Grace Andreacchi

He was the most beautiful old man I have ever seen. They say the face of vice is ugly, but he was the living proof that it need not always be so. I cannot tell you his precise age – he must have been three hundred years old at the time we met, but one’s first impression was of a man not much over sixty. There was a vigour in his cold eye, a statuesque immobility about his person that belied his real age. On closer acquaintance one …

Michael Perfect
As I wake up and begin, through the burn of the headache and morning light blindness, to weigh up the evidence, it would seem that as far as sticking one’s cock into complete strangers goes this has been something of a relative success. I feel certain that contraception was used. A sufficient quantity of alcohol was consumed as to significantly delay but not prevent orgasm. You did not orgasm, I recall, but you seemed to enjoy yourself before you fell asleep and you did not vomit on me, which …

Laurence Klavan
He turned the steering wheel hard to the right, changing lanes without having signaled. The driver of the car behind him, whom he had just cut off, blared his horn, then tail-gated him, bitterly, before moving left. The other man drove parallel for awhile, giving him the finger, before hitting the gas and whizzing away.
Get a life, Bill Chubbuck thought. Then, forgetting the other man immediately, he thought: I hate that expression. I wonder who made it up: probably some poor dumb bastard like me. Now, through no fault …

Then, my dear Mnumba, as I attempted to read the headlines, his sweaty skull opened. It sounded to me like small thuds of “click, click, click, click, click” as the steel bolts locked into his forehead started revolving around themselves. The temples of his spectacles where supporting the upper half of the skull which was positioned above this yellow mass of goo we call the brain. His glasses made the upper part of his fleshy and bloody skull stay up, you know, so it wouldn’t close again. And the brain explained to me, in Russian, what it said in the newspaper Pravda.

Christopher Gatefield
I have always maintained that I have a touch of genius; nothing will demonstrate this fact better than if I tell you of my decision, at the tender age of seventeen, to taste of the whole range of human experience.
I duly fell in love with an intensity that is, I suspect, unrivalled in recent years with a beautiful, solemn, grey-eyed girl who cared nothing for me. In this way I also managed to experience heartbreak in one efficient affair. Afterwards, I contrived to experience the other side and set …

Gordon Weetman
1.
Starving people on TV: a sight so familiar it verges on cliché. These appeals are becoming ever more frequent, global weather conditions having recently taken a turn for the worst. Stick men – skeletal beings moving through a parched landscape. Children with pregnant bellies, visible ribs.
The narrator announces that the problem is one of distribution. I’m not sure if I should believe him. Is it possible in an era in which a message can traverse the earth at the click of a mouse, in which I can choose between …

Selena Wisnom
It never seemed to matter when the black ones died. As it stopped breathing bubbles it bloated to the surface like a globule in a lava lamp, and bulged there as its scales already began to peel, a single wet dark eye tadpole-like reflecting the ceiling of its tank, black plastic grating, and the other staring down, staring right down at her as it floated on the membrane between the world’s one eye fixed on each. She wondered what it had been thinking as it died and whether it …

A Short Story

Eley Williams
‘Would the Minotaur moo?’
Surprised by the question, my elbow caught on his night-light and the lampshade coughed fiery and tufted dust against the shadows of the bedroom.
‘I imagine it would bellow rather than moo.’
I closed the book close with a clap of covers. Bernard’s face turned on the pillow, eyes already gummed together with sleepiness.
‘So, it would speak?’ he continued.
‘I don’t think Ovid mentioned either way. I imagine he bellowed. The Minotaur, not Ovid. Or perhaps it would bell like a stag.’ Bernard’s eyes …

Anyway this (.) basically this (0.5) last one is just to say that (0.5) when, erm (.) when I lose this (.) arm (0.5) I’m not going to be able to (0.5) use the •hhh Dictaphone (0.5) any more (0.5) and I still have my tongue for the moment (1) so I’d better say bye (.) now (.) I’d better say it’s been a •hhh pleasure talking to you (.) I’d better say that (.) er (0.5) I’ll miss you (0.5) •hhh (unintelligible) it’s been nice (.) it’s been (0.5)