A State of War
That shameless beggar, Heloise, my cat of many years, has begun to wheedle at me from the kitchen.
Veil & Quill
Stories by Edward Aplin
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The Elder Keepers
The Trinity House tug taking Stephen Thorn out from the village St Merren’s left a wake of slate coloured smoke.
An Unusual Piece
Mr Jonathan Sorrell held his new acquisition away from his body at a safe distance. It always took him some time to build a rapport.
Barker
Barker took the turn much too fast as usual and the wash from his propelller rocked the two boats moored up by the side of the canal.
The Incumbents
Even for the hopeless enthusiast, the collector that chases after churches like butterflies for his pinboard, this was not an inviting specimen.
The Little Man in the Velveteen Jacket
Mr Farley paused and looked back down the slowly falling hillocks over which he had walked.
The Lord of Flies
Perhaps this story will serve as one of those episodes of country life which my children often wheedle at. They have been studiously uninterested until now. But in the last year, after Monica finally left us, and after I have developed sympathetic and ominous signs, they tell me; for the grandchildren, to give them a sense of their history. They want this rural stuff as compost for their kids, to give them "roots", to help them grow more fully. Roots are for tearing away when proper ripeness has been reached. We have never been able to speak to each very much, my children and I. Their mother could better pretend. I do not know where this nostalgia for a period of time in which they never lived, for a place they never dwelt, might have come from. They also think that this record keeping will have a tonic effect on my mental state, so they encourage me to pic up my pen as one encourages a surly youth to keep a diary. They try and lamp me like a rabbit with pitying eyes.
The Night of Christmas Eve
The Boar’s Head is the only pub in a small village in Gloucestershire, the name of which is not particularly important to this story, other than to say you are very unlikely to have heard of it unless you were born there, and to mention it can only offend without profit.
There Was a Man Who Dwelt By A Churchyard
In a small redbrick house overlooking a churchyard, Gilbert Payne sat nearly swallowed in his armchair, staring fixedly ahead.