CHRISTMAS PRESENT 1 Three people hospitalized, one of them a little girl in a coma, children traumatised, parents throwing Xmas mugs at his head – it hadn’t been a good first day at work for Joe Mackland. Both his arms gripped by security gorillas, he limped to the manager’s office and was forcibly sat down, […]
PARTING SHOT Two frightened men sat facing each other in a cold, dimly lit room. There was no window, and nothing on the walls except the ventilation grills. The thin young man’s chair was low and hard and uncomfortable, the metal back digging into his spine. The older man’s chair, behind the vast steel desk […]
NO ACCIDENT They couldn’t know it, but everything was about to change. At the right turn junction, career and motherhood juggling Alison India Meares watched for the red light to turn amber, while trying to zone out from the noise her over-indulged kids were making in the back of her red Jeep Cherokee with […]
WRITER’S BLOCK Eager, hoody-hugged ruddy face frozen in sunshine, eyes blistered by the spotless acre of virgin snow. The buzzing riot of un-mown grass and sodding weeds now resting in oblivion, obliterated beneath a zen sheet of purity, dying to be spoiled. That’s how he remembers the first White Christmas, after church, his dry woolly […]
