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8 min read
The Last Word
She writes the obituaries in advance. There are four hundred in the drawer. One of them has started to worry her.
Moods: Funny Twist ending
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What have you got time for?
Short fiction, sorted by how long you have and what you feel like.
100 stories
13 min read
The Swimming Pool at the End of the Season
The lido closes on the last Sunday in September. This year it closes for good, and eleven hundred people have opinions about the water.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
9 min read
The Verger
He unlocks at seven and locks at six and in between the building is nobody's and everybody's.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
14 min read
The Rehearsal Pianist
Thirty-one years in the rehearsal room. She has never played a performance and has heard every one of them go wrong first.
Moods: Heartfelt
8 min read
Neighbourhood Watch
The group chat has four hundred and eleven members and eleven years of evidence that nothing ever happens here.
Moods: Dark Funny
12 min read
The Apology Letter
She has drafted it for eleven years. This is the version she is going to send, and it is four sentences long.
Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending
7 min read
Wrong Kind of Snow
She writes the announcements. She has eleven words and four thousand angry people.
Moods: Funny
13 min read
The Man Who Answered the Door
Four hundred doors on his enumeration district. One of them is answered by a man who is not on any list.
Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending
15 min read
The Sea Wall
The engineering is not in dispute. Everyone agrees what the wall will do. The argument is about which four hundred metres it goes round.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
7 min read
Overtime
Four hundred coats, one cloakroom, and a queue that will not be reasoned with.
Moods: Funny
8 min read
Two Hundred Metres of Hedge
You cut it almost through and then you bend it over and it does not die. That is the whole craft and it takes a winter to believe.
Moods: Cozy
7 min read
The Reading Group That Never Finished a Book
Eleven years. Ninety-four books chosen. Four finished. The group considers itself a success.
Moods: Cozy Funny
8 min read
Terms and Conditions
He reads them. All of them. In eleven years he has found four things worth finding.
Moods: Funny Twist ending
9 min read
The Last Delivery
Eleven customers left on the round. The dairy says that is not a round. He has one more thing to do first.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
13 min read
Dead Reckoning
Before satellites, you found your position with a clock, a compass and arithmetic. He is teaching it to eleven cadets who will never need it.
Moods: Twist ending
8 min read
The Balloon Release
The school wants to release two hundred balloons for the anniversary. The caretaker has been to a meeting about this before.
Moods: Dark Funny
11 min read
The Girl Who Fixed the Clock
The town clock stopped in 1998. Everyone has an opinion about it. One person has a screwdriver.
Moods: Cozy Twist ending
9 min read
Bell Ringers
Eight bells, eight people, and a piece of music that takes three hours and cannot be recorded.
Moods: Cozy
12 min read
The Locum
Eleven days covering a rural practice. Every patient wants to talk about the doctor she is standing in for.
Moods: Heartfelt
15 min read
Every Name on the Wall
There are two hundred and eleven names on the memorial. He has spent nine years finding out who they were. Name one hundred and forty is a problem.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
14 min read
The Winter Count
One night a year, in the cold, they count everyone sleeping outside. The number is always wrong and it always matters.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
8 min read
The Kindness of Strangers Is Taxable
A client has been given a boat. He has questions. His accountant has more.
Moods: Funny
13 min read
Salvage
Eleven thousand cars have come through the yard. He remembers the four hundred that arrived on a low-loader with the roof cut off.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
7 min read
Allotment Committee: Minutes
Item 6 is the shed. Item 6 has been on the agenda since 2019.
Moods: Funny
8 min read
Ice Cream in February
The kiosk opens Easter to September. It has opened on one February afternoon every year since 2011.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
7 min read
The Proofreader’s Revenge
Forty-one years of other people's mistakes. She has kept one of them back.
Moods: Funny
8 min read
The Last Man in the Phone Book
The 2024 residential directory for the district contains one entry. He gets about eleven calls a year.
Moods: Funny Heartfelt
8 min read
Quality Control
Her job is to taste four hundred biscuits a day and say what is wrong with them. She has been right every time for nineteen years.
Moods: Dark Funny
11 min read
The Ferryman of Loch Torran
The bridge opened in 2019. The ferry still runs, four times a day, carrying almost nobody.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
9 min read
Marginalia
She buys second-hand books for the notes in them. One handwriting keeps turning up.
Moods: Cozy Twist ending
12 min read
The Weight Room
The average age in the Tuesday session is seventy-eight. The deadlift record is held by a woman of eighty-four.
Moods: Funny Heartfelt
9 min read
Night Bus
The N92 runs four times a night and carries, most nights, the same eleven people.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
7 min read
The Substitute Ingredient
The restaurant has one signature dish. The supplier has gone under. Service is in four hours.
Moods: Funny
13 min read
Six Hundred Hours of Birdsong
He recorded the dawn chorus in his garden every morning for eleven years. He was not recording the birds.
Moods: Heartfelt
12 min read
My Father’s Handwriting
She has authenticated four hundred documents in her career. The one on her desk is in her father's hand, and her father could not write.
Moods: Twist ending
14 min read
The Reef Survey
Twenty-two years of the same eleven transects. She knows exactly what she is documenting and she keeps going down.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
8 min read
Hold Music
Forty seconds of synthesised strings, on a loop, for eleven years. One employee has been keeping notes.
Moods: Funny
9 min read
The Tally
Four hundred and eleven ewes went up the hill. He has counted them down four times and got four different numbers.
Moods: Dark
13 min read
Lost Property
Eleven thousand items a year come through the office. One has been on the shelf since 1998.
Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending
7 min read
Three Minutes of Ari
The haircut takes eleven minutes. The conversation takes eleven minutes. Only one of them is why anyone books.
Moods: Cozy Funny
11 min read
Room for One More
The table seats eight. There have been between eleven and nineteen people at Sunday lunch every week since 2014.
Moods: Cozy Funny
15 min read
The Sound Engineer’s Daughter
Four hundred hours of tape from her father's studio, and on nine of them, by accident, her own childhood.
Moods: Heartfelt
11 min read
The Baker’s Dozen
The thirteenth item is free, has always been free, and is the subject of the longest-running dispute in the family business.
Moods: Cozy Funny
12 min read
Nobody’s Fool
The card school at the Anchor has run every Friday since 1991. Everyone agrees that Alf cheats. Nobody can catch him.
Moods: Funny Twist ending
13 min read
The Last Bell
Eleven pupils, one teacher, and a closure decision that was made three years before anyone was told.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
17 min read
What the Ice Gave Back
The glacier has been retreating for ninety years. This summer it gave up a rucksack, a boot, and a problem.
Moods: Dark Twist ending
14 min read
The Inheritance of Tools
Her father left her a workshop she has no idea how to use, and a note that says the tools will teach her.
Moods: Heartfelt
12 min read
Correspondence Course
He enrolled in a beginners' Welsh course in 1998. The course closed in 2003. His tutor never told him.
Moods: Funny Heartfelt
16 min read
Signal Box 14
The box is decommissioned, the levers are dead, and a man still climbs the steps at 05:40 every morning.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
13 min read
The Wednesday Swimmers
Six women, one cold lake, every Wednesday since 2009. Nobody has ever suggested moving it to a warmer day.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
15 min read
Three Winters in the Archive
She was hired to catalogue eleven thousand photographs. By the second winter she had noticed the same woman in forty of them.
Moods: Twist ending
14 min read
The Long Way Round
Every fare from the hospital gets the long way round. He has never charged anyone for the difference.
Moods: Heartfelt
10 min read
Thirty Seconds of Applause
He played on four hundred records and is named on none of them. Then someone found the tapes.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
7 min read
The Understanding
Two bakeries, forty metres apart, forty-one years of open warfare. And one arrangement neither will admit to.
Moods: Funny Heartfelt
8 min read
Feeding the Five Thousand
The rule is that nobody asks why you came. The other rule is that everybody chops something.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
9 min read
The Translator’s Note
She has translated eleven of his novels. This is the first one he has not lived to see finished.
Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending
6 min read
Every Wednesday, the Wrong Bin
Number 14 puts out the green bin on grey week. Number 16 has kept a log since 2021.
Moods: Funny
11 min read
Static
He has been broadcasting into empty air on the same frequency every night for six years. Last Tuesday, something answered.
Moods: Dark Twist ending
8 min read
Blue Plaque
The committee agrees the house deserves a plaque. What it cannot agree is which sentence goes on it.
Moods: Dark Funny
7 min read
The Woman Who Wins the Raffle
Eleven years. Eleven raffles. Eleven wins. The committee has investigated twice and found nothing.
Moods: Funny Twist ending
9 min read
Seventeen Postcards
They arrive one a month, from a woman who died in 2019, and they are arriving in the wrong order.
Moods: Twist ending
8 min read
The Ball Boy
He worked the same touchline for thirty-one years. The club is retiring a shirt number that was never his.
Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending
10 min read
Nightjar
She has recorded the same heath at midnight for nine summers. This year there is something on the tape that should not be there.
Moods: Dark
9 min read
The Last Video Shop in the County
Nine hundred DVDs, one till from 1998, and a proprietor who has stopped pretending this is a business.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
8 min read
Wrong Number, Right Person
For eleven months she has been getting updates on the recovery of a dog she has never met, from a stranger who has the wrong number.
Moods: Funny Heartfelt
7 min read
The Sourdough Custody Agreement
Clause 4 covers feeding schedules. Clause 9 covers what happens if either party names it.
Moods: Funny
8 min read
Closing Time at the Wax Museum
Forty-one figures, one night watchman, and a strict institutional policy of not talking about the Napoleon situation.
Moods: Dark Funny
10 min read
What We Do With the Ashes
He left instructions. Four pages of them. His three children have read the instructions and are now standing in a car park at dawn, disagreeing.
Moods: Dark Heartfelt
7 min read
Pashmina
Stall 41 has sold the same eleven items for twenty-two years. Her customers do not come for the eleven items.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
11 min read
The Man Who Timed the Trains
For nineteen years he stood on the same platform with a stopwatch. The railway assumed he was a hobbyist. He was not.
Moods: Dark Twist ending
7 min read
Room 12B, Ask for Denise
The form requires a document that no longer exists, issued by an office that closed in 2011. Denise has a workaround.
Moods: Cozy Funny
8 min read
Fireflies at the Border
The fence runs through the valley. The fireflies do not know this, and every June the whole town comes out to watch them not know it.
Moods: Heartfelt
8 min read
The Cartographer’s Mistake
Every map publisher hides a fake street to catch copycats. Hers went further than that.
Moods: Cozy Twist ending
6 min read
How to Fold a Fitted Sheet
There is a correct method. My grandmother knew it. She refused, on principle, to write it down.
Moods: Funny Heartfelt
9 min read
The Anomaly in Sector Twelve
The traffic model has been wrong about one junction for four years. Nobody can work out why, and the model is never wrong.
Moods: Twist ending
7 min read
Directions to My Mother’s House
Sat nav will get you to the postcode. It will not get you to the house. This is the only reliable version.
Moods: Heartfelt
6 min read
Cold Open
Four hours of live radio, one guest who has not arrived, and a producer making increasingly desperate hand signals through the glass.
Moods: Funny
10 min read
The Ninth Floor
The building inspector signs off forty structures a year. This one, he has come back to eleven times.
Moods: Dark
9 min read
Six Across
He has set the Thursday crossword for thirty-one years under the name Corvid. Only one person has ever solved every one.
Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending
7 min read
The Lending Library of Things
You can borrow a hedge trimmer, a wallpaper steamer, or a gazebo. What people actually come for is harder to shelve.
Moods: Cozy
12 min read
The Queue
Nobody knows what the queue is for. It has been there since Tuesday. It is now the third largest employer in the district.
Moods: Dark Funny
10 min read
The Piano Tuner’s Ear
He has tuned this piano twice a year for twenty-six years. This is the first time the family has been in the room.
Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending
8 min read
Seven Minutes of Sun
After sixty-five days of darkness, the sun comes back over the ridge at 11:47. The whole town stops. Even the ones who say they won't.
Moods: Heartfelt
11 min read
What the River Kept
They drained the reservoir for the first time in sixty years. The village came back up. So did everything in it.
Moods: Heartfelt Twist ending
9 min read
Night Shift at the Observatory
Four hours of cloud, one thermos, and a colleague who has been dead for six years and still leaves notes in the log.
Moods: Cozy Dark
6 min read
Grandmother’s Recipe, Version Fourteen
Fourteen index cards, fifty years apart, one dish. What changes between them is not the recipe.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
7 min read
The Complaints Department
Desk 4 handles complaints about things the council does not administer. It is the busiest desk in the building.
Moods: Cozy Funny
10 min read
Salt
The village preserves everything. Fish, memory, grudges. Especially grudges.
Moods: Dark
6 min read
Weather for Ducks
Thirty-one years of forecasting. One catastrophic Tuesday. A nation that has never, ever let it go.
Moods: Funny
8 min read
The Understudy
Two hundred and forty performances. She has never once gone on. Tonight is not going to be different, and she has made her peace with that.
Moods: Heartfelt
9 min read
Inheritance
Her uncle left her a locksmith's shop, four hundred keys, and no explanation of what any of them opened.
Moods: Twist ending
7 min read
The Bus That Waits
The 6:14 leaves at 6:14. Except on Thursdays, and except for one passenger, and nobody has ever asked why.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
12 min read
Nine Lives of a Municipal Cat
The cat has no owner, four names, and an official parking bay. The council has stopped fighting it.
Moods: Cozy Funny
11 min read
The Substitute
Year 9 had been through four supply teachers in a term. The fifth one did not seem worried.
Moods: Dark Twist ending
14 min read
Low Tide
Every August, for eleven years, they met on the same stretch of sand. Neither of them ever suggested it.
Moods: Cozy Heartfelt
6 min read
My Neighbour Is Definitely a Wizard
Exhibit A: the parking space. Nobody gets that parking space. Nobody.
Moods: Funny
8 min read
The Inventory
The job was simple: list everything in the house. The house had other ideas about what counted as everything.
Moods: Dark
6 min read
The Bread Man of Alder Street
Nobody on Alder Street orders bread. It simply arrives, and it is always exactly what you needed.
Moods: Cozy
7 min read
Thirty-Two Seconds
The recording is thirty-two seconds long. She has listened to it four thousand times.
Moods: Twist ending
9 min read
The Lighthouse Keeper’s Last Winter
Forty-one years of keeping the light, and nobody had ever told him what to do on the last night.
Moods: Heartfelt
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