Free stories
Drawdown
A reservoir engineer takes the weekly level readings at Gallowbank for nineteen years. In the summer of the drought, the drowned village of Wreyford comes back up — and it is in better repair than the last time anyone saw it.
Made Good
A grave with no name on it is opened and refilled every seventh year by order of a bequest nobody can produce. Nobody is buried in it. It gives back more clay than it is given.
The Cutting
The rails came off the Brantwood branch in 1964. The man who walked it four times a year for thirty-four years can tell you that something is still running on it.
The Thirty-First Item
A deposit form lists thirty-one items. The box contains thirty. An archivist catalogues them one at a time and finds a parish that has been keeping a parallel record of people removed from the official one.
The Last Light Between Stars
The stars went out at 03:17, and Lena Vale noticed only because she had been watching them. Seven minutes later the ship was twenty-three light-years off course, and a man she had never met knew her name.
Low Tide
You have three hours to cross the causeway and you must not be on the sand when the tide turns. Nobody explains why it matters more on the way back.
Correspondence
Letters keep arriving from a pen-friend who died in March. They answer questions the narrator hasn't asked yet.
Something Owed
She inherits a house and a debt contracted in 1806. The creditor is patient, courteous, and increasingly present.
The Weight
The lift in her building holds eight people, and about once a fortnight it thinks there are nine.
Tenant's Handbook
Clause 14.3 of the tenancy agreement concerns the fourth bedroom. The flat has three.
The Quiet Carriage
There are four carriages on the 23:40 and nobody talks in the third one. There is also a rule about not sitting in it twice.
The Understudy
She covers a role for an actress who never comes back. The part begins to fit far too well.
The Winter Gardener
She hires a man to restore a walled garden that hasn't grown anything in forty years. He already knows why.
Salt and Tether
Sent to relieve a lighthouse keeper who never signed off. He is still there, entirely calm, and cannot leave.
The 3:04
A night-shift camera operator logs the same car passing an empty fell road at four minutes past three every night for eleven months — until the night it doesn't come, and she goes looking for why.
The Long Field
An incomer to a Yorkshire farm cuts the last strip of barley that the whole village refuses to touch, and learns too late what the custom was actually for.
Third Night
A woman inherits a house with one rule — the upstairs hallway light stays on until dawn — and discovers on the third night that the rule was never meant to keep anything out.
Books
First book coming soon.