Stories

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy.

Five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.

I am sure many of you, like me, learned this children's nursery rhyme about magpies. According to an old superstition, the number of magpies seen predicts whether you will have good or bad luck. Something I came across subsequently, was the existence of many variations on this rhyme, some more sinister than the children’s version.

One of those is incorporated into this short story about boyhood abuse.

A dark story for Halloween...

Three kids. A spooky old house. Halloween. They should have paid more attention to those horror movies.

John and Chris met in high school, but it wasn’t until their junior year in college when they undergo a truly terrifying experience. It happened after a trip to Alcatraz just before Halloween, but you’ll have to read the story to find out what happened to them. (Halloween story)

Owen's teen life changes a great deal after the overnight success of his music band, Black Fox. But in some ways, his love life specifically, it doesn't seem to move an inch. A surprise encounter at one of their gigs pushes him to take matters in his own hands.

Hands are extremely important body parts for every drummer boy, right?

When a cinema company piles extra work onto their long-suffering projectionists, is it any wonder some of them go totally crazy?

How many words do you need to tell a story? Here are my attempts at micro-fiction - a series of unrelated mini tales, all under 50 words in length.

Danni Aarmodt is exiled to Planet Redemption, a penal planet. Surrounded by Earth's worse criminals and jagged glaciers, Danni must not only learn to survive the cruel planet's treacherous inmates, unpredictable weather, and psychological affects of isolation but the ancient evil that has been dug up from underneath the ice and awoken.

After a few days’ stay on a remote and bleak island in the sea, a writer finds that the boat he arrived in has been torn from its mooring by a storm. None of the locals will take him to the mainland, afraid to brave the waters after the storm, and as he struggles to make his way home, it seems more and more as if something doesn’t want him to leave.

Kyle Thorburn feels unlucky. But could he actually be cursed by another boy who is in love with him? A slighted lover, someone who is trying to kill him?