I wake at half past three, unsure whether to lie still and listen to the sounds of the outside world beginning to rouse, or get up, drink a mug of tea and go for a walk. I choose the latter. The tea steams while I pull on some warm clothes and boots. I take several […]
Tag: Prosery
A Halloween Affair
We meet on the edge of dusk as the moon starts to rise, its misty light highlighting the lacy stonework of the church tower and the shadow of its silent bell. Eleanor leads me through graves blotched with moss and lichen that over hundreds of years have erased the inscriptions and life stories of the […]
Voice
I close the cottage door with a soft click and turn onto the road that leads past cottages and bungalows. The smell of hot earth and sun-scorched hay stubble settles over the village’s fields and lanes, where wilting scarlet poppies congregate. Before the small hump-backed bridge, I turn right, feel prickles of dry grass through […]
Singing in Space
Earth has been dead for a century, and all humans with it. Or so we believe. All that is left of the final expedition is our colony of souls on Mars. Only mouths are we. Who sings the distant heart which safely exists in the centre of all things? That is the question we ask […]
Evening Class
The card on the noticeboard offered an introduction to crystal healing and dream interpretation. Aisling wrote the address in her notebook and returned to the house she shared with three students. She wouldn’t tell them. They would only laugh at her in the same way as they did at her herbal teas and potions. That […]
Star Watcher
After watching the stars all night, she was still out there, in the frozen outdoors, tracking a comet across the sky. It was slow-moving, not as bright as she expected, and then it changed course, heading towards her. The light stopped in mid-air, pulsing a shade of blue she’d never seen before. She thought, “I […]
Giant
I’m trapped between mature queen beeches, beneath the litter of their crunchy mast. Their silver trunks are adorned with stag-horn lichen and bracket fungus, a tiny fairyland. Me, I’m a giant, one of a circle of stones haunting the landscape, a left-over from a long time ago. Sometimes the great bones of my life feel […]
The Kind Ghost
‘I knew we had a ghost,’ the writer said from her armchair piled with cushions, feet warming by the fire. ‘How’s that?’ ‘When we moved in, neighbours told me about a soldier who was killed in the Great War but returned to watch over his daughter, to whom he told stories. She became a writer, […]
Something in the Walls
“There’s something in the walls,” she said, grabbing my hand and pulling me through the front door. We stood in the hallway, listening, my mother with her ear against the wall. Outside, the wind was dancing a mazurka, spinning branches in its embrace, lifting the door knocker and tapping to come in. “See,” I said. […]
Ogden’s Extraordinary Observatory
Posters were plastered all over town, filling us with expectation: ‘OGDEN’S EXTRAORDINARY OBSERVATORY – ONE NIGHT ONLY’. We had to go. It’s in an abandoned factory that was closed when we were children, the year my best friend Rachel discovered astronomy. I’m glad I remembered to bring a torch. Ogden is a creepy man, clown-like […]
writing in north norfolk 