the noose
stephen smith
The noose chuckled at its joke. It was the sound of dry sun and sawdust. Harry Fielding groaned.
“Be quiet,” he said.
He wanted to reach up and shake the voices from his head. Watch as they fell, one by one, to the grass. First, his friends. Then the unforgiving stares of his parents, the hurried whispers of co-workers. Finally, his wife. Her daisy coloured dress flying up to obscure her face as she fell, revealing pink underwear.
The noose was not the only thing in his mind.
nana yaa, kwaku dua and the green-gold fire
anna trembath
The villagers from just outside Kumasi town had gathered in two lines on either side of the road that gently snaked up the hill. The two lines of people met at a throng on the hill’s crest, where Chief Kwaku Dua’s grand white colonial mansion stood. Oh, the sight of the waiting crowd alone was enough to stir such excitement that one would have been forgiven for not holding down one’s breakfast. I remember watching the hornbills overhead in the cloudless azure sky. Their flight usually regal and relaxed, on this day their movement was oddly jagged, as if they could not keep straight bearings. Was it that they saw two pythons lying on the hill below, in a mating dance? Pythons of sizes large enough to raise their bodies high into the skies and pluck out the hornbills? Pythons with scales of iridescent hues?
arrival
robert vaughan
Tumbleweeds. Prairie dogs. What a shitty trip. He was sure his breath stunk, his swollen feet ached. Would his mother even be at the bus station. Or would he have to walk the mile or more to her apartment. He didn’t really want to see her.
“I’m Alice,” the woman tried again.
“Kurt,” he said self-consciously, a hand across his mouth.
She smiled. “Yer kinda young to be traveling alone, aren’t you?”
the 82 types of person in the world
ewan morrison
Her ability to empathise with and adapt to other people was unique. Her faces and moods, like her wardrobe, changed weekly, if not daily. Flared jeans for one date, an Armani suit jacket for the next; a D&G dress for one, then Nikes and slacks for another. And when she talked to people from different backgrounds, although she did not like to admit this to herself, her market research experience helped in discussing the things they liked. She knew, for example, that E34′s used Ecover washing powder and supported Greenpeace, and that F41′s liked Star Trek: the Next Generation and read Harry Potter even though they didn’t have kids. It wasn’t that she was two faced; if anything she was 82 faced, or 34 four faced, that being the number of lovers she had in her twenties, as was fairly normal for people of her type at this point in time.