Flash

When I was a kid I had two friends, Tom and Charlie. We did everything together until one day Tom and Charlie fell out. Forty years later I still don’t know what caused the argument but I do remember that both of them told me that I had to choose one of them as my…

Isobel couldn’t start the morning without having a cigarette and cup of coffee. Before she got herself ready for work she would sit at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Her husband, Barry, didn’t like her smoking but he knew better than trying to tell…

There wasn’t much Martin could do about it but the news still saddened him. He knew that Pauline’s pregnancy meant that her life was going to change forever and that she would have to pull out of college. He had such high hopes for her. She was the first of her cousins to make it…

When I was a kid there was an old man called Mr Kelly who used to live at the top of the street. He spent most of his time in his garage cutting large reams of paper into smaller pieces of paper, mostly A3, A4 and A5 sizes. We never knew what he did with…

We were driving to San Diego when we got the call. Molly’s Uncle Stan had died and her mother was ringing to let us know. We were supposed to be spending the week in a nice hotel, just relaxing. I’d taken the time off work, booked it two months earlier. I really didn’t want to…

Trevor liked playing in his garden. There was a long green patch of grass, which had bushes on each side, where he had two little buckets ten feet apart from each other that acted as his goal. He would put his red teddy bear in the goal, in the middle, and then when everything was…

‘Kid you’re stupid, you must be.’ Karl didn’t answer his father.    ‘Three days in a row. What have I told you about cycling on glass?’ Again Karl didn’t answer his father; he was worried that he’d tell him what really happened, how it hadn’t been his fault. Instead he quietly handed him the glue….

He went through what had happened. He had been polite. He had tried to make her comfortable and he had said goodbye and walked away when she told him that she didn’t want to talk about it. To the casual observer nothing happened. It was just two people on the street talking; no one would…

Every kid wants to be thought about as being the best and John was no different. When he tripped up the cleverest boy in the school in the playground. He justified it by telling himself that he should be the cleverest boy in the school. When he hid all the footballs on sports day he…

Clearing Jenny’s room had been difficult on Margaret. Despite knowing that it was time to move on, she still found it difficult to let go of the fact that she wouldn’t see Jenny again. It had been eight months since her passing and she spent most of the day clearing Jenny’s clothes from the room…

Jill stood on the platform waiting for the train to arrive. She hadn’t been back in Boston for over a year, not since she fell out with her father. She thought about the falling out. How she hadn’t listened to him when he told her that Sam wasn’t the right guy for her. She had…

Melissa was in no mood to collect her mother from the station and she was in no mood to listen to her giving out to her either. She knew that they would spend the weekend having the same argument about the same things. When was she going to give up writing the column, when was she…

Samuel looked at the letters carved into the tree, ‘SW loves OP.’ He could still remember when he and Olive had done it. He had bought the pen knife in Turner’s along with a fishing rod when he was twelve. The rod didn’t get much use but he still had the pen knife somewhere at…

Sarah held her mother’s hand. They were in the middle of the Mall and the noise of the other people made it difficult for her to listen to what her mother was saying to the stranger. She picked up the word ‘forget’ but apart from that she didn’t really know what her mother was saying…

There were five people interested in renting the room but Mitch wanted to make sure that he had made the right decision before calling Kathy to let her know that she could move in. He looked at the names on the list again and went through his notes. First there was Charlene, she was a…