When I write a short story I always aim to capture something humane. People are, for the most part, decent, even in the face of the macabre; even if they don’t always think or do the right thing.
Each of the following images bears a brief excerpt from the story it represents. In future, I intend that visitors to this website can click through to read whole stories. For now, they are just tasters.
At once, the pyramids were infinite yet human; implacable and dusty dead yet alive with the memories of the thousands of builders who crafted them. Their honey gold faces stretched into the sky and made their own horizons.From his hotel room window, Mac saw the woman from his dreams: the woman who carried around a human head in a bag.He stood stock still, watching and not moving. The more he looked, the more he felt sure. The tide had washed up something dull, slightly organic, grey. It appeared to be a modern trainer shoe. A shoe like the one from nearly two years before.When he got out of the ute there was a stench so foul it took his breath away. Something somewhere was rotten and dead. Sparse gums spotted the red dirt landscape and, around the creek, dismal grass the colour of straw stretched in all directions.Here we were now, up with the birds. A thin layer of fabric and a flame were all that held us aloft. The basket was only as high as our chests. If we wanted to, we could climb out. How easy it would be to fall. How strange.Amy opened the door to a woman who was bleeding from the eyes. “I’m really not interested,” she said, but the woman had already insinuated her foot into the doorway.He woke with a start. For a moment he just lay there, trying to make sense of the night. Red digits swam on his monolith alarm clock. It was the fuzz of the small hours and something was wrong.She brings the lottery numbers up on the screen. Ron is softly, happily snoring. In the kitchen, Sarah and Matt are bustling around and there is the industrious clank of pans. Outside, Emily and Sophie are doing handstands in the evening sunshine. Margaret stares at the numbers and at her slip of paper.The man shifted again and stark, white eyes looked up at her from the dark shambles of him. She stepped forward, heels wobbly where tree roots broke free of the pathway.He shouted and pushed her hard and she fell and hit her head and something broke.As we lay in the dark there was a faint sound from across the room. It was tiny: the tiniest little scrabbling noise and then a rhythmic scratching. It stopped.
Tom Evershed 