Dermot Stripe

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…

The most enjoyable part of Max’s day was going home. He liked to be able to tidy his desk, put the caps back on his pens. Put the pens in his drawer and power off his PC. It was the same ritual five days a week. After he had powered off the PC he would…

There wasn’t much on the TV to keep Karl’s mind from wandering. It didn’t help that he couldn’t stay on any one channel for longer than ten seconds. He had scanned all the news channels, all fourteen of them but it was all the same type of news, depressing. Most channels were showing images from…

As far as Mark was concerned Bree wasn’t his friend anymore. He had needed someone to talk to when he split with Simon and though he had wanted Bree to be there for him, she wasn’t. It didn’t help that Bree had never approved of Mark’s relationship with Simon. From the very beginning she had…