Once the pages had finished rustling and he had landed at the crossword section, a chessboard of missing letters confronted him. There was a row of hieroglyphic clues for the Cryptic crossword, childish clues for the ‘quick’ cross word and the a string of questions for today’s challenge. They were lined up like soldiers in [...]

He really abhored doing it; 1./ defining the budget and 2./ sticking to it, but this was the only way he could afford to live in the property he had purchased. After many nights of streamlined scheming he was now here, but to do it he had elasticised his finances and now with the first [...]

Sitting in class fidgeting, feet kicking under the desk into the panelled kickboard that drapes from the chemical trough that runs like the Panama canal all the way down the left row of desks, too many experiments have found their way in there, too many concoctions of chemicals that shouldn’t have been concocted. There’s a [...]

It’s not often I’ll be stumped by one of these, but this one leaves me with nothing, No-thing coming into my mind, into my psyche to describe- Psyche. It’s hard to grasp, as if it’s some kind of clear gas that is ‘there’ but I’m just unaware of. It exists yet it can’t be touched, [...]

Sometimes it reminds me of a Chinese character drawn in a wash of pen and ink – squarish with a line through the middle. It’s a bit of a puzzle that needs to be solved, especially as my weight seems to increase – I puzzle over why I have to clamp the belt in so [...]

She just couldn’t get him out of her head, it was as if a road crew had set themselves up in there and had been digging and driving around all night, those whirring generators and high powered spotlights had been sweeping to and fro. She was a prisoner inside her own mind. For the most [...]

Class, that’s the only worked he could think to describe it, pure class, from the moment they had been chaperoned to the elegantly coiffured table up until the serving of dessert it had been superb service, silver service. Having flown first class too many times he knew about silver service, lamb carved off the bone [...]

They come rolling off the production line at “androids are us’ shining chrome mettalloy hulks. Eyes looking down at you with a menacing crow stare. Hunched over and life less before they are wheeled to the testing room. Data ports are connected for configuration and streams of ‘matrix’ data flow ghostly across a screen – [...]

Spoons and knifes excavating the jar at breakfast, digging into the gluey unending bottomless pit of golden hue, exerting levered pressure in the gathering. Pneumatic muscles strain to release the tethered spoon. Freed, golden strains of the honey sing from the spoon, a ballerina twirl seals the globby mass to the still spinning silver. The [...]

For whatever reason it seemed to be dragging on and on like a snow-plough through a thick drift. Every time he had to go and see the lawyer it was excruciating, it seemed the arms of the chair were made of razor wire and the cushions were covered with a layer of stinging nettles. His [...]