She couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Pale as a ghost and slumped against the brown bottle recycling bin. Some blood trickled from her nose but not as much as was spreading rapidly across the front of her pretty pink T shirt, soaking the rainbow unicorn. A huge blot blossoming out from where she was holding her hand over her podgy little belly. Wet and shiny. She looked up at me for a moment,...

The ambulant, with its bright green cross, slammed into a hover and then settled onto the surface. The ambulant’s drive system wound down from growl to silence and the side doors lifted. Jake and his partner Genevieve stepped into the busy night-time street corner. The smell of street food, especially chillie-fried trench worm, filled their noses, as did the smell of alcoholic vomit and the copper...

Just when I thought it was all going so well. That bastard, my so-called life-long friend, Freddy the Fence, has done me up like a kipper. I was all set for an old age of easy, fun-filled gin and tonic gargling and now I’m totally stuffed. When (and there will definitely be a when) I catch up with him, I will be settling his account for good.

We went to school together, Freddy and me. I was alwa...

She slams her coffee cup down on the breakfast bar, spilling the contents over today’s post. It’s nothing important, an advert for a pizza delivery and a charity begging for money in return for a biro that doesn’t work. The Iranian maid, as always, appears as if from nowhere and in total silence clears up the mess.

“You’re a monster!” My daughter has a colourful vocabulary so this is mild. “I hat...

Work and life had prevented me from visiting Spurn for perhaps fifteen years, but on a whim, I booked a weekend visit. I should have checked the tide table at the spanking new visitor centre. But I didn’t. I’ve been coming here for all of my life and I know what I’m doing, I thought. So I didn’t check. More fool me because now I was stuck at the end of the Point until the waters receded.

Even on ...

Content/Trigger Warning. 18+. Strong Violence, Death, Suicide

I could fall asleep standing up at a bus stop in a thunderstorm. That’s what people said about me. I used to sleep in blissful peace and wake up refreshed and ready for the day. I never had any problems sleeping.

I can’t pin down a specific time or reason, but I started having dreams. I know everyone dreams, but I had never remembered...

Jake was alone in the middle of a row of chairs at the back of the crematorium, which was empty apart from a few mourners at the front between him and a pale wood coffin. The guy who was doing the Master of Ceremonies bit, not exactly a priest and not exactly a clerk, was reading out some notes. It was as if he were reading a shopping list.

"Mother of two wonderful children, bag of satsumas, thre...

He draws them all together onto the wide, gravelly, bank down by the side of the river. There are the boughs of some spindly trees, some fallen and numerous piles of tangled twigs, dried leaves and bark. The bright sunlight sparkles off the rushing river as it gurgles and splashes noisily along its stony course. A cheeky robin shouts at them from its territorial perch on the muddy bank. He sits do...

Brisk. That’s the word that best described the wind as they sailed their dinghy towards the jewel shaped island of Scarba. Uninhabited since the 1960’s the island was their chosen place for a secluded honeymoon. Back in the 2010’s Jake and Emma would have had their honeymoon in the Maldives or somewhere. But in 2028 Scotland was as exotic as it got.

The coronavirus that had first appeared in 2020...

They sat together, side by side on the rug, eating a supper of fish they’d cooked on the fire. The fire, was well burned in, its glowing core flicking off the occasional lazy flame and sending twinkling sprites of sparks floating down the beach on the wind. Their dinghy was pulled up on the beach behind them and tied on a long moor to the bough of a palm tree. Their sailing boat was anchored in th...