Colette Paul, "A Complete Success"

 

Colette Paul was born in Glasgow. She is the author of Whoever you Choose to Love (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Phoenix) , a collection of stories which were serialized on Radio 4, and shortlisted for The Spirit of Scotland Writer Award. Colette’s work has appeared in several anthologies and magazines, including Mslexia, Edinburgh Review, Stand, and Litro. Colette’s story ‘O Tell me the Truth About Love!’ won the Tom Gallon / Royal Society of Authors Prize, and three of her stories were included in Victoria Hislop’s edited anthology, The Story: 100 Great Short Stories by Women. Her second collection of stories, A Complete Success, is due to be published this Autumn. Colette lives in Cambridge, where she teaches Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. 

About A Complete Success, by Colette Paul

This is a sharply observed collection which finds comedy and sadness in the ordinary lives of ordinary characters—teenage girls, middle-aged divorcees, a man facing his last night alone in hospital. The stories are linked by a sense of lives in transition, with the attendant fear, exhilaration, and sense of loss those moments can bring. Time after time, characters struggle to understand and communicate their feelings, to their loved ones and to themselves. Despite the melancholy theme, the stories are shot through with humour and lightness, a sense of life in all its complicated messiness. 

You can read more about A Complete Success on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening story of the collection. 

From A Complete Success

From 'Rats'

Before my boyfriend leaves for work he says, ‘I saw another rat last night. You better talk to that neighbour today about feeding the birds.’

‘You talk to her,’ I say. 

‘You’re the one who’s lumbering around the house all day,’ he says. ‘I’ve not got a minute to myself from the moment I get into the lab.’

‘Lumbering,’ I say, ‘that’s very nice!’

‘You were still in your dressing gown when I came home last night.’ 

‘Because I didn’t feel well!’ 

He stops fiddling with his bike helmet and says quietly, ‘Why are you crying?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Why do you think I’m crying?’

He lets out a sigh of frustration. ‘It’s really annoying how you answer a question with another question.’ He sits down next to me with a look of defeat. ‘Do you think you might be depressed?’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘is that a question? I thought we weren’t allowed to answer a question with another question.’ 

Since we moved here six months ago, we argue all the time. I blame my boyfriend for bringing me here, where I have no job and no friends. It doesn’t matter that I’d just got made redundant, or that my best friend had moved to Spain, or that I was actually excited to move somewhere new—I still blame him. It’s not fair, I know, but that is one of the downsides of being such a decisive and definite person, like my boyfriend. 

*

I get dressed and put on some makeup and knock on my next-door neighbour’s door. She is a tiny, stooped old woman, with bright eyes like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. From our bedroom window we have witnessed her throwing bird seed around her garden with surprising energy.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I say, ‘but we live next door, and we’ve been getting a lot of rats in our garden. The internet says it might be because you’re feeding the birds—the rats are attracted to anywhere they can find food.’ 

‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘have you got them as well?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Loads of them. They seem to be coming from your garden.’ 

‘I hear them scurrying around, scratch-scratch-scratch, all hours of the day.’ 

‘In your house?’ I say, horrified. 

‘I don’t know,’ she chuckles. ‘The council’s been round a few times, but they can’t see where they’re coming from either.’

‘Well maybe you could try stopping feeding the birds,’ I say. ‘That’s the biggest way to get rid of them, the internet says.’ 

‘Oh I love my birds,’ she says. ‘I sit and watch them all day. They’re the only thing that keeps me going since my husband died.’ 

Hannah Stevens, "On the Bodies of Strangers"

Congratulations to UoL PhD Creative Writing graduate Hannah Stevens, whose new short story collection, On the Bodies of Strangers, has just been published!

 

Hannah Stevens is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. In Their Absence, her debut collection of stories was published by the Stretto imprint of Roman Books and was translated into Bulgarian by Ana Pipeva for Altera Press.

Her writing has featured in numerous anthologies including The Fairlight Book of Short Stories, High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories and Unthology 10: Fight or Flight. She is widely published in literary journals and magazines globally including Archer Magazine (Australia), Loose Lips (Canada), Necessary Fiction (USA), Litro Magazine, Idle Ink, Losslit, Fictive Dream and TSS Publishing (all UK).

She is currently working on her third collection of stories inspired by her time living and working in Taiwan. She has undertaken writing residencies in Yangon, Myanmar, The Literature and Translation House in Sofia, Bulgaria and the Taiwan Literature Base, Taipei.

Hannah is also an editor and creative events producer and has worked around the world on projects using writing and storytelling as tools for positive social change, partnering with the BBC, the British Embassy, Greenpeace and many others. Her website is here. 

About On the Bodies of Strangers, by Hannah Stevens

Shortlisted for the W&A Working Class Writers’ Prize 2022. A collection of short stories linked by the theme of tattoos.

Our lives, our experiences and the people we encounter leave behind indelible marks. On the Bodies of Strangers explores marked lives and marked flesh. The stories in this collection are linked by a single thread: the tattoos of their protagonists, traces of experiences and meaning etched onto their skin.  

 

These are stories about the chaos of ordinary lives, about people who are flawed, complicated, but always deeply human. From domestic abuse to unexpected friendship, mixing horror and hope, intimacies and lies, On the Bodies of Strangers explores the many ways we mark each other and ourselves as we deal with the complexities of human behaviour.  

You can read more about On the Bodies of Strangers on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories.  

From On the Bodies of Strangers

Extract from Stick and Poke

The sun is higher now and the air is hazy with dust. The factory is in full sun, and so they’ve had to move for some shade. They sit beneath a tree across the wasteland close by.

Angel opens her bag and pulls out an old towel. She lays it carefully onto the floor, smoothing out the rucks as best she can on the uneven ground. Alma watches, nods her head in approval.

"It’s getting real now," she says. Angel doesn’t speak, takes out a plastic pouch filled with a handful of sewing needles. Next she brings out a pencil, a spool of thread, and then a tiny pot of blank ink. 

"This is everything," says Angel, sitting up and straightening her back. 

"So, how does it work, then?" Alma asks. She shifts slightly, trying to get comfortable on the hard ground. 

"Well," says Angel. "You dip the needle into ink and then poke it into the skin. Like, over and over again."

 

"Yeah, even I got that," says Alma. "So the tattoo is made out of dots, not lines?"

"Yes," says Angel. "I’ll be poking dots, not drawing lines, and I’ll have to go over it a few times. It’s going to hurt." She stops talking and looks at Alma.

"It’s fine," says Alma. "I can handle it." She sniffs, avoids looking directly back at Angel. 

"What design do you want?" Angel asks. 

Alma doesn’t want to say, somehow. "I thought you were supposed to be the artist," she shrugs.

"I wouldn’t say that," says Angel. "Anyway, you should choose. It’s your body." 

A woman with two kids appears on the canal towpath. She is carrying shopping bags in each hand. They look heavy, and her shoulders sag. Alma can see the woman’s face is red, set hard against the distance she’s got to walk home. The two boys trail behind her, struggling in the lunchtime heat. Alma wonders who they are, who they’ll become, if they’d disappear eventually too. Just like her dad. 

"Maybe a moon," says Alma finally. She remembers that time when her dad was home. Just for a short while. How he showed her the moon from her bedroom window, said that whenever she saw it, she should think of him, how he loved her. It was the only time she’d heard him say that he loved anyone. She remembers the moon’s white glow, the curl of it against the dark, empty sky.

A. J. Ashworth, "Maybe the Birds"

A. ‎J. Ashworth is the author of the short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here, which won The Scott Prize and was shortlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. The Times Literary Supplement said that her work "displays impressive versatility" and that her stories "do not progress so much as accrue, collecting incidental detail that enriches the scenarios without pointing towards their resolution." She is the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, which was her own idea to raise funds for The Brontë Birthplace Trust. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University and works as an associate editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Maybe the Birds is her second collection and features "Leather" which was selected for Best British Short Stories.

About Maybe the Birds, by A. J. Ashworth
After the apocalypse destroys most life on Earth, a woman makes artificial bird voiceboxes to try to keep birdsong alive. A young female vampire uses her knowledge of mirrors to save her village from the man who turned her. A woman haunted by her past feels that the robins she has always loved are no longer her friends. These fourteen stories, largely speculative in nature, consider what happens when the world is no longer as it used to be – whether in the postapocalyptic future, the paleolithic past or the dark north of the present. The collection is interested in love and loss, families and foes, as well as moments of disconnection and connection. All are interested in what it means to be alive in very difficult times.

You can read more about Maybe the Birds on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Maybe the Birds

From the title story "Maybe the Birds"

I watch the dog. The dog watches something through the patio doors to the backyard. Every now and then his head tilts to one side in the way it does when I talk to him or sing to him. Although there is no sound that would make him do that now. Not that I can make out anyway. But dogs have better hearing, don’t they? They hear things no human ear is capable of detecting.

Like dog whistles.

The low growl of thunder from five miles away.

A million voices screaming from the other side of the world.

Maybe the birds are singing but I just can’t hear them. Maybe there is someone out there shuffling about. Maybe, maybe ... But this is all just wishful thinking – the birds, someone being out there. It’s the way your mind gets in the quiet. He’s probably just got his eyes on all the brown leaves in the yard and wondering why they’re there. "Why all these brown leaves in the spring, Ma?" I imagine him asking in the human voice I have given to him. But I haven’t got any answers. None that he would understand anyway. And so I keep quiet, and just carry on watching as he tilts his head the other way. Not once looking at me. Eyes full on whatever has got his attention through the grey dust coating the glass on the patio door. The little dots of his pupils as black as the night used to be.

Gus Gresham, "Angel Reach"

 

Fresh from ditching an engineering career in the early 1980s, Gus Gresham found his road guru and lifelong friend Laurie lying stoned and unconscious at the edge of a vineyard in the afternoon sun, an empty Beaujolais bottle in the grass and a Jack Kerouac novel spread-eagled on his chest …

They picked grapes in the same picturesque French villages; laboured in olive groves on Crete and pumpkin paddocks in New South Wales; sought enlightenment in India and did the Auf Wiedersehen Pet bit on building sites in Germany. They followed seasonal work doing pretty much everything from thousand-acre wheat harvests to beachcombing. They slept in cornfields and woke up at dawn to wash their faces in the morning dew and start hitchhiking …

Alongside hard travelling, Gus always had a passion for writing, and somehow in between it all he has been a mechanical engineer, environmental activist, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal-skills facilitator, and mature student (MA in Creative Writing; MSc in Building Surveying). Currently, he juggles a building-surveying career with being a husband, father and writer.

His short stories have appeared in literary magazines and online. He is author of the novel Kyiv Trance and author of the young adult novels Earthrise and Marmalade Skies. Angel Reach collects his short stories from across 30 years; some are from those intervening decades, others are fresh off the press.

About Angel Reach, by Gus Gresham
Angel Reach explores the human condition through flawed characters whose vital, often strange journeys may bring them happiness or ruin.

In the north of England, a visit from a tall man who smells of rust could be the antidote for Emily’s reclusiveness. But how can you trust somebody if you’ve never seen their eyes? 
A young man who lives in a Manhattan attic may be a prophet or lunatic. In parallel, a young woman takes on social injustice wherever she encounters it. While neither have much regard for their own safety, they inevitably affect the lives of others. What will become of Tabbie and Finn? And what will happen when their paths cross?

Struggling over the death of a child, a man haunts Venice in a modern-day tribute to Daphne du Maurier’s "Don’t Look Now."

On the west coast of Ireland, a bully finds personal and perhaps universal truth.

In an imagined Slavic folktale, Agata faces unimaginable challenges as she searches for the key to her life.

An astronaut is locked in an illuminating battle for survival on an exo-planet.

Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Angel Reach

One Last Look

I wander the moonlit grounds with a bullet in my chest. No pain, just the bullet. How did that happen?

Has she got snipers on the roof now?

I watch the blood pumping out of the hole in clotted gobs that rhyme with my heartbeat. And even at this juncture, I think about some of the rare, good moments I’ve had with Charlie.

Go, I tell myself. Just go. She’ll be all right.

But I turn back to the house. There’s a light on in the dining-room and Charlie’s sitting alone at the table. I press my face to the glass.

She looks up. For a second, her expression is cold. Then she smiles. Crosses to the window. Opens it. She laughs as I jump through and land on the bare boards.

"You can’t do it," she says. "We belong."

She raises a crooked finger, pokes it in the hole in my chest and wiggles it about. It feels … okay. I put my hands round her waist. With her body against mine, the old chemistry pops and fizzes. In my peripheral vision, shadowy figures pass by outside.

"Don’t worry about them," she says. "Glass of wine?"

We sit across from each other at the mirror-top table. Our faces are distorted and ugly in the reflection. Charlie’s eyes are soot-black as she pours black wine from a black bottle into black glasses.

"I can’t stay long," I say.

She shrugs, and traces patterns on the table with a fingernail. My eyes begin to water, and my nostrils feel harsh. Uncontrollable laughter warbles out of me.

"What?" she says.

"Laughing at myself," I say. "Sitting here with a bullet in my chest and I was just worrying that I might be coming down with a cold."

"Another one?" she says. "Don’t give it to me."

I hear a dull, erratic thumping. I think it’s my heart giving out, but it’s noises from upstairs. Military boots? The butts of automatic weapons striking the floor? And something big is being dragged into position. Furniture? Torture equipment? From a crack in the ceiling, a ribbon of pale dust comes powdering down through the air.

Drew Gummerson, "Saltburn"

Drew Gummerson is the writer of The Lodger, Me and Mickie James, Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel, and most recently, Saltburn. He is a Lambda Award finalist, Leicestershire Short Story Prize winner. His stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4, and in various anthologies. https://linktr.ee/drewgum

About Saltburn, by Drew Gummerson

Saltburn is a collection of six funny sad queer short stories, all set in the town of Saltburn which is in the north-east of England. I start with an apology  

May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.

Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. 

In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.

You can read more about Saltburn on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Saltburn

Warriors of the Wasteland

While their parents watched the actual war spin out on the TV news programme, Look North with Arthur Seagull and Molly Splat, the boys, and one other, being neither boy nor non-boy, played war games down on the mudflats. Setting themselves up into armies, Shirts vs. Skins, Terminators vs. Rambos, Circumcised vs. Hooded (Claws in common parlance, as in, ‘Are you a Claw or Non-Claw?’) they took up positions behind old abandoned shopping trolleys, in forts constructed from for-sale signs stolen from the overgrown gardens of long-derelict houses, and in the abandoned crumbling concrete Martello, stinking of tramps’ piss and filled with sad-looking wrinkled used, sometimes unused, condoms. They were Trojans, all of them.

And these poor innocents, they would go at each other with wild euphoric abandon.

Happy days. The country was never happier, more unified, than when it was at war. 

Except, just as in any war, there were dissenting voices.

Those who were not happy. Not exactly. 

For Sven Tosier-Gumshoe, being the smallest, feyest and, perhaps, because of his position as neither boy nor non-boy, when the war games were coming to their nightly close, ragged, careworn parents having started to line up like gulls along the pier rail, shouting out that it was time for their respective charges to hurry home for tea or there would be tanned hides all round, was the one who was, most often, taken hostage. 

A quick resolution was needed to finish the game. 

‘I’m Private Tosier-Gumshoe,’ they would say. ‘Fifteenth Seal Regiment. Identification Number 35654. I won’t tell you anything.’

Usually then they would come at them with a used condom filled with sand, or a live crab with snapping claws, or the rusty speculum Aart Jansen had stolen from his doctor dad aeons before, telling them with faked horror that a speculum was something you used to look up buttholes. 

‘OK,’ Sven would say, ‘I give in. Our army is massed behind the seal fort… Plans are to advance at midnight… The password is Valkensteeg 17. Just don’t hurt me. I’ll tell you anything.’

Katy Wimhurst, "An Orchid in My Belly Button"

 

Katy Wimhurst is a writer and visual poet. She has had three collections of short stories published — An Orchid in My Belly Button (Elsewhen Press, 2025), Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She occasionally writes literary essays on speculative fiction and interviews writers for 3AM Magazine. Her website is here. She is housebound with the illness M.E.

About An Orchid in My Belly Button
These short stories savour the surreal, flirt with magical realism, dabble with dystopia. A boy sees the ghosts of dead crabs. A girl with a fox tail is bullied. A disenchanted woman sprouts orchids from her belly button. Fashion models pursue the trend of having plants as hair. Electronic goods amassing all over London herald an apocalypse. Darkness and wonder, the strange and the ordinary, interweave to offer an environmental and social portrait of our times. Guaranteed to evoke a response, whether a giggle, a gasp, or a nervous gulp, these stories will stay with you, enriching your perception of the world.

Surreal, absurdist, magical realist: Katy Wimhurst writes speculative fiction that meditates on our reality. Although bleak themes are examined – dystopian futures, the climate crisis, bullying – a quirky imagination and wry humour lift the tales above the ‘realm of grim.’

An Orchid in My Belly Button is published by Elsewhen Press. More about it can be found on the publisher’s website here. An extract from one story is below.

From An Orchid in My Belly Button, by Katy Wimhurst

Snow on Snow

Snow flutters down in her living room, even though the windows are closed. She blinks. The flakes pattern the carpet into white lace and dust the top of her cacti collection. She can’t afford to heat the flat, so she puts on a woolly hat and curls up on the sofa, tugging a tartan blanket around her. She gazes at the icy miracle. How remarkable! 

When the snow stops before bedtime, she makes hot chocolate and changes into fleece pyjamas. Snuggling under the covers with a hot water bottle, she remembers camping in the garden for a week one December when she was a teenager, sixty years ago; she preferred the quiet, cold tent to the heated rows of her parents. Before she drops off to sleep, the icy tingle on her face tells her more flakes are falling. 

She awakes to a flat carpeted in snow, which reaches a few centimetres up the skirting boards and collects footprints when she crunches over it. Nature has adorned the place festively, even if she hasn’t bothered to put decorations up. She puts on warm clothes, a woolly hat, mittens, a jacket, and boots. Her bones are chilly, but the magic of this arctic interior lifts her spirit. 

Hot porridge warms her. Then, using a pastry brush, she flicks the snow off her cacti collection—the Fairy Castles, Old Ladies, Moons, Stars, Bunny Ears, and Golden Barrels. Her ex-husband said they were like her, prickly but resilient. Worried about what the cold might do to the plants, she wraps strips of hessian around their bases, pricking her finger twice.

With a duster, she wipes the snow off a photo on the wall, revealing her niece and two great nieces in Montreal, Canada; so far away. She doesn’t bother wiping the one of her nephew and his family outside Tate Modern, London. 

Neil Campbell, "Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents"

 

Neil Campbell's new collection of short stories Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents is out now. From Manchester, England, he has appeared four times in the annual anthology of Best British Short Stories. He has published three novels, six collections of short stories, two poetry chapbooks and a poetry collection, as well as appearing in numerous magazines and anthologies. His website is here. 

About Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents, by Neil Campbell

Campbell gives voice to the extraordinary (never ordinary) men and women of Manchester. He goes beyond the King's English and formulaic approaches to short stories to capture, in print, how people really talk. Think James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, but Mancunian. Funny and heartfelt, this book is a romp to whizz through with pleasure. Forget mad for it Madchester, this is the Manchester of now, where Hacienda clichés turn into corporate nightmares and the only art is in marketing.

Read more about Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an except from the collection. 

From Saying Dirty Things in Regional Accents

Job and Knock 

Chris does the nightshift because no other fucker wants to do it. So he deserves the better money and the fact that they can usually get the job done early doors. It’s what they call job and knock.

Most of the lads are on the iPlayer all night, catching up on the football or Line of Duty or whatever. But they’ve been getting away with it so long they’re even getting bored of the iPlayer.

Why don’t we just go to the boozer for a bit, says Chris, to Phil, the lad he’s on the job with. Phil can’t come up with a reason not to.

Nobody ever mentions management. They’re a joke anyway. Most of these nightshift lads said could have got management jobs if they’d wanted but they couldn’t be arsed with the hassle of going to meetings and all that, they just wanted to crack on with the job.

They started the nightshift at six bells and by eight they went to the boozer. It was only about a thirty-yard walk from the exchange. Months they’d been dragging this job out, on and off.

They went in the pub and it wasn’t like they remembered. Instead of cosy corners and comfy seats it was full of tables and families sat there having meals. Screaming kids all over the place. Both Chris and Phil had enough of that at home. Part of the reason Chris did the nightshift was that he got more kip on the hammock in the back of the van than he did in his own bed.

The pints cost a fortune and of course you had to go outside with your fags as well. Just wasn’t the same. It was like they were deliberately trying to get rid of pubs for the drinker. They were just restaurants that sold the occasional lager now. This boozer didn’t even do Guinness anymore. They always used to have great nights on the Guinness in there.

On the way back to the exchange they stopped at an off licence and picked up a four pack of Foster’s and some fags. Back in the exchange Chris turned on all the lights and they flicked on one after another. They sat there at the tables and then Phil asked if Chris knew the way onto the roof.

Yeah, think so.

Better than being stuck in here. Let’s have a wander up there.

They trailed up the stairs carrying the beer with them and went out through the fire escape and onto the roof. The bright lights of the big city stretched out before them.

Phil went back down and brought a couple of chairs back up and they sat there on the roof smoking and drinking.

This is fucking quality, said Phil.

 

Nice and cool on here as well. Boiling in that exchange.

Better get these beers down us.

Save a couple until tomorrow mate. No sense driving home pissed. One’s enough anyway. It’s like the fucking Shawshank Redemption up here.

F. C. Malby, "A Place of Unfinished Sentences"

F. C. Malby writes novels, short stories, and poetry. She has travelled widely, teaching English in the Czech Republic, the Philippines and London. She is a qualified teacher and a photographer, and is currently studying for a Masters in Theology. Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle, set in early 1990s Czech Republic, won The People’s Book Awards. Her second novel, Dead Drop, set in Vienna, is a lyrical, daring thriller about the undercover world of art crime. Her debut short story collection, My Brother Was a Kangaroo, includes award-winning stories published in literary magazines and journals worldwide. Malby's poetry has appeared in journals, magazines and podcasts, and her second collection of short stories, A Place of Unfinished Sentences, includes stories that have been published in anthologies with Reflex Press and Pens of the Earth, and placed in competitions. She is a contributor to four print anthologies (the forth is forthcoming with Pens of the Earth in Oct 2024). She is also a contributor to anthologies published by Reflex Press, Unthank Book and Litro. Her short fiction won the Litro Magazine Environmental Disaster Fiction Competition, and was nominated for Publication of the Year in the Spillwords Press Awards. Her stories have been widely published both online and in print. Her website is here. 

About A Place of Unfinished Sentences, by F. C. Malby

This second collection concerns the sentences we leave unfinished, questions surrounding sudden loss, a decision on a train. It covers themes of relationships and memory, exploring what happens when memory fails. It looks at beginnings and endings, weaving through themes of generations, family, uncertainty, and what happens when experiences change us.

From A Place of Unfinished Sentences

The woman sitting opposite me looks like the guy I used to date. Her face is angular, her eyes fixed to the page of a book I cannot see. I wonder why she reminds me of him. The door clunks back into the frame of the train’s carriage. A thud as it stops makes me jump, and a man with a trolley walks through and scans the seats.

“Tea? Coffee?” he asks, glancing at the ex-boyfriend lookalike.

“Neither,” she says, her eyes remaining fixed on the pages in her hands. 

He looks at me. “Coffee, black, no sugar,” I say, without waiting to be asked. He lowers his shoulders, exhaling slowly as he pours me a cup from a large metal coffee pot. Steam rises from the spout, the scent of it licking at my nostrils. Saliva fills my mouth in anticipation.  

“Snacks,” he says, almost as a statement. I can hear my Grandmother telling me that it's rude not to form full sentences. Nobody is in a full sentence mood this morning. The trains have been delayed by three hours because of a ‘body on the line’ and the weather is damp and oppressive. Normally, the announcement is ‘leaves on the line.’ This morning it's a body. An elderly lady told me it was a young man. Such a waste of a life, she had said with a tone of disgust, eyebrows raised, as though taking your own life was comparable to a child throwing away a gift they no longer wanted. I had started to explain that you don't know what's going on in someone else's life, but she walked away mid-sentence. 

London was a place of rush, a place of interchange, a place of unfinished sentences. The young boy's life might have been an unfinished sentence: a friend in a rush, too busy to hear that he had felt low for months; an interchange of parents going to and from work, passing like ships in the night; a sentence about feeling hopeless, left unfinished. 

rob mclennan, "On Beauty: stories"

 

Born in Ottawa (Canada’s glorious capital city) and raised on a farm near Maxville, Ontario, rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. With recent titles including World’s End (ARP Books, 2023), essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) is his fourth work of fiction, after the novels white (The Mercury Press, 2007) and Missing Persons (The Mercury Press, 2009), and The Uncertainty Principle: stories (Chaudiere Books, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], and co-founded the ottawa small press book fair in fall 1994, which he’s run twice a year on his own since. He is the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and he regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices on his blog here. 

About On Beauty: stories, by rob mclennan
The thirty-two stories in On Beauty exist as lyrically dense bursts of short prose that move across wide swaths of narrative in compact spaces, offering explorations of characters working through small or large moments. The stories include parenting, pregnancy, the death of a parent, complications between friends, spouses, etcetera. These stories, in their own ways, explore moments as potential sequence, and how each of those moments might impact each other. To ask where, when, how or who: the “why” is the story; all else are facts.

You can read an excerpt from On Beauty below. You can read more about the book on the publisher's website here. 

On beauty
Upon the death of her widower father, there came the matter of dismantling his possessions. Emptying and cleaning the house for resale. It wasn’t as though either of the children were planning on returning to the homestead, both some twenty years removed, but it fell to them to pick apart the entirety of their parents’ lives from out of this multi-level wooden frame, a structure originally erected by their grandfather and great-grandfather immediately following the Great War. Theirs was the first house in the area, constructed on seventy-five acres of farmland, long since disappeared to development. Across the street, a smaller house of similar design and build, where the hired man and his family had lived. Where, originally, their widowed great-grandmother spent her final days, sixteen long years past the death of her husband.

The house was a local oddity, an obvious construction decades before the brown brick and stone-grey on either side, and contemporary infills. Where the neighbouring bungalow was once their back garden; another, where livestock spent fallow days. Where most likely a barn stood, then a shed, which now hold driveway and garage. Foundation maintenance that routinely uncovers the roots of an orchard. The difficulty of inground pools, and the puncture of linings.

Their father’s house: now that he was dead, it was though it had died as well. They had no choice but to bury it. Not a word. Silence. My wife and her sister, dismantling what would never exist again, and by dismantling, removing it from all but their memory. This, too, will fade.

Teika Marija Smits, "Waterlore"

 

Teika Marija Smits is a UK-based writer and freelance editor. She is the author of the poetry pamphlet Russian Doll (Indigo Dreams Publishing) and the short story collections Umbilical (NewCon Press), which was shortlisted for the 2024 Rubery Book Award, and Waterlore (Black Shuck Books). A fan of all things fae, she is delighted by the fact that Teika means fairy tale in Latvian. Teika is on X/Twitter @MarijaSmits and her website is here.  

About Waterlore
The thirty-fourth in the Black Shuck "Shadows" series of micro collections, Waterlore contains seven dark, fantastical stories on the theme of water – from the depths of the oceans to a public swimming pool – and explores the many facets of romantic love, family life and forgiveness. 

You can read more about Waterlore on the publisher’s website here. Below, you can read a sample from the collection. 

From Waterlore, by Teika Marija Smits

Lady Seaweed
or
Tristresse

Mathey Trewella, why did you come a-calling?

Mathey Trewella. His name is like the salt that clings to my lips: bitter, acrid, dead. I go about my business, watching over my little ones, but he is always here in my mind. Mathey Trewella, gone too soon.

I call to my children but they pay me no heed, so I keep the warning to myself: Kee-kee! Kee-kee! Be careful! Be careful! and I hope that it gives them protection enough from unseen rocks and drowning waves.

I can’t believe how big they’ve grown; that rock that they’re playing on – scrambling onto and diving off – was too far out for them last year. Soon it’ll be too close to home. I have to laugh at the humans who mistook us merfolk for manatees. My children, little waifs, are all bones and agility. And besides, manatees give birth to live young. We merfolk are more like platypuses, laying eggs and then breastfeeding our young.

Those humans tell tales about us mermaids. They cover our breasts with shells and say that we spend our time combing our hair; they believe we’re enamoured of the human form. Yet none of our kind could ever desire a human, with their hairy legs and strange, cold voices – always at odds with Mother Earth who provides for them. My children’s father, my merman, all sinew and strength, is all that I’d ever want.

Mathey Trewella, why did you come a-calling?

Abi Hynes, "Monstrous Longing"

Abi Hynes is an award-winning drama and fiction writer based in Manchester, UK. She wrote the first four episodes of historical audio drama Dark Harbour for Audible, and is currently developing many original dramas for TV. Her script Long Lost was on the Brit List in 2022, and she has recently adapted Anne of Green Gables for audio drama for Audible, starring Catherine O'Hara and Victor Garber and narrated by Sandra Oh.

As a playwright, her work has been staged in theatres across the UK, and she works regularly with LGBT History Month, bringing forgotten queer stories to life on stage. Her short stories have appeared in a wide variety of journals, magazines and anthologies; she won the Cambridge Short Story Prize in 2020, and her debut short story collection, Monstrous Longing, was published by Dahlia Books in October 2023.

About Monstrous Longing

A desperate mother buys a love potion to win back her daughter’s affection. An actress has a forbidden encounter with her animal body double. An idyllic new home comes with an unexpected lodger – a poltergeist.

Exploring themes of desire, womanhood, and obsession, Abi Hynes’s collection of short stories is sometimes funny, sometimes uncanny, but never too far from the truth.

You can read more about Monstrous Longing on the publisher's website herehere. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories in the collection. 

From Monstrous Longing, by Abi Hynes

From "The Something"

It was hard for Andrea to pinpoint the exact moment she became aware of the Something in her house. It had always had a sort of personality, squat little new-build that it was. Its roots spread deeper than was immediately obvious from outside. Its kitchen delved into the ground in a bizarrely old-fashioned design that left its little windows peeping just above the front lawn, offering an ankle-only view of passers-by to whoever did the washing up.

Other aspects of its layout seemed to defy logic and good sense. The two first floor bedrooms connected with each other, corridor-style. You had to pass through the ensuite to reach either of them, rending the guest room ... Well. Bloody inappopriate for guests.

The house asserted its own character with a pleasing confidence. It was one of the reasons Andrea had bought it. (An impulsive purchase, a Fuck it, why shouldn’t I? Giving off that dizzy rush of power. I am master of my own destiny!) Quickly, the house felt like a companion. It was co-conspirator in her emancipation from sharing unsatisfying flats with unsatisfying friends. She liked the Something, especially coming home on quiet, dark nights. The house’s confidence was catching.

The Something started small. It was the towel she noticed first (though there might have been other things before. Andrea could be dreamy. Unobservant). Clean and dry and folded neatly on a now-closed toilet lid. It was an unambiguous gesture, as there was no question of Andrea having put it there herself. Her towels were never folded, never carried in preparation to the bathroom. Her journey, dripping and shivering, to the airing cupboard in the guest bedroom, and then back, was part of her morning routine.

As a gesture, it didn’t frighten her. Her house wasn’t like old houses. It didn’t groan and whistle and scrape when the wind got up. It only sat there, resolutely silent, its burglar alarm and double-glazing primed against intruders, all its corners clean and cheerful. The Something was not a grisly intruder, Andrea was sure. It was just … the house itself.

Angel Dionne, "Sardines"

 

Angel T. Dionne is an Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Moncton Edmundston campus. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Pretoria, and she is the founder/head editor of Vroom Lit Magazine. Her writing has been featured in several journals and anthologies. She is the author of a full-length collection of short fiction, Sardines (ClarionLit, 2023) and two chapbooks, Inanimate Objects (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Mormyridae (LJMcD Communications, forthcoming). She also served as co-editor for Rape Culture 101: Programming Change (Demeter Press, 2020). She currently lives in Canada with her wife and cats. 

About Sardines
It is a universal enough truth that human beings are social by nature. There is space within us which normally fills up with relationships and rich experiences. When we are rendered solitary by circumstance or temperament, however, that space fills instead with the symptoms of loneliness. Angel Dionne’s dry, observant short stories pull back the lid of that claustrophobic way of life, giving us a vantage on the minor existential pains of people talking most often to themselves.

In this, the author’s first collection, readers will find twelve tinned tales of a world both familiar and disquietingly austere. For all of her economy of expression, Dionne’s investigations into the scenes - hair salon, butcher’s, library, zoo, café - and occurrences - a read-through of the paper, a conversation at the cash-out, an inquiry into the open job - of everyday life are meticulously observed.

Dionne’s story-telling is a kind of narrative atomic theory, in the same philosophical school as the writing of Nancy Huston, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Thomas Bernhard, I. L. Peretz. Life, Dionne shows, is not so abstract or so complex that it cannot be made sense of. With sympathy, wit, and a relentless eye for detail, she demonstrates how to discern the commonplace minutiae of human existence, and how to see the ways they interact and compound until the mundane begins to resonate with human meaning.

You can read more about Sardines on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories in the collection. 

From Sardines, by Angel Dionne

Sardines (excerpt)

Antoine had always marveled at the way the concrete walls and darkened windows of city buildings were transformed at night. By day, they stood benign, but at night they rose and became towering giants looming high over narrow streets. The tenement buildings and brick storefronts, in crowded desperation, attempted to blot out the moon, and the city sank into a tepid darkness from which Antoine wasn’t certain it would ever rise.

Antoine had been born in this city, had grown up in this city, had toiled and agonized and would, as far as he was concerned, die in this city. At sixty-two years of age, he awaited death like one awaits a long-departed lover. He occupied a little ground-floor apartment in a tenement building, facing neither the sunlight by day or the damp luminescence of moonlight by evening — the perfect place for a forgotten pensioner burdened with arthritis and a stubborn cough.

Although thin-walled, the apartment was good enough to suit him. It wasn’t quite home. In fact, the city never really had been despite the fact that he’d never left it. The oppressive air and colourless pavement made up the sum total of his life. Sometimes, he wished things had been different for him ... 

Katy Wimhurst, "Let Them Float"

Katy Wimhurst’s first collection of short stories was Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and her new collection is Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She interviews writers for 3AM Magazine. She blogs here. She is housebound with the illness M.E. @Sylphsea on Twitter

About Let Them Float
In the short stories in Let Them Float, Katy Wimhurst creates off-kilter worlds that illuminate our own. Apocalyptic rabbits invade a town. People overwhelmed by their lives float above an urban park. A woman turns transparent after a virus. The playful lenses of magical realism and surrealism are used to explore physical and mental illness and our fragile environment. Thought-provoking fiction with a good dose of whimsy. More can be found out about the book here. You can read an excerpt from the book below. 

From Let Them Float, by Katy Wimhurst

Let Them Float

It was like any walk to work through Castle Park until something tugged at Isla’s attention. She halted, cupping her hand to her mouth. Jeez.

A woman was floating upright above a leafy oak tree. Her slender arms were opened a little on each side, like a half-baked ballet pose. She wore blue jeans and a matching jacket, and she stared skyward blankly, her chin tilted up. Suspended in the air, she resembled a figure from a Chagall painting or a lost angel in denim. What was she doing up there?

Would this be like the epidemic of Fainters in town, from a couple of years back? Or a few years before that, the Hornies, the group of teenagers who sprouted goat’s horns on their heads – Isla’s nephew, Hamish, aged five at the time, loved those. 

From where Isla stood, the floating woman looked twenty-something. Does she have any children? A question Isla asked herself about many strangers. She reached for her neck scarf and absent-mindedly rubbed its silky material between her thumb and forefinger. Three men ahead of her had stopped, one filming the woman on his phone. Isla would have loved to linger and watch, but another busy day at work awaited. She tore herself away.

In the sunlight, the wrought-iron park gates threw shadows like pretty lattices onto St Peter’s Street. Isla’s office was in a glass-fronted building halfway down this road. In the foyer, the sign above Reception read: Orizone: Compliments for Condiments. She wrote copy for a marketing company specialising in foods such as chutneys and pickles; hardly a dream job. Her boyfriend, Gaitlin, jokingly called her the ‘chutney champion.’ 

Kylie, the smiley receptionist with a ginger bob, greeted her. 

‘Heard about the floating woman?’ asked Isla.

‘Pardon?’ Kylie’s brow creased as Isla explained. ‘I’m definitely going to have a nosey at lunchtime. What’s that all about?’

‘Wish I knew.’ Isla glanced at Kylie’s telephone. ‘Any calls for me?’

Kylie’s brows rose. ‘That Mr Lancaster again. I told him to try in half an hour.’

A difficult client, Isla’s heart plummeted.

Sunlight sluiced through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the open-plan office. As ever, Isla was the earliest to arrive. She put her velvet jacket on the back of her chair while looking at a silver-framed photo on her desk. It showed her nephew in a school uniform, smiling in his sweet, bashful way. All the other women her age here had photos of their own kids on display. Isla switched on her desktop and turned her attention to her emails. Four already from Mr Lancaster. Oh, spare me. She clicked on his first one and tried to concentrate, but her mind harked back to the floating woman.

Laurie Cusack, "The Mad Road"

Congratulations to Laurie Cusack, University of Leicester PhD Creative Writing graduate, whose debut collection of short stories, The Mad Road, has just been published by Roman Books, as part of its Stretto Fiction series!

Laurie Cusack (PhD) hails from Leicester. He studied Creative Writing at Leicester University. He writes from the gut −  The Mad Road is published by Roman Books, and is his debut collection of short stories. The stories were first drafted as part of his PhD thesis at Leicester.

About The Mad Road, by Laurie Cusack

The Mad Road is a collection of short stories that deals with raw Irish experience in a ‘Fairy Tale of New York’ meets Trainspotting sort of fashion. There is a comic-toughness about Cusack’s narratives that keeps you turning the page. They are working class in nature and aren’t for the fainthearted. 

You can read a review of The Mad Road on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From The Mad Road

Usher’s Well

“Do you want the shamrock on the cream, Davey?”

“What?”

“Brewery directive.”

“Just give me the fucking drink, Hughie.”

“We’re like Sainsbury’s now. We have to ask.”

“Brand Ireland, eh?”

“Now you said it.”

It was just the two of them in The Angel. For the last fifteen years, Hughie O’Connor had been the landlord of the Irish pub tucked in the back streets of Hackney. Traditional music often thrived within its walls.

“Was I missed?” Davey Murray whispered, trying to gauge Hughie’s mood.

Hughie gave his old friend an odd look followed by a shrug. He liked order, liked being kept in the loop. He kept a tight rein on things; a no messing policy; barred meant barred. No early-doors; no late ones. But Davey was the exception to his rules. Hughie often wondered why. Maybe it was because they had been on the shovel together during Hughie’s early days in London. Demolition. Dusty and dangerous work. And most of their wages went on drink in and around the pubs of Cricklewood.

“There were a few asking for you, come to think of it.”

Davey hadn’t shown his face for ages. Unusual. Not a sight or a whiff of him. Hughie had scratched his head a good few times during the past few weeks.

“Look… I had to split, alright?”

“Going off grid is a mortal sin, nowadays.” 

“Am I daft or stupid, Hughie?”

“Now − that, might take a long time to answer, Davey.”

“Ruffled a few feathers?”

“You could say that.”

“Who?”

“Your manager − coming in here, making a show, Where’s the fucking bollix?”

“Eejit.”

Davey’s manager, Rory Higgins, was a character who handled Irish, showbands and other novelty acts. The Impresario of Kilburn High Road − that was what they called him. He had the knack for smelling money. He was always bucking the trend. Davey would still be busking tube stations if Higgins hadn’t chanced upon him ...