“So, Lara, how can I help you this morning?”
I was courteous on the call, as I always was.
“Well, Margie, I have a problem I’d like some help with today. I don’t know if you can help me, but here I go.”
I took a draught of my espresso, with another lined up behind it. I needed to sharpen up this morning after last night, so the big hit of caffeine was just what I needed to get me going. Continue reading
It was not that he found it odd. It was not that at all, but it made him think just a little.
After the events of the day, something so trivial as this should not really matter, yet for him, in that moment, it caused him to miss a breath.
The list was fairly routine. It was on a pad that had hung on the fridge door for years, being filled up gradually as the week wore on, just for the top sheet to be ripped off and taken for the shop on a Friday night. Continue reading
Once upon a time, there was a girl called Meribell. She was a nasty piece of work too, was our Meribell, for she was very choosy.
The funny thing about her was that although she was very fussy and opinionated about many things around her – not least people – she wasn’t much of a beauty herself.
After quite a few years looking, Meribell found a man she liked, so eventually, after many months of testing the poor man, she moved in with him in a rented ex-council house in a small estate in Wandsworth. Continue reading
As the wind picked up, the creaking of the very frame of the ship was deafening. They had not known weather like this since they left Constantinople.
For the crew of the Alamio, this was a short leg across the Adriatic to Venice, their home port. For Julio, it was one of the longest trips he could imagine. For he was going home, at last, after two years at sea.
Slowly, she turned in a 180 degree arc. They were rapturous for her, that was clear.
Jennifer beamed as it finally sunk in for her. The trip had, after all the fears and worries on her part, been a success.
All those late nights working on scripts. The long caffeine infused days in the office with Greg and Sean, running over the options and finally making decisions on the way they might phrase certain things.
Whilst the sea was calm, standing on the rocks certainly was not. Yet Evan did not care in those few, special moments he had taken to stand there.
He loved the wild of the waves lashing the small promontory, however wet he got in the process. So much so, that he would do this every day he was in the town.
It had become a habit that he could not – well, would not – easily give up, for it was a crowning point of his day.
The crisp packet lazily meandered across the street, under a grey and gloomy sky. As it did so, it met an empty coke bottle on a similar journey.
For Mark, it was an irritant. A visual scar on the landscape of his morning walk and he was annoyed with it.
For more years than he had cared to count – and about five times a week – Mark did his regular walk in the country.
The bullet, when it came, was not unexpected. Indeed, Jackson had been expecting it for most of his adult life.
He did not hear the sound of its arrival, nor for that fraction of a second, did he feel anything at all. For moments afterwards, despite where it hit him, he was aware of what happened.
The snow blew across the road in flurries, seemingly with a life of their own. Sometimes they chased each other, and other times, they went off on their own, down the road a little before they expired.
He watched them for a while and then, once again, looked up in amazement. The snow really was like the ornament they had on the mantelpiece at home. Huge dobs of snow filled the sky, lit only by the streetlight.
Edna closed the door. He was finally gone.
At last the room could be cleared and space made to put back those treasured items she had cleared when he came back, all those months ago.
Whilst it would not be the same without him, and of course she was saddened by his departure, there were some positive aspects to her life. Or the life that would now become.