Very quick post to say that I have a limerick about lockdown published in On the Premises, a fiction e-zine I subscribe to. And they paid actual money, which is always helpful in these straitened times. If you want to read it, and the other winning entries, click below. If not, move on with your life.
On the Nth Day of Christmas
4 JanHappy New Year!
WordPress very kindly made a review of my blogging year and invited me to share it with you. However, on the assumption that a list of statistics about my blog is probably more interesting to me than to you, I’ll instead share a wee bit of poetry taken from the start of my short story collection A New Year’s Trio (available on Smashwords , Amazon etc.). This is extremely rare, since I write poetry only once or twice a decade. I hope you enjoy it, but if you don’t, at least I won’t be troubling you with any more poetry for a while. 😉
On the Nth Day of Christmas
That dayless week between Christmas and New Year
When it’s all over and it hasn’t started.
Finding space for new presents and new life,
Three leaving the stable that two had entered.
A pause, a plateau, an intake of breath,
Ready for the wheel to turn again.
Crime Scene
6 MayAt some point in the future someone will ask, didn’t you suspect something, didn’t you realise there was something – not quite right? And you’ll pretend that you did. But for now you just sit here at his table, drinking his wine and looking into his eyes, smelling nothing but the air freshener, hearing nothing but the music.
Company Policy on Screaming
31 JanShe wants to scream. She wants to scream so often that she doesn’t notice when, finally, she does. She is asked to speak to the HR Manager.
“It was just a scream. Screaming’s not against company policy, is it?”
It turns out that it is.
“What about sighing?” she enquires, carefully holding it in.
This piece of flash fiction is available to download as part of my collection of short stories, Office Life (and Death).