I’m hearing you, I’m seeing you, for sure.

I’m peeking through the slightly open door.

You sing that awful Katy Perry tune.

As if you’re free from shame you just ignore

me and the world beyond your own cocoon.

You must assume the door is shut as you’re

just singing in your hairbrush like a loon.

I’m hearing you, I’m seeing you, for sure.

But then you start to dance across the floor

right out on...

The shrill seagull squawks,

Disturbing our post lunch nap.

Shh! This is our nest.

Through the open door it peers.

Hoping to get an invite....

“Tom-Tom, is dinner nearly ready yet?”

8 across ‘Cruel girl makes poet thrall.’

So it begins: The Sunday lunch duet.

Try to ignore her and she might forget.

10 letters, anagram: LEVEL IN ALL

“Tom-Tom, is dinner nearly ready yet?”

“It’s in the oven, have a cigarette!”

Concentrate Tom, you are starting to stall.

And so it goes: The Sunday lunch duet.

I can’t do the crossword with cons...

For three days it had seemed like the rain would never end but tonight it finally relents. Still, a wetness remains. A still wetness. I stare out of the window and watch residual droplets fall from the gutters to the street below, but my reverie is interrupted by the bleep-bleep and vibration of a text message. Withheld number?

“Mr. Auster. Must meet you urgently. Will pay handsomely for your se...

People used to look at me funny when I said that my Dad was my hero; like I had something on my face. I suppose in their eyes a farmer doesn’t fit the stereotype. He wasn’t a fireman or a policeman. He didn’t tell exciting stories of his daring. Strangers didn’t recognise him in the street. He was just a plain ordinary farmer but to me at the age of nine he was superman and I wanted to do what he...

Niobe was a monster and she lived alone atop a stark and barren mountain. She had made her home in a cave that Mother Nature had hewn from the rock with millennia of groaning tectonic upheavals, invasive bleeding rivulets, and pounding east winds.

Her cave had one main room where she had built a nest against the back wall, away from the chilly winds, using leaves and twigs and many soft, plush ob...

There came a late-nochy collocoll at our dormy. Three gromky rasps tolled for the spectres outside. Set me zoobies on edge, it did. The gromky collocoll had been preceded by them clockwork goosesteps of orange boots on the slabs outside and we both knew exactly what that meant. Ade turned to me, wide-googlied with pog. Me tick-tock was down in me pit, thumping like jack. But had they come for h...

It’s almost 4am and I’m starting to feel the effects of twenty-one hours awake. With my heightened senses I notice every movement in the corner of my eye - hear every creak and groan in this ageing former office block.

​“I’m going to start now.”

David is shift supervisor; he’s behind me, listening to my call; I can feel him hovering there. His presence comes closer and he reaches over me; a gen...

We hadn’t had slept. The adrenaline rush was still pumping, gone 5am when Tower 327 burst into life and began projecting the dawn briefing into my visual cortex implant. How anyone is expected to sleep when the daily briefings are pumped in five times a day, I don’t know, but I was low on credits, so I had to watch the whole broadcast. Ellie had switched her implant off. She was pretending to sl...

“Dad sends his love. He’d have come too but, what with his bad leg.”

She sat down opposite. Method tried to look away, tried not to make eye contact, nevertheless, his mother leaned forwards, controlled the nerves in her voice, and she asked him what she had come here to ask.

“The papers have said some horrible things about you but it’s all lies isn’t it? Tell me it’s not true.”

“What people are...