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Another revision of previously published fiction.

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ELEPHANTS & MONKEYS Too many reasons not to take my grandson to the zoo. He did not want to go, I did not want to go, and when we got there, it was shut. Apparently, some disease or misfunction had hit many of the animals. Yet the disappointment should not have been an issue, and...

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I imagined a couple of old people, who had lived a life of experience, a life of having their own children, now faced with a granddaughter, eight years old, a granddaughter they had not been told existed till now. But how could they say they knew how to bring up children if their own...

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The large rock-like stone David had prised from the ground along with the intractable root of the once gnarled apple tree looked like a grey joint of beef.  After placing it with self-consciously aesthetic rockery intentions at the foot of a pruned-back peach tree trunk, he speculated on how...

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‘A Symphony in Three Movements’   There was no doubt in my mind that I was being stalked — and this was by a creature which, if it had been human, I would have, at all costs, tried to throw off my trail at the first opportunity. There is nothing worse than someone who seeks an essence...

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Based on last night’s speed-writing exercise at the Clacton writer’s group... The crew of them came for me. They somehow told me that their on-going job was to cast a net for everyone who was celebrating their 70th Birthday. I looked them straight in the empty eye sockets and asked...

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She always fancied herself as a female version of Sherlock Holmes, not Miss Marple so much as a tall, willowy brunette with jodhpurs, whip and meerschaum pipe. And, of course, deerstalker. Always there even if never there. That was her self-image, and I dare not describe her for real, in...

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This was not about the terrible disease from which old men have often suffered. This was the only story where the Famous Five children and those from Swallows and Amazons appeared together and declared war in support of their own author, Enid Blyton children versus Arthur Ransome children,...

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Writing words to mean something or mindlessly drawing them. Read this or view this and see. ‘One all’ is a funny expression, is it not? It might be a score draw, it might be a way of saying you were quits with someone regarding a dispute, it might also be about winning a whole war where...

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The Stood Bedroom was a single story. Standalone, a bedroom house, a house with only a bedroom, and four exterior walls and two windows halfway up or halfway down as formed by corners like sharp, right-angled bays, with curtains inside to match and pull in different directions from...

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The man wearing an eye-patch stared at me. The white of his single visible eye was strangely clear to see from where I was standing. It was riddled with red wriggling thread-worms. Its pupil seemed to be a grey weeping pustule or the leading edge of something that I imagined to be...

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The West End was teeming with people, some with heads that stood out from the crowd, heads with large defined faces, upon taller bodies than most. The rest faded into their own background, individuals, some so small they must have been infants, others so thin they vanished behind lampposts,...

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“Do you see that young man again, Wendy?” “Was he the one who we saw about ten minutes ago? You called him Peter, didn’t you, after the man’s name on this bench? Dead now ten years? See, yes, ten years ago. Rest in Peace: Peter Glidder ... 1961 to 2008. You called him Peter...

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The grizzled cove came into town under his chimney hat. In those days, the purveyors of queer medicine rode ramshackle wagons swaying from side to side, ill-balanced between large leaning wheels, hauled by horses as small as mules. Horses that looked like giant rats from certain angles. Even...

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Previously entitled ‘Death in the Attic’

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Black and right, black and right, Back to night, back to night, Empty well on the left, coloured in light. What did he say? Sounded like lines from nonsense nursery rhyme verse. But does a nursery give out sounds like nonsense? Quite easily, she replied. When a nursery full of...

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a new short short story by DF Lewis

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The Maroon Party A maroon-party is a picnic over several days, rather than the more usual single occasion spanning, say, a single afternoon. Old Dick had arranged this particular shindig for no obvious purpose: with several stellified ladies, buckets of sloshing trash-ice,...

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I walked across the plain, looking to neither side, interminably, doggedly, as if this were a real desert ahead of me, not just something that simply looked like one, thirst being the main driving force, even though I did not feel thirsty at all. Not even a little bit. They had let me out...

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Last night’s speed-writing exercise at the Writer’s Group as based on a randomly chosen title... ................ THE LIFEBOAT Tell me, who called the lifeboat? I visualised a surging sea with a shape that upped and downed within it. Not a whale or shark, but something...