My Published Short Stories
What follows won't be an exhaustive list, and it's split into years of publication as that's as good a division as any. My short stories are recognisably all mine, I think, but have no more obvious linking in terms of subject and treatment.
They are long, short, first-person, third-person, male or female point-of-view, diverse in subject-matter, etc. Some are extracts from longer works, and though I've tried to make them stand-alone, as publishers nearly always require, it may be obvious that there is a large chunk of story missing at either end.
They will be in the form of links, or of the entire text, or both, sometimes.
They are long, short, first-person, third-person, male or female point-of-view, diverse in subject-matter, etc. Some are extracts from longer works, and though I've tried to make them stand-alone, as publishers nearly always require, it may be obvious that there is a large chunk of story missing at either end.
They will be in the form of links, or of the entire text, or both, sometimes.
2020
The Trio
Toothpickers - beware!
'I watched them openly now from the cash register, because they were too absorbed at this stage of their meal to be aware of anything else. Dad’s and Nino’s faces filled the hatch, Dad’s lips slightly wet, Nino maintaining the even line of the grim Soviet smile that hid her metal false teeth.'
Can we all agree that it's very bad form to go to a diner, even if it fancies itself as a restaurant, and pick your teeth at the table? Three men get a terrifying lesson in manners in my story The Trio, out now in The Fictional Café.
Eaters of offal, toothpicks, two sets of identical twins - and more toothpicks, all in The Trio, which can be read in its terrible entirety right here.
Can we all agree that it's very bad form to go to a diner, even if it fancies itself as a restaurant, and pick your teeth at the table? Three men get a terrifying lesson in manners in my story The Trio, out now in The Fictional Café.
Eaters of offal, toothpicks, two sets of identical twins - and more toothpicks, all in The Trio, which can be read in its terrible entirety right here.
Istanbul Song - the opening of my unpublished Istanbul novel
A bit of Turkish-style Art Deco on Istiklal Caddesi, the main drag through the old 'European Quarter' of Istanbul.
One: The Blind Beggar’s Daughter
I knew the rain would never stop, that second winter in İstanbul, knew I’d be stuck in it till the summer, when I could bake myself dry in the sun. By then, all the colour would be washed out of me, and perhaps that’s the lot of the Englishman abroad, to lose himself bit-by-bit to the elements. I love that city of polyglots and performers here in my head, but hated it that first week of November as I claimed a doorway on İstiklal, that is, Independence Avenue, and stood there giving it five minutes more.
Standing in that doorway, doing nothing except keep out of the rain, I realised that, as long as I stayed there, my life could seem less complicated. All my conflicts and problems were out there, under sheets of water, and they couldn’t reach me.
The blind man who begged outside the shops with his daughter wasn’t there, and I missed him, didn’t know why, wondered how he’d ever make a penny in all that foul weather. The daughter caught my eye once, and I tried to make out it wasn’t touching me, this moment of scrutiny. I had a dream about her soon after, and in it she’d come out of the rain and said it didn’t matter that she’d seen the face I’d put on, that not many people were cut out for deception. I turned my face up into the water falling down into my dream, and she called after me, “Wash your sins, not only your face.” Everything is blurred in the rain, and deception is easy, though the blind man’s daughter would tell me the weather makes no difference, that all acts like that are played out in the head.
This is the introduction to my 'long lost' novel set in Istanbul, where I lived from 1990-1992, and in Eastern Turkey. It's a perhaps familiar story of 'the Englishman abroad trying to make sense of everything.' In real life, I stopped trying to do that not too long after landing in Istanbul, a city I love and miss to this day.
Maybe it deserves to be long lost - it's certainly long enough to have got more or less instant rejections all its life. All the same, chapters 1 and 2 have been published in the appropriately-named Rejected Manuscripts magazine. You can read them here.
I knew the rain would never stop, that second winter in İstanbul, knew I’d be stuck in it till the summer, when I could bake myself dry in the sun. By then, all the colour would be washed out of me, and perhaps that’s the lot of the Englishman abroad, to lose himself bit-by-bit to the elements. I love that city of polyglots and performers here in my head, but hated it that first week of November as I claimed a doorway on İstiklal, that is, Independence Avenue, and stood there giving it five minutes more.
Standing in that doorway, doing nothing except keep out of the rain, I realised that, as long as I stayed there, my life could seem less complicated. All my conflicts and problems were out there, under sheets of water, and they couldn’t reach me.
The blind man who begged outside the shops with his daughter wasn’t there, and I missed him, didn’t know why, wondered how he’d ever make a penny in all that foul weather. The daughter caught my eye once, and I tried to make out it wasn’t touching me, this moment of scrutiny. I had a dream about her soon after, and in it she’d come out of the rain and said it didn’t matter that she’d seen the face I’d put on, that not many people were cut out for deception. I turned my face up into the water falling down into my dream, and she called after me, “Wash your sins, not only your face.” Everything is blurred in the rain, and deception is easy, though the blind man’s daughter would tell me the weather makes no difference, that all acts like that are played out in the head.
This is the introduction to my 'long lost' novel set in Istanbul, where I lived from 1990-1992, and in Eastern Turkey. It's a perhaps familiar story of 'the Englishman abroad trying to make sense of everything.' In real life, I stopped trying to do that not too long after landing in Istanbul, a city I love and miss to this day.
Maybe it deserves to be long lost - it's certainly long enough to have got more or less instant rejections all its life. All the same, chapters 1 and 2 have been published in the appropriately-named Rejected Manuscripts magazine. You can read them here.
I Think of Ariadne when I Eat Hummus
'I think of Ariadne when I eat hummus, and specifically the time I made it and she tasted it and said You forgot the garlic. I’d made it for what passed for a party in Lefkimmi among a certain type of person – her friends, of course, people like us, I guess, into gentle snacking and not big blow-outs. Some of them had already arrived, and had one ear on the conversation and the other on the sound of food being brought out.'
Lefkimmi is not a particularly good-looking or remarkable town, though it's Corfu's second city. I only spent an afternoon there (our trusty car did NOT break down), and that was in 2003, but it left enough of an impression on me to want to set this very short story there.
It's out now in the Who Are We? anthology, which looks at race, place and nationality, alongside other winners of Willowdown Books' Cunningham Prize. Available for £11.99 from Amazon UK and Amazon USA for $14.99.
The House of the Siren
My flash tale The House of the Siren, was reprinted and reissued in The Stray Branch, all 250 careful words of it... so I won't give any of them away here, for now. They're now available to read here.
2019
The Architect Interrupted by His Creations
A boy in a doorway, illustration by Astrid Chesney for Ambit Magazine
‘I liked the diva’s hands on my shoulders. I screwed her in a hallway to the twee sound of Mozart, made her sing just for me. I told her how the only way Mozart could be improved would be to add a hundred roaring motorbikes to his toodlings. I felt a current between us. In this way I forgot about the Duce and how he had worked the impossible with the force of his petulant, child’s will, worked his wishes on the world. And on my opera house. The shadow of my jealousy came back to me next morning like a hangover, and I remembered the diva telling me that the Duce had screwed her first, and had screwed her quicker – not a man who liked to hang around – and better.’
The Architect Interrupted by His Creations is my story incorporating Futurism, that art form that, paradoxically, had no future. It has had a second reprint, in The Quail Bell, and you can read it here.
The Turkish Moon
The very edge of Turkey - well, one of them - from Samos
‘They kept their heads down as Georgians and Armenians and Turkish nationalists shot things out between them, looked up at the moon, the one that had guided them from the great plains of central Asia, and years later, when it became law to take a surname, had remembered it, and had called themselves, Türkay, the Turkish Moon. Only many years after that did some of them move to the place they called Scutari, despite its having long been known as Üsküdar.’
My 500-word story The Turkish Moon is online here at the excellent Page and Spine magazine, and recounts the story of a journey that went beyond the movement from A to B.
My 500-word story The Turkish Moon is online here at the excellent Page and Spine magazine, and recounts the story of a journey that went beyond the movement from A to B.
A Song as Old as the World
Plac Zamkowy/Castle Square, Warsaw
'Women with long thin faces like Kathy’s, with large eyes, big noses, they had dark times as childhood’s ugly sisters, but when they got to their twenties they highlighted those eyes and made their lips bright red and framed it all in a symmetrical bob, looked like the women who did well in the Weimar Republic, strong and wilful and with a frightening beauty all their own; then they were eyed with a different kind of censure. “I’m sure she’s a nice girl,” Marek’s mother had said, “but what a face! I’m sure you can do better than that, dear.” Marek hadn’t needed to tell her that.'
A perfect night to fall out of love, go drinking with the girls, and then riding in a Škoda to nowhere in particular. A Song as Old as the World features an Englishwoman abroad, showing how it's done.
It's out the the fantastic Forge Literary Magazine, and you can read it right here.
A perfect night to fall out of love, go drinking with the girls, and then riding in a Škoda to nowhere in particular. A Song as Old as the World features an Englishwoman abroad, showing how it's done.
It's out the the fantastic Forge Literary Magazine, and you can read it right here.
In Herzegovina, near the Town of Gorjad
“Wars come and go,” I said to Dzanka. “Governments rise and fall. Borders change. Olive groves get… burned.” Dzanka looked at me closely. Did she see a fire in my eyes? Maybe she did. “Whole peoples get rubbed out.” I recovered my thread. “But DJs, their haircuts stay the same.” Dzanka smiled despite herself, and coughed out a laugh.
The picturesque and the appalling come together in my latest story, In Herzegovina, near the Town of Gorjad, out in Jerry Jazz Musician now. Read it here.
The remarkable paintings here are by Kevin Weaver, who kindly allowed me to use them as an aid in promoting this story. He is a former photojournalist who worked freelance for UK broadsheets, magazines and BBC Radio. He covered conflicts and revolutions in Europe and wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. He now brings his experience and expertise to sculptures and paintings in oil. The resulting body of work is one of catharsis, but also an essential record of events we shy away from looking at. Now based in Cumbria, Kevin responds to the local landscape with bold, bright and energetic paintings in oil. See more of his painting and photographs at his site here.
Twenty Two Seconds
Somebody fired a missile at the Houses of Parliament – bad mistake. Under an onion dome, a man in a suit showed teeth and grinned, his eyes glowing red. Why red, Piotr wondered, when he saw the final thing. Why an onion dome – as if the evil Russians spent all their time in church. The Russians Piotr had known never set foot in a fucking church.
The music blared. It saved the world – of course it did. United by that music, and cued by young men with clipboards, people took to the fields – why, just…why? – and punched the air with exuberance.
That was still what happened in pop videos, even in an age of cynicism and insincere world-weariness. If we were really that world-weary, we’d hate the music, Piotr thought, and love the launching of the missiles.
A faded star and his mysterious assistant, a diva director, a failing farmer, a video in stasis. All culminating in tantrums, sex and murder. OF COURSE it's another of my short stories. Twenty Two Seconds, in the #sweettreereview, and you can read it all here.
Never Forget Me
'Every school day my feet made echoes on stones where a hundred years before were put the same timid steps, and I looked up at ancient portals, and framed in them faces blurred in traditions, their moods turning blue with the melancholy of their days. Still I envied them, these ghosts, their traces behind them.'
My slightly spooky schooldays story Never Forget Me is out now with Ariel Chart magazine, and can be read here.
The Only True Outsider
Mixed feelings and sandwiches on a minibus trip from hell to Hell itself - a visit to Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland. Should you be visiting such a place - and, if you do, should you bring your own sandwiches?
My story The Only True Outsider never quite gets to answer these questions, just examines them, lets them go, but leaves them in mind all the same.
It's out now in Burningword Literary Journal #91, and can be found here.
Extraordinary Rendition
'Something gave my neighbor the idea that she’d be on TV for her free makeover, but that ordeal was not part of the prize. All the same, in case it was, and they were just telling her that, and might spring it on her as a last-minute surprise, she dressed up in clothes that were… nice – don’t get me wrong, they were nice – but either deliberately retro, or just simply current a decade before. She also had her hair done as retro/frump, and while she was at it had eyebrows kind of glued on, and trowelled on a tonne of make up before going. It was a bit like cleaning before the cleaner arrived... which she also did, because I’d seen her many a time through her living room windows, up on chairs, dusting, before her Latina treasure strode sternly along the sidewalk and up the path.'
If you have a makeover, is the before or after the real you? My story Extraordinary Rendition tries to fathom it out. A note to the narrator: when you hold a lens up to people, make sure it isn't also a mirror.
It's out in the excellent Corvus Review, a 'literary journal dedicated to the strange, wonderful, and downright weird'. A very good-looking magazine indeed, and I'm glad to be there. Here's a link to the published magazine, and I'm on p6.
A Blossom from Bosnia
‘She saw her dusty classroom, a little bust of Marshall Tito sitting high on a shelf, ignored. They had an empire here, she reminded herself, and let herself frown, knowing that empires ended foolishly, with rooms full of empire junk in cities under siege.’
My story A Blossom from Bosnia is out now in Bewildering Stories magazine. It's a dreamlike wander from city to city, against the backdrop of the Siege of #Sarajevo in the early 90s, and it’s a reprint of the first story I had published.
You can read it here.
The Automatic Writers' Group
Can you write without knowing what you're writing? Pastor Eisenthal (who looks a bit like Rasputin) thinks you can. The narrator's dad thinks it's nonsense, and yet he wrote automatically all the time. Attending the Automatic Writers' Group could just be a ruse to get out of the house, of course. My quirky little tale of guided pens is out in Avatar Review, and can be read here.
The Automatic Writers' Group
The Escape
'Klara had been pushed out of buildings, and caught in nets, had fallen out of aeroplanes blindfolded so as to simulate the dark world beyond the known one, and, g-forces in and out of every cell in her body, was one of the few human beings on the planet who had been pressurised and depressurised so many times her brain had shrunk in earthly terms but expanded in ways nobody had ever been able to catalogue. She had been too afraid to impart the terrible truths left in it to the scientists and researchers. One day, they’d invent some infernal machine that could allow them to see in there, but in the meantime she allowed them to drive themselves mad with a concept of deepest infinity known only to her and those like her.'
The Belamor Canal, wonderful or terrifying, depending on who was talking about it. In the Soviet Union, it was sometimes hard to work out the difference between the wonderful and the terrifying.
Aleksi has been sent out to the sticks through no fault of his own - orphaned, and in the care of his aunt Klara, who really can't work out what to do with him. Klara has problems of her own, her brain gone to carbon that gleamed and beeped and glowed from all the space missions she flew. She is a hero of the Union, exiled despite her hard work, her visions, the changes in her molecules.
The Escape, my tale of canals and cosmodromes, and electricity employed in the service of gratuitous blue murder, is out now in the excellent Squawkback magazine, and you can read it all here.
Sightings of an English Band in Poland, 1993
Alan... who the fuck is Alan...
At Warsaw Airport, a band disembarked from my flight. I hadn’t noticed its members on the plane. I knew they were a band because they had band hair, from not just one decade earlier, but two: all feather cuts with highlights, and shoulder length. They wore unfeasibly tight jeans, the likes of which I’d not seen for many years, plus boxing boots and All Stars. They wore satin bomber jackets, for fuck’s sake, with the sleeves rolled up. For fuck’s sake. Who did that, in 1993? Well, bands did that, in 1993, living the dream, even fresh off the plane, and ready to rock. As I’d not noticed them on the journey, they’d obviously not been acting very rock n roll: no groping stewardesses, or stewards, or chucking TV sets out the windows into the swimming pool. Well, there were neither on a plane. Just as well.
A band in transit at Warsaw Airport, and I'd see them again in Poland, during the snowy winter of 1993. I assumed they'd be on the road forever, and I guess they would have been if chance hadn't intervened in its usual, tedious way.
My piece Sightings of an English Band in Poland, 1993 is out now in the wonderful Talking Soup magazine, which is devoted to non-fiction - which can be almost anything, from the deepest recesses of people's minds, in all of its wonderful forms. You can read it here.
A Childhood Tainted by Wisdom and Flames
'I had no sisters, had a brother name of Calloway who lay in his crib and turned the deepest blue and died six days after he was born. His remains were put in the graveyard behind our local little black church of the Holy Virgin under a stone that puns Little Calloway Called Away. Like most babies in our little Penn town of Balz, Calloway wore a red thread around his wrist, supposed to protect him from the evil eye till he got baptized, but it didn’t do him any good. I swore he’d be the last baby came out of our family to wear a thread.'
A Childhood Tainted by Wisdom and Flames is an excerpt from a longer, unpublished (and maybe unpublishable) work with the working title They Still Believed in Angels. It is set in a small town in the Delaware Bay region of the US in the late 1940s among a community of eastern European immigrants and refugees from the Soviet Bloc. It maintains this theme of escape, with the additional question: the first generation escaped, so what does the second, born in the land of freedom, do?
It is out now in the wonderful Tiny Flames Press Spring Edition, and can be read here.
The Solution to the Rooks' Rider
'The server showed us the label on the wine bottle, and went into some spiel about the grape from which it was made, and the weather in the valley in which it flourished, and how the fermentation process differed from that of some other wine made from some other grape in some other valley, a more famous but, in his opinion, inferior variety. Outside work situations, I find it kind of annoying to have to nod politely at something I’m fundamentally not interested in. Maybe I look like the kind of shallow wannabe gourmet who’s interested in all that kind of thing. Maybe that’s worse than actually being interested... I want to drink it, I nearly told the server. Not bond with it and send it fucking Christmas cards. I thanked him, instead. The wine was bearable, despite looking like a concoction for children.'
A man and a woman have just been dumped by friends on the emptying concourse of a railway station. It would be absurd for them not to get together, surely? He bemoans the fact that a basic phone is now a pricey collectors' item, while she is still slightly disgruntled that her family was stripped of the aristrocratic von- in its name, its historic lands and town houses and the odd indentured servant, by communists. One thing it kept, though, was its chess problem. Can her new friend help?
The Solution to the Rooks' Rider is out now with Platform for Prose, and you can read it here.
The Stone
The library was closed, he knew. He would go home, then, lie on his bed, watch the bugs dance on his ceiling. He would eat at the Mission of the White Sisters, he supposed. He jingled coins in his pocket, thought he might buy a beer after eating. He realised that he was talking to himself, knew he shouldn’t do that; people would write him off as a no-good. ‘You are good,’ she had written in the letter that he had kept in his pocket for two days, words close to his heart. ‘You are kind, you are everything in the world to me, and I await your next letter with impatience and joy.’ Home, then, where he would think of those words and let them prompt him into his own; they would appear on his bare wall, and he would give them life on the pad he kept in his case. He would count the days by his letters, count them by hers, see them turn to years, would be assured, as he always was, of his ability to defy them with the trace of a smile on his face as he walked up the road to the post.
An epistolary post-war romance. The kindest nurse and the bravest soldier make peacetime plans, but there may be one terrible flaw in their optimism.
My story The Stone, published for the first time by Literary Yard. It's available to read here.
Fast in the Life Lane
My banger needs a lick of paint or two...
“You used to love those seamless, figure-hugging shorts,” my wife says, “and having an excuse to show off your legs.” I can make only a token effort to disagree. Alas, all of it, no more. If a cyclist is something you become having once cycled, then I’m a cyclist, but I haven’t been near a bike since I arrived in Istanbul, city of a billion cars. Istanbul people are good people, as big-city dwellers go, but once behind the wheel of a car they turn into Mad Max I, II and III.
A man foolishly accepts a ride in his friend's car, making a short jaunt around the outskirts of Istanbul into a high-speed adventure taking in sheep, potato-sellers and at least one Starsky-and-Hutch-style flying dustbin moment.
Fast in the Life Lane is published for the second time in its fragile life by Down in the Dirt Magazine, an outpost of Scars Publications. You can read it in full here.
The Last of the Lace
Just above their heads, there was a woman dressed in the brilliant reds and whites of the costume of the eastern provinces. She swung gently from a balcony railing, the loop of a thin rope buried in her neck. She twirled slowly, one of her hands slightly raised. Magda had worn the same costume in the Corpus Christi parade, and at school presentations, in dancing choruses; she too had raised hands, and twirled. She closed the vision out with a dip of her head, only to replace it with the sight of a child frozen in a doorway, a puzzled look in her wide, waxy eyes. Before she could be turned to stone in the child’s gaze, Magda hurried Alicja down the side streets that led to Saint Romualda’s. She paused at the church doors, wondered whether to go in.
When Magda can't contact her husband or child, she makes her way home to her town, even though there are rumours of an awful cataclysm there. Apart from having to shoot some unfortunate soldiers in NCB suits, she gets into the town without difficulty, and is stuck with one last job to do before she can take a breath and a rest.
The Last of the Lace has been published in Polish as Ostatnie Koronki, in the magazines Prze Tłumacze and Polski Noir, but it'll be out for the first time soon in English, with the well-established Selene Quarterly magazine.
The Strobe
