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
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What have you got time for?
Short fiction, sorted by how long you have and what you feel like.
47 stories
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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