Twenty-three stories spanning a couple of decades. Some warm, some absurd, and several written in my twenties when everything had to end in a crisis.
The whole lot in one file, if you'd rather read them on the sofa:
A six-month-old Maine Coon kitten discovers wrapping paper, cardboard boxes, and a pine tree that clearly exists to be climbed.
Read Story →George is twenty months old now, twice the size, and convinced the festive season is a territory dispute he is winning.
Read Story →Fed up with HR, Jamie decides to launch a gay porn studio from his living room. Then Daz turns up for the first audition.
Read Story →After a dismal date with Pete, Caden meets Dylan in a Cardiff bar. Two endings: one hopeful, one pitch-dark. You pick.
Read Story →Eighteen-year-old Ed has the fieldcraft of Jason Bourne and none of the trauma. He heads into Guatemala and crosses paths with Noah.
Read Story →A marriage on life support takes a weekend trip to a Crime and Punishment Expo to queue for Jessica Fletcher.
Read Story →Stuck at a council desk, Jake writes a sensible list of life admin. Leaving his wife is on it. So is poisoning the office tea urn.
Read Story →A couple try to patch things up on a northern Thai hill-tribe trek. Wandering eyes and old resentments have other ideas.
Read Story →A philosophical goldfish considers the bowl, her owner's anti-religious tirades, and human idiocy through curved glass.
Read Story →Dawn carries a quiet secret and an unsettling gift. She finds herself standing over a dead body.
Read Story →Graham, barricaded in squalor, faces a doorstep visit while his parents' voices argue inside his skull.
Read Story →Trapped in a dead marriage, Jeana reinvents herself to seduce the handsome postman. The doorstep has other plans.
Read Story →A street child in Manila tries to steal from a church collection box and gets pulled into a brutal cycle of survival.
Read Story →Sent home suspended from university, Jamie walks straight into a violent reckoning with his abusive father.
Read Story →Calum flies back from Thailand to sit by his dying mother's bed, clinging to a childhood belief he can move things with his mind.
Read Story →A dyspeptic swimmer sits in the gym steam room, quietly roasting everyone who walks through the mist.
Read Story →Patrick's grand debut as a motivational life coach goes off the rails when he lectures a confused chair-aerobics group.
Read Story →A business analyst has a midlife crisis, buys a compound bow, and goes into the woods. The deer are completely fine. His thigh is not.
Read Story →Two old men in a care home trade the small, sharp memories they managed to keep hold of.
Read Story →On a planet that definitely isn't Earth, King Barkus demands a holy book of rules to keep everyone in line. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
Read Story →Barkus's holy wars rack up catastrophic casualties while the court scrambles to spin the collapse.
Read Story →The new commandments are enforced with disastrous, literal-minded zeal. Turns out people will follow a rule right off a cliff.
Read Story →The Seer is hauled before King Barkus as the whole experiment tips into terminal absurdity.
Read Story →