Tag: creative writing

His the Night | Short Story

Person in dark cloak holding lantern walking on wet cobblestone street at night.

No-one was quite sure what the lampman’s purpose was. They knew that he appeared on still nights when the fog swept up from the Avon and slicked the dark cobblestones. They knew that he was looking for someone or something, but his purpose? No-one could come up with a plausible explanation.

It was not as though the man was shy. His buckled boots sounded loud against the worn stone, and he was unabashed in leaning close in to the shop fronts and the street level windows, cupping his hands around his eyes to avoid his own reflection. A moment’s searching, and then moving on, the flame of his cruisie lamp guttering with his movement.

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Twelve Cans Beans | Short Story

Shelves with canned goods labeled beans, soup, canned meat, peas, and sacks labeled grains, wheat, rice, oats in a basement pantry

Twelve cans beans.

Ditto lentils.

Twenty bags assorted grains.

Enough powdered milk to choke a donkey.

And then the jumble sale – the canned vegetables, the fruits, the canned meats. She sometimes thinks that it is the world’s worst tombola. They are brought forwards, these tin, flush against the edge of the steel shelves. Everything in its place.

There is a comforting airlessness down here. A silence. Everything is in its place. Everything counted, stacked against some half-imagined Event which would send them down here.

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We, the Dead | Short Story

We, the dead, make a stand.

Standards are standards; they do not distinguish between the quick and the buried – we all must tend our patch.

Our churchyard caters for a certain vintage of clientele. We have all been present and correct for some time – most of our headstones are stacked alongside our graves or against weathered tombs. Too many storms and too much Scottish rain has seen the local authority deem our slabs unsafe.

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