The new moon hung in the cloudless sky, almost intangible against that grey canvas that stretched out beneath it. Soon the horsemen would charge upon the earth and salt the ground as they went, and with the stamp of those hooves, signal the final turning of the moon.

Mothers held their children’s heads to turn their eyes from the doom above, and soon averted their own gaze to spare themselves the...

She's part of the furniture

She likes to hang on the wall

They look at her and reflect

Upon their good looks

In the right light

Some say she's warped

Playing cheap tricks

Lifted from the circus

Is how they explain it

The old mirror girl

Hair obsessions unravel

And nose fixations grow

Crooked smiles spread

Over straight faces

And she sees it all

She makes rough sketches

Enough to make herself t...

The sky peeled back

Like tangerine skin

To dress our room in a different light

Fill corners that once lacked

And foster our laughter

That had grown so thin

Like butter spread over too much toast

But now crowned by a golden yolk

Gracing our tongues

We talked in shades of red and boasted

Of this small moment

In which we spoke

Until the burning petals closed again

And with them drew our love away

...

The bitterness had never left Oscar’s tongue, not for all those years gone by, innumerable in the pressing darkness. He had only recently forgotten what the world above him looked like, and before that he had relied on his fading memory, flipping through scenes in his mind like a tarnished album. Now even that was gone, and only a notion of a feeling remained with him, and it was so distilled as t...

The wind caught her hair like a golden sail

And I stepped on an unseen snail

Love struck like a gut feeling or a hunch

But all I could think of was that sickening crunch

She turned to seek the source of the sound

And saw me wiping my boot on the ground

She looked like a painting with a curious look

And watched as I pulled off my shoe and shook

She glided across the road with elegant ease

An...

Write a poem from the perspective of an alien visiting our planet for the first time....

“Take your shot, stranger. You’ll only get one.”

Start or end a scene with this dialogue....

Describe a magic artefact that has the ability to talk. How did it become enchanted in the first place? Whose soul lives inside the artefact? And how did it get there?...

It’s been ten days. Ten days since the Sun disappeared. I don’t suppose you could even call them ‘days’ anymore.

During those first few nights when you could still turn on the TV and get something other than static, reports had been flooding in from the various ‘professionals’ about what exactly had happened. Some said it was still there, but it was obstructed by some other celestial body. Others...

The vessel was laid out on the table in front of Indra. It was almost alive but missing something crucial – she hadn’t found it yet, but she was sure it was on the shelf somewhere. A ‘Spark’ is what some called it for lack of a better word, and it had taken centuries to find the first; locked away in a place forgotten by time.

Its discovery had changed everything. It had taken decades to begin to...