Talisman

A small wrapped parcel, covered in soot, bounced out of the fireplace. “I’ll put that back for you if you want.: Ali looked from her phone to the package on the floor. “What is it?” she asked.

Scandal

Archibald Clark spat his coffee over the computer screen.His long-suffering wife Marigold went to the kitchen for a dishcloth to clean up the mess.  “It was never a good idea for you to read the newspaper at the breakfast table when it was a paper.  It’s an even worse idea now that it’s on the net,” she said.

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The Voice in Her Head

“You’re doing it wrong and you’re taking too long.” The voice in her head, it sang its old song… But this was unlike all of the times before. This time she picked herself up off the floor. She just didn’t listen to all the voice said. This time she answered the voice in her head.

A Wish Come True

The little “well” was beautiful, carefully constructed from brightly-painted balsa wood, with ribbons and bows and flowers over it, in a manner only someone as artistic as Martha could have made look so elegant and beautiful. On the side was written, “To Ariana and Jack. May all your wishes come true.”

Lost and Found

People might have called Orsinius Wishlet a keptomaniac, if they had known about him. But nobody did so nobody could call him anything. Orsinius was a wisp, living on the cusp of reality and unreality, not etirely here, but certainly not completely there.

Muse

Muse looks at a number of the things that people fear, not just the supernatural elements of the story, but far more mundane fears: the person who offers us help, but is really there to exploit our weakness; the person we love and support, who turns out to be a “monster”; the corrupt politician who uses their position for whatever personal gain.

The Stopover

I got off my flight, along with 215 other passengers.  The signs to the baggage pick-up area were actually easy to follow.  I was impressed.  I’ve been all over the world and seen all kinds of airports, with greater or lesser degrees of accessibility.  This was logical, sensible and easy to access. It was the best I’d ever seen.  To find it, I only had to leave the world and go to the Moon.

Lizard

Isabelle glanced out her kitchen window and dropped the plate she was drying. Either she was hallucinating, or there was a dragon in her back yard.Dragons didn’t exist, so rationally, she must have been hallucinating.  Despite that obvious fact, she carefully stepped around the shards of shattered plate, and ran out to the back yard.

Excerpt from Hollywood Lied

Hollywood had told us what to expect. So much so, that when it really happened, we didn’t recognise it at first. Hollywood lied. The zombie apocalypse wasn’t about people constantly running from place to place, trying to avoid being bitten or eaten by ravenous monsters. Society didn’t collapse, it just metamorphosed.