‘I’ve read your tales of India,’ he said, as he sat in my study at Rottingdean, ‘so I thought you might like to hear my story.’
I’d answered a knock at my front door just as my study clock struck midday, and found the man standing on the doorstep. He had looked cold, and oddly distracted.
‘Can I help you?’ I’d asked.
‘My name is Jabez Carter,’ he’d told me. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you.’
Continue reading “The Visitor’s Tale (a ghost story, after Rudyard Kipling) by Robert V. Stapleton”
The air in Detective Dane Lloyd’s former office hung warm and heavy, like something already used. He glanced at the broken air-conditioner near the tiled ceiling and sighed. His headache was half from the heat and half the beer from last night’s celebrations. His own retirement party for crying out loud, but here he was again, all hands on deck since they called him in at five a.m.
I had this to consider as I fell: that to be pushed from the eleventh floor of a slum hotel, in the end, isn’t so different from being pushed from the eleventh floor of the Ritz-Carlton. The outcomes would differ very little.
*
For Jonas Ericsson, a junior prosecutor with the Swedish Prosecution Authority, the story began in Stockholm on Valentines Day, 2012, and ended a week later in New Orleans, USA, on the twenty-first day of February.
Fat Tuesday.
At short notice Ericsson asked his secretary to cancel a number of upcoming appointments. He then booked two weeks leave.
Five days later he landed in the United States.
The day before Mardi Gras.
Margaret Dawson had sold linens at Macy’s for fifteen years, hating every day of it, every customer she served, and every other sales clerk, when she met her husband, Donald, a kind-hearted Manhattan policeman who patrolled West Harlem.
Marriage did not change her discontent and the birth of a premature and severely disabled baby named Bertie brought her to a simmering rage.
Freddie knew there were some people you could disrespect and others you had to treat with reverence. He was in a restaurant looking at a man sat at the bar. He knew instinctively that this was a man who was not to be fucked with.
He looked back down at his bowl of spaghetti and ordered his wife to do the same. She did but every once in a while peeked up at the man from the corner of her eye.
She had a bad feeling about him.
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. I’m a string tied too tight on a harp close to breaking; the tired glow left after a flame; the last paint on the brush colouring the wall of my life and I look to you. Against you I’ve sinned and done what pains your eyes. Lord, turn your face away from my sins but don’t deny me your face or take away the Holy Spirit. Questions and lack of answers have plagued me in a lifetime lived in your honour. However, a lifelong devotion is outweighed by a single misstep. The path to salvation is through you and your son. A kind eye towards friends and foes are not the path; only the submission to your glory is. Continue reading “Pater Noster by Tobias Haglund”
When the willow fell it swept to the surface of the engorged torrent in a graceful swoon. The roots wrenched from the ground flinging mud, pebbles, small boulders and the moss and grass of the bank skywards. The whipping branches flew across the water to be grabbed and hurled downstream till their anchorage on the great trunk stayed them. They streamed in the flood, tempestuous ribbons squirming and writhing in the wild water.
It all started when that fat fucker moaned about having to give me change. I don’t ever say ‘Fat fucker’ as I am a rather large person myself but honestly, ‘Jabba The Fucking Garage’ really annoyed me. ‘Is that all you have got’ he enquired with a sneer and a sarcasm that I just couldn’t ignore. I advised him that I would look further. I exaggerated looking through my pockets and this was also lost on this fuck wit, he
The nags were against me. Six races. Six bets. All blown out before the finishing line. I’m going to change bars, I told myself, this place is bad fucking luck for me. Superstition and gambling become more impassioned bed fellows the worse your luck is – and mine, mine hadn’t seen anything to show for it in months.
I sat at the bar in the Front Page cursing my luck, cursing the Racing Post, cursing the barman who had talked through the back page of form listings and most probably caused me to rush to a decision when time and a clear head was required. As the stranger pulled up a seat beside me I cursed him too. Wednesday afternoon, quite possibly the quietest time in a bar’s week and in a room full of empty, cold seats this prick parks up alongside me.
Continue reading “The Front Page by David Louden – Adult Content”
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