Straightforward Short Stories

Across the road, beside the old army camp, there was a small pond that everyone called Dead Man’s Lake. My mother said I was never to go there, because if I did I would surely drown.

The two rooms over the lollipop shop in the middle of Stamp Street are small, dark and inconvenient, but they have what Miss Arabella Bassett prizes highly: a wonderful view!

I lay on the couch and stared at the stark, white ceiling.

After a time, Dr. Wiesen approached wearing a poorly fitting, stiffly starched white coat. He looked down at me. His smile – reassuring in the middle, sadistic around the edges - I had seen before. He picked up the card attached to the side of the couch and viewed it through thick, antique glasses.

For the fiftieth time, Paul Maitland asked himself if he was just being a fool and why, instead of being tucked up in his own comfortable bed he was huddled in a sleeping bag in of all places the chocolate kiosk of the Bijou Cinema.

The alarm had first been given by young Mr. Archibald, the assistant cashier. When he had arrived at a quarter to nine at the offices of Messrs. Diddle & Snatch, the estate agents who employed him, Mr. Archibald said, a scene of chaos confronted him.

When I was ten, and my twin brothers, Jerry and John, were eight years old, we all lived on Lord Rathmore’s estate, deep in the heart of the Kent countryside. Up at the Hall there were lots of servants who lived-in, but the gamekeeper, the cowman, and the gardener each had a cottage of their own.

Mrs. Briggs had come down from the village that morning to help us out.  We didn’t like her much. She was a fat, untidy woman who gave the impression of being slightly unsteady, and she was always prying.

“What’s your Pa do for a living?” she asked my sister, Tansy, one day while she slopped around with her pail and her mop.

That “trick-cyclist” I saw when I first booked in here three months ago was rubbish! Always rolling his tongue around expressions like “obsessional neurosis” and “frustrational trauma” just to give well-shaved jaws some exercise.

Many generations ago, a traveller was journeying through the deep forests of middle Europe when he met a farmer tilling a small patch of earth under the giant trees.

Their home was a land of eternal wind and cold. All through the savage Antarctica winter the penguins had huddled together on the pack ice, heads down, eyes closed, their bodies pressed close for warmth, bravely enduring the blizzard which blew continuously during the month’s-long night.