Last night, I dreamed about the city, the noise and clamour of traffic, masses of commuters streaming from the gaping mouths of the underground, heels tip-tapping, bags swinging, steaming plastic cups of coffee proffered like torches leading the way to work with their bitter aroma. Buses rumbled, horns blared, and exhaust fumes discombobulated rays of […]
Category: Prose
Only a Dream
She gets into bed accompanied by a whisper of rain like a tentative apology, lulling her into a fitful sleep. It drips through her dreams, punctuating them with watery full stops. So many dreams, like the flicker books she loved as a child, only the pictures change too quickly, from the first day of lockdown, […]
A Way Back to the Garden
In the garden she was lovingly cultivating, Mother Nature stood back. The plants were doing well, flourishing even, producing flowers and fruit of every colour, even some she hadn’t invented yet – they were going it alone. Birds and insects carried pollen from one part of the garden to another, cross-pollinating, creating forest and jungle, […]
Surprised by Love
Unlike most of her friends and acquaintances, her teenage years and early twenties were not so much sweet with romance but bitter with break-ups and dour with disappointment. “I don’t know why I was surprised every time love started or ended,” she told her therapist, “I never chose the unlikely men I ended up with, […]
Moments
There are moments caught between heartbeats, between light and shadow, time and space, in the swing of the pendulum, tick and tock, that leave us breathless. Lightning strikes during those moments, illuminating the darkness of a city street, an ocean, a field or, in my case, the garden in the middle of the night. A […]
Strange things happen at sea
The walk along the beach that Sunday was wild. The wind racing across the sand was fast and powerful, blowing bubbles of foam into the dunes and sand into hair and eyes. The tall dark-haired woman in the Fair-isle hat bent down to stroke the terrier at her feet and lifted a stone from a […]
Mudlarking
After winter’s blast, a gang of us swarms the banks of the Thames beneath a leaden sky, picking our way through mud contaminated with sewage, slippery and sucking at our boots. We wear our hungry faces like masks, our hands red and purple from the icy wind. Occasionally, a cry goes up as someone skids […]
Arroyo of Dreams
In sleep, I drift through unfamiliar landscapes, scanning rock formations for other signs of life, feeling like a space traveller, far from green fields and horizons lined with oak and birch. In the distance, a cow is screaming across the arroyo. Its powerful anguish metamorphoses into a dust devil, a column of sand towering above […]
Dark Chocolate
The day was blackly overcast, rain fell steadily, and Alice hadn’t seen a soul all day, not even her nosy neighbour. She’d almost given up hope, when the doorbell rang. In the hallway, she screwed up her eyes, trying to identify the silhouetted outline in the patterned glass of the front door. The bell rang […]
Anticipating Hallows Eve
Living between sea and waterways, I love this time of year. Schools have celebrated harvest, clocks have gone back, and nights are drawing in with frost and spooky tales. Along the coast and above the marshlands, the sky is haunted, filled with the cries of wintering birds. In the woods, frills of fungus cling to […]
