Amber Means Wait
The sparrows had nested in a traffic light. They selected the orange filter, periodically warming themselves against the bulb whenever the light changed from green to red, or back again. When I first noticed them, crossing the road on my commute home, they looked like the end scene of a Looney Tunes
Under His Skin
I don’t think he knows I’m here, embedded in his dermis. We ended things in a typical rage: “God, you get under my skin!” And I said what now seems to me the line which sealed my fate: “You’d be so lucky!” And, the next morning, I came to, and there I was. Don’t get […]
Leaf Racing
My sister Lena was a mess when Funtown Playland let her go. Two months of playing Princess Thistle in their daytime production – and nothing. She came home in street clothes with her gaudy yellow dress crumpled to her chest. Back when Lena first moved into my spare room, I hoped Funtown Playland w
Catherine
One of the women I worked for when I first moved here was also named Catherine. She lived in one of those pretty Georgian terraced houses in an expensive suburban fold of the city that I never usually found cause to visit. The front entrance to the house was through a narrow feature door that [&hell
Drifting Bridge
You are up on the bridge, my friend. You used to deliver heavy household equipment all over the country— hands of leather, moving like silk. One morning, many years ago, you blew into my house on a wood-violet breeze and landed inexplicably in the kitchen doorway. The setting sun spans the valley
Winner of the TT20 500 Word Competition
There was a magnet perching on the fridge which listed the moment of sunset for every single Shabbos of that year, but still she liked to weigh with her own hands its old and sore refrain. She had laid out the candle and the wine and five filmy pouches crammed with spicy cloves onto the […]
At Breakfast
The kitchen tiles are finding their corners in the half-light. In the small flat on the top floor of the house, two women sit at the breakfast table. They’re nurses in the early months of 1933. Two empty porridge bowls have been pushed aside. Two half-drunk cups of tea stand between them on the ta
Marmalade
It came as a shock to learn that Barbara was still alive inside the marmalade. The sight of the oranges had brought back the memory of her. She appeared as an embryo suspended in jelly – the incarnation of a rumination, preserved in vitro. I knew it was her because of the slightly crooked spine, [