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, […]
Tag: Prosery
No One Left and No One Came
She’d been on a retreat in the middle of nowhere: no television, radio, internet or signal on her phone. She rose and retired with the sun, wrote until lunchtime, and walked in the afternoons. She’d watched a lark rise in the March sky and a falcon dive into gorse. She talked to trees and picked […]
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 […]
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 […]
