘appropriate community visibility’ – but the instant he walked in, he sensed something was out of the ordinary.  The place was packed, as usual – it was the only bar on the…

“I would have Johnstone,” said Margaret, resolutely.  She stood with her back to her father, and listened for his reaction.  She could hear the faint scuffing of his boots on the floor as he shifted his weight around. “It is your choice, my dear, of course.  I cannot say that I am entirely…” She interrupted…

Ben got her to Paris as quickly as he could.  A mid-morning shuttle from Heathrow landed them at Charles de Gaulle before he could finish the piccolo of Heidsieck that the EuroAir cabin attendant had proffered in recognition of their premium fares.  In the moulded seat beside him, Dela feigned sleep, while the headset streamed…

“Oh God, not again?”  Isobel looked impatiently up from her tabloid – a pan-European edition, in English – and scanned the view from the train window.  The passing mural of landscape was slowing, green fields and olive groves giving onto loose clusters of tired stone and plaster houses with cluttered yards. “Not another stop.  Where…

Welcome.  And congratulations. (Whatever your native intellectual state, I flatter myself that a certain measure of ingenuity was required to locate and decipher this message, not to mention some good old-fashioned persistence. Comforting to know that curiousity isn’t confined to us.)  Regrettably, all I have to offer at your journey’s end is this short tale. …