Fifty word fiction – Helium-filled

It slips from the child’s fingers, races down the aisle, bumps against the roof arch, then jumps from one carriage to the next, where a man catches hold of it.  His bald head is balloon-smooth.  At the next station he returns the inflatable to its owner with a bow.

Fifty word fiction – Long Player

You are a record, scratched and dusty, played over and over again.  The needle of life follows well-worn grooves, cutting deeper with every repeat.  Soon you will wear out, and be taken to the nearest charity shop.  Or, if you still have some small residual value, be sold on eBay.

Fifty word fiction – Coconut shy

He was throwing under a minor sky, the rain holding off.  At less scrupulous fêtes they glue them to the stand, but third shy of four he had his nut, more by accident than design.  Hairy as an orang-utan, it was.  Later he cracked its head open with a hammer.

Fifty word fiction – A Harvard lie

The waitress presents them with the beer sampler, to which she has added three complimentary glasses.  She must have delivered her lines many times before, with the same carefully disguised insincerity.  The meal over, he says keep the change.  As she wheels away, she scratches him on the back, lightly.

Fifty word fiction – Hunting in packs

He was a Foxhound.  Others were Bassets, Beagles or Harriers.  They assembled in the courtyard before meals, supervised by the Roman-nosed Scot who taught English.  To reach the dining room, they descended into the basement, then ascended, following the scent.  Later he discarded the indoctrination and became a hunt saboteur.

Fifty word fiction – Waterlow Park

The pigeons sat quietly in the branches of the trees, fat after an early festive lunch, puzzling over the absence of red buses.  They were taking the air to escape from the parents, the Queen, the deflation that made the 25th seem like an extra twenty-four hours of Boxing Day.

Fifty word fiction – Old Compton Street

Dirty Mac says to Gunpowder Plot, ‘Do you think we’ll pass?’  He looks us up and down, and sighs.  ‘You’ll do, I suppose.’  Evidently he thinks better of this judgement once we’re inside the bar, because he cannot stop himself sighing again.  ‘No self-respecting gay man would wear that tie.’

Fifty word fiction – At Daunt Books

He glances out at the uniformed figures dawdling along the street.  ‘Look at all those traffic wardens.  I wonder what’s the collective noun for them?’  She’s not equal to the invitation.  Later, like mortified Rousseau after peasants left him lost for words, the answer arrives: a tedium of traffic wardens.

Fifty word fiction – My name is…

A tennis professional, Dad’s face was well-tanned, not unlike Sean Connery’s.  Indeed, a journalist once described him as 003½.  I suspect the quip betrayed knowledge that the similarities were not simply facial.  I worry about the legacy of this story: am I destined to play out my life as 001¾?

Fifty word fiction – Give generously

Her way was successively barred by the robust suitcases and bodies of a holidaying family of zombies, two nattering legal secretaries, and a space cadet attempting to calculate the elevation between platform and ground level.  Obviously it was time to step up the Campaign for a Third Lane on Escalators.

Fifty word fiction – The Windmill

He had pulled thousands of pints waiting for it to happen, each topped off with an upward glance.  The screws parted from their threads by its summer undulations, the ceiling fan had finally worked itself loose.  Down it came, slicing off the head of the captain of the darts team.

Fifty word fiction – Woodwork

The school bully drove a two-inch nail through his finger.  He laughed as he held aloft the injured digit, with which the nail had formed a perfect right angle.  Later that term he lifted me off the floor by the neck.  I hammered his nuts with my knee and ran.

Fifty word fiction – The dark side of the asteroid

Who’s the god of beer? Prisoner asks.  Not Bacchus – he’s the god of wine, says Telegram.  Would it be Ceres?  Push remembers an asteroid of that name.  Fatboy wagers that there are pools of ale on its dark side.  Telegram says that we should check it out.  So we did.

Fifty word fiction – At the Observatory

Like you, the cameraman is trying not to disrupt the flow of life.  He frames a picture, pans away, closes in again.  He finds and tracks you.  His art is in his patience, his freezing fingers. Though you seek to avoid his lens, deflect his focus, he’ll never lose you.

Fifty word fiction – Black Ven

At the Whittington, waiting for an ECG.  Two collections of ghost stories are the only available reading matter for all those fluttering hearts.  I have Bleak House with me, but my attention wanders.  I try to think I am nothing, and for a moment, I succeed: I cease to exist.