You are going back to the old country and nothing will have changed and everything will have changed.

 You won’t surprise anyone when you say

 No’.

To the offers to come with you. 

Heat

I am not the parent I thought I’d be, but revolutions rarely unfold as we predict

The Space Between Us: Parenting and the Generation Gap

We’re not like the other pubs in the area, we’re proper with wood logs by the fake fire and pickled eggs in jars at end of bar.

Be True to Your Bar

I will tell you what happened, in my own words and with my whole truth. I will explain  I was not bad and not to blame, and nothing I’ve done should get me punished. But that somebody was bad and to blame and somebody must be punished, well...

Because of What is Out There (In Hunger: An Anthology)


There is such wetness at the beginning of the end times, you thought it would be drier, scorched earth, raging wildfires, brimstone, hell opening, a tormenting furnace. 

Deluge

An eco prisoner in the USA feels she has done her time

Dear John

It was not the first suicide in room 6. It was the fifth.

The Turn


We usually wait until January for the panto at the Playhouse. We take in our own snacks and drinks, to save money and save queueing. This year we were cutting back though, so we didn’t go at all.


Last Night of The Panto

Don’t think the man in the silent room is scared, or sad. He has felt those feelings recently but not now. He has not chosen silence to hide, or to buy himself a little more time.He is sitting in the space where the orchestra has finished..

Finished Symphony

Download story from the competition website:
It was a good kitchen full of cooking smells because often there was me stirring a slow cooked stew or Daf washing mud off potatoes just dug up.
If I’m making it sound like a paradise you ruined, it wasn’t

The Cigarette


It was Nora’s fault, for she had left me in a speakeasy on 52nd Street, whilst she finished her shopping. It was snowing outside, like New York at Christmas should be, but inside we all had misty auras from the cold turning warm, like corpses..

Between Whores and God

Madame Wei was keeping herself to herself during the outbreak. This was not hard for her. She generally kept herself to herself and as a sane, small woman in her 80s, the rest of the city obliged her. 

You Will Have Heard of the Vet of Wuhan

The Social’s too big for the people in it, and the walls are covered in photos of nearly famous Yorkshire people to fill the empty space. And there’s a plaque up to the kids who died in another village scavenging coal for their families. 

tabithabast

Selected work