Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

I have a new morning habit these days: writing microfiction. I take an unused title from my typically daft repertoire and use it as a prompt to generate a flash fiction. Some titles easily inspire stories and a premise quickly forms in my mind, no matter how surprising that may turn out to be. Some titles just lead to creative false starts and dead-ends. But that's the daily discipline of writing for you. What I do find invigorating is how I've been able to create interesting plots and characters within 300 words or fewer. Being someone who submits to competitions and submission callouts, it helps to have at least one option for every conceivable word limitation. I have a half dozen serviceable drabbles (100 words exactly), a couple of decent dribbles (50 words exactly) and even the occasional 10-word or 6-word tale. Mind you, I do think these latter types are too short to work as self-contained narratives and even verge on poetry, but that's just my judgement. Anyway, here...

Robert Kitchener, aged 48, was tossing and turning in his bed. He was striving to hang on to his dream but she was slowly disappearing once again. He awoke with a start, banged his head on the headboard and cursed loudly. He was also acutely aware that his bladder was full so he leaped out of bed, trod on an empty vodka bottle as he did, fell over and pissed himself. His alarm clock was in full voice so he threw it at the half open bedroom door and it landed on the top step of his stairs and proceeded to bumpily but somewhat tunefully, make its way to the front door from where it kept up its tune for a further five minutes, ending with a weak squawk. Robert sat in his wet pyjamas and wept floods of tears much like other days but this day was the worst for two weeks. How could this be happening? What had happened to his life? Of course, as he told himself every day, he knew full well what had happened to his life. In just three years of forced retirement, he had become a shadow of...

I flicked quickly through the untidy pages of crossings-out, garish ink and poor writing, eager to replace them with entries reflecting my family and friends. The old book symbolised those early years when we started out together. A rush of new names, new faces, growing families. Divorce and distance had created casualties along the way. Now I wanted to start afresh. There was a pile of letters and notes at my elbow which I had saved from the Christmas cards, each containing some change, news of illness, new addresses for those who had downsized or moved nearer to family, leaving behind old familiar house names. I copied out the address of a distant cousin onto a new page of B’s. The house name as beautiful as the Arts and Craft house it described.             ‘Do you remember that house?’ Her face turned towards me and I saw her smile.             ‘Yes, lovely place. ...

The man in the kimono was waiting for me at the bench. One would think his green clothes would have made him seem quite natural in the setting but, of course, no dew-dotted leaves or grass shined quite like it. With one last glance around, I showed him the book. I was careful only to show the first couple of pages before snapping the cover shut. “I want a hundred for it,” I told him. I watched him warily as he reached inside his kimono and produced a silver cashmere purse. He filled my hand with notes. I counted them twice before passing the Book of Sand to him. As he began to riffle through the pages, I stood up and hurried away. “Why do you run?” he asked me. I glanced back once. “Don’t question my motive. The book is yours now.” He said nothing else, just left me to run as fast as I could. Of course my suspicious behaviour might have prompted him to check the book but then I could tell he was an idle sort. He had his thick leatherbound tome for display purposes so why w...

  Call me mistaken or mad but I’m sure I found The Book of Sand . Jorge Luis Borges, please forgive me.             At the time I was working at The National Library as an assistant, though my heart wasn’t in the full responsibilities of the job. Whenever possible, I would avoid visitors and their confounding inquiries and disappear into the stacks.             Being a reader of Borges in my youth, I fancied that The National Library he wrote about was the very same that I worked at. Recalling the story of The Book of Sand , I browsed the basement where the book had allegedly been abandoned. I rummaged through yellowing maps and tissue-thin periodicals till I found a damp shelf. It was fragile but still standing with three books on it. I took each out and opened them until I found the one that contained more pages than the spine would suggest. More pages than seemed pos...

  It was many years since I had visited the ancient Pilgrim City. I was in the shadows of the great Cathedral where merchants and street vendors competed for attention with their cacophony of ringing voices and shrill cries. Shoppers nudged together to reach for vegetables and fruit set out on hawkers’ barrows.  Further on, under the painted sign of a black cow, a butcher stood with his cleaver aloft, a blood-spattered apron tied around his large belly. Next door, a sign above the fishmonger’s, showed a vivid, aquamarine sea and its harvest of orange crabs, silver-scaled fish and oysters: a picture far removed from my memories of the drab, grey, shifting sands and sea of the Kent coastline. My eyes fell from the sign to the queue at the fish counter and that was when I saw him. A long, thin man, his knees slightly bent as if in the act of supplication. As I stared at him, I saw him stretch out a lank hand with thin, pale fingers that closed around the parcel of wet fish he had...

I had this girlfriend once, called Sally; she wanted to go to the theatre. It was to see a sort of Romeo and Juliette thing but with a happy ending, she said. La Nonnay Sanglantay, it was called. Translates apparently as Bloody Nun, and it was – bloody nunsense. There’s these star crossed lovers, Rudolpho (not Romeo) and Agnes. The families are at loggerheads, so to keep the peace, she’s being forced to marry Rudolpho’s older brother. She runs away by disguising herself as the ghost of the nun that’s supposed to haunt the castle. Rudi trots along to the rendezvous they’d arranged earlier, sees the ghost, thinks it’s Agnes, and marries it, witnessed, as he would be, by all his ancestors - who are also ghosts. Then he finds out it’s not Agnes. You’d have thought he’d have checked what was under the veil, wouldn’t you? Anyway, the ghost won’t let him go unless he kills the man who murdered her – I hope you’re following this, ‘cos I couldn’t until Sally explained it at the inte...

  (Memorial to Commonwealth servicemen killed during the Battles of the Aisne and Marne in 1918 who have no known grave. Soissons, France). She would have known. She was his mother. She would have felt his pain. Her mind held on to an image she had conjured of him. Dazed, lost, left by someone in a cottage or a farmhouse away from the guns. Foreign voices whispering questions he didn’t understand, unable to remember his name or where he was. Armed with the weapon of denial, she fought off despair and the lure of mourning. Weeks later, she saw him. Standing at the sink, she looked towards the gently rising Pennine hills and fields crossed by snaking stonewalls. He was there, at the bottom of the garden by the wall, his back towards her. When the sunlight caught the tips of his ears, she cried out and lifted her hand to knock at the window but the sun faltered and his image dissolved, extinguished by the late summer light. She turned to see if he had come into the kitchen. Wipi...

  “For Sale: baby bootees, never worn” Attributed to Ernest Hemingway, this ‘short story’ in six words always brings a sigh of sadness as we think of the poor parents who have lost a baby. But is this actually what it’s all about? Since the story is so vague, there are lots of other interpretations. Imagine two sets of grandparents, each determined to outdo the other. Each buy baby bootees. One chooses blue, the other chooses pink. Baby finally arrives and is … well, you can see what might happen. ‘ No, Douglas, we must be first with the bootees.’ ‘ But why pink ones, Mary? What if it’s –’ ‘ Our Sally is craving sweet things all the time and she’s carrying high. It will be a girl.’ ‘ Tom’s mother thinks –’ ‘ She has no idea what she’s talking about. She only has one child. I have had three! We will have a grandaughter, there’s no doubt about that.’ And so the bootees have to go, before Sally, Tom – and worst of all, his parents – find out the...

  (Part 1 was on the Blog on the 10 th April)    I wait a while and press the apartment bell again. The street is very quiet, apart from a man walking slowly along the opposite pavement, singing a Richard Anthony song, loudly and badly. How come I can remember the song, but not my own name? The door opens. A tall, slim woman stands there, long hair, long dress, long fingernails. A small tattoo on a bare forearm. It must be Simone, but the memory is hazy. She reaches out and kisses me on the cheek. Not on the lips. What does that mean?     “You don’t look good Liam! Where have you been?” Liam! That’s good to know. She makes no move to invite me inside. No lip-kissing, no invitation. There’s a message here.     “I got lost and ended up sleeping at the bus station,” I lie. “I have your key and wanted to bring it back … and to see you, naturally.” I’m struggling to talk in sentences. “Could I perhaps come in?”     “I...

   The security lights shine through the blackout curtains.   Strange, this has never happened before.   I climb out of bed, and pulling the curtains aside, peer out into the inky blackness of the night.   I must have been mistaken, yet everything seemed so bright.   My eyes adjust to the darkness, and I shiver.        The wind is whistling through the trees, and a full moon suddenly appears, casting an eerie glow across the garden.   I silently watch and wait.   What is lurking in the dark shadows?   A lonesome fox approaches, staring straight at me, daring me to confront it, eyes bright and piercing, but I remain still, and it swaggers on its way, soon out of sight.   The moon disappears and darkness envelopes the garden once more.        I sigh and close the curtains, longing to return to my welcoming bed.   I gasp at the scene before me.   I am asleep, buried beneath the duvet...

  “There is nothing certain except that nothing is certain, And nothing more wretched than Man Or more arrogant.” Mattie had hated the school motto from the moment she first saw it. Her eyes were drawn to the stern, black letters, each a foot high, painted on the wall of the high-ceilinged dining hall.   She supposed they had been there for years and years. The plastered wall was cracked and patched under its whitewash, but the words were solid – forbidding and black as crows. She thought they must be repainted every year, ready to frighten a new intake of children. The motto was as stern and incomprehensible as the school itself, Mattie thought.   As she hurried up and down the bewildering staircases and along the endless corridors of identical wooden doors, the words whirled around in her mind in a tangle of double negatives. Did the motto mean that everything was certain, or that everything wasn’t? She felt like Alice in Wonderland, spinning as she fell down the rabbit...