Cafe Aphra: An Online Community for Writers

She gazes in a kind of mystical awe at the myriad of socks laid out over the king size bed. Ankle socks, trainer socks, walking socks, Christmas socks, poodle socks (remember those?), long socks, posh socks, socks with holes in, even a special ballet sock. The most extraordinary feature of this collection is the fact that not one, not even the limited edition sock that has a personalized image of Gareth Bale printed on it, is a match. In the school staff room, she recounts this discovery to the amusement (mainly) of her colleagues. One is, however, looking genuinely puzzled. “How?” the neat, tidy and super organized teacher asks in bewilderment, “How does that happen?” “How does it not happen?” replies the Sock Queen. “How, how does anyone keep socks in pairs?” Super organized teacher suggests gently that Sock Queen pairs the socks before they go in the washing machine. “I’ll try,” promises Sock Queen as the bell goes to mark end of break. She leaves the staff room, now litter...

Polly, the housing support worker, drove Naomi crazy. Fat lot of support she gave her. Today she was asking about her boyfriend. ‘You are being careful , aren’t you?’ she’d said, in that fake worried tone of hers. Polly was a podgy blonde of around 35. She’d been perched right on the edge of Naomi’s second-hand sofa, like she was scared she would catch something from it, as if she was ‘being careful’ herself. Naomi - or Nai, as Hannah used to call her - had just turned 19. She wore tight Lycra leggings and a skinny top, her shimmery crochet cardi open at the front and accentuating rather than concealing her long cleavage and curves. “A right prima donna,” Polly’s colleagues had warned. “She’ll say she can’t see you because she’s painting her nails.” Polly stole a look. Naomi’s long talons were indeed impressive: today coated in dark varnish and topped off with glittering silver swirls. When Polly had asked if she was being careful, Naomi hadn’t answered. Nosy cow. And then...

Hannah came from a nice part of Surrey where people gave their dirty clothes to a young man at the back door who brought them back a few days later, clean and ironed. Once married to handsome Jerry, however, Hannah forfeited back doors and all that came through them. But her sweet-talking husband did buy her a washing machine and steam iron with some of their wedding money. He even taught her how to use them. Jerry, meanwhile, got on with betting on dead certs at various horse races around the country. Sympathy for Jerry’s rotten luck survived intact through three wedding anniversaries, the loss of Hannah’s heated rollers, camera, the best of their furniture and even some of her jewellery. Only when her washing machine was sold to pay the bookie who’d popped round for a chat late one night, did she begin to suspect that gorgeous Jerry was completely useless at backing the winning horse. Hannah had never used a launderette before. She arrived with her dirty clothes n...

She left from the gathering around the grave, leaving behind the kindness that couldn't reach her. She ignored the concerned calls and drifted deeper among the heavy granite slabs. She had no direction beyond 'away'. She saw the stark red, harsh against the snow, before she saw the tiny corpse. A sparrow, plucked from the air by winter's call and shredded by a passing cat, perhaps. She looked, but didn’t register this other, lesser, death. Even so, she reached unsteadily down towards a fluffy, furled feather lying in the glistening snow. She touched it gently. It had so little substance that her skin could not believe there was anything there - but then her finger tips no longer knew how to notice touch. It was one of those unexpected changes that had come on her with age. The drying skin, turning to paper; the muffled hearing; the clouding eyes. They had laughed together at it. Carefully, clinging for support to a nearby stone, she knelt in the crisp moisture a...

Me and Joe were inseparable as boys. “You could be twins,” me Mum used to say smiling.   She’d pack us both brown bags filled with squashed sarnies and an apple each, before ushering us out for the day. Watch less, parent less, we’d explore for hours. In old quarries, up meadows and in the bombed out ruins.   Joe’s Mum never packed him a lunch. She struggled to feed the triplets let alone Joe, her eldest child. The triplets had been an “unwanted leaving present from the G. I’s,”   I’d heard Mum telling Mrs Jakes, the next door neighbour.   There was no holding Joe back. He climbed, ran, jumped the highest, fastest and furthest of us kids at St Edmunds. He’d have been head boy too or so said popular opinion, if it hadn’t been for his family ‘background.’   It was night-times when we had our greatest adventures. After midnight, while our families slept, we’d climb out of our bedroom windows and meet up by Beckett’s Pond. In summer we’d build a tree house ...

Outside the cornershop a dog had died.  The heat had accentuated the stench bleeding off the carcass. Some number of flies had made it their new water cooler. Discussing filth, presumably. Across the road, in between the impatient footsteps of city-ridden mental illness, I saw two pigeons. One slightly larger than the other, with a lighter hue of that bluish grey they possess. He looked well-fed; well, as much as a city pigeon could.  In Bournemouth, in the gardens of the house to some Victorian eccentric expatriates, styled with old stone, vines and exotic flowers to look like a narcissian stage, a certain pigeon had once paraded the lush koi pond, adorned by gentle fountain faucets and hydrated foliage. He was a royal-looking pigeon, their Prince on his travels, a young Siddhartha but with vanity and less commendable intentions.  The pigeon on the London road that day could have had this beauty; he was lucky to only have the few scars. Behind him was a smal...

The bulbs of the Empire, a proscenium preserved in aspic, flashed out the name of my first show. Some would say it was not ‘my’ show, that I was just the scriptwriter, but authors are tyrants and I knew it was all me, me. I walked round to stage door with a feeling that, although everyone down here on the city streets didn’t know I’d written the Empire’s newest musical, if they hadknown they’d have revered me very much, and this lent me the power of a dormant volcano. I entered stage door and – OH! – what a sight. At the desk sat a short hairy man who harrumphed and curtly asked me my name. He was a sprite. Standing near, three or four bored ushers who were clearly waiting for Cassandra Fleming-King or Walter Godolphin, to harass my beautiful actors with flattery. ‘Molly Mead,’ I said. The sprite scribbled it down. ‘You’re the writer, yes? You know you don’t need to come backstage, you can just take your seat for the…’ ‘I’d prefer to have a word with Cass and Walter first,’ I s...

I had thin arms as a boy. When I was about 11, I started doing biceps curls with a wooden beam in my father’s workshop. It weighed maybe ten or so pounds. I did hundreds of curls with that beam, hundreds. I did so many curls with the beam it became too light to give me a pump. So I added some weight to the beam, in the form of two stout salamis that my mother was curing in the cantina. They weighed a couple of pounds each and I tied them to opposite ends of the beam for balance. This worked. The added weight guaranteed that I got a pump when I did my curls. This was before barbells became a commonplace. Eventually, two salamis added to the beam were not enough. I had to add two more. My skinny, weakling arms were filling out and hardening into serious pipes. I started wearing tank tops and my little friends made comments about my arms. Look at his arms, would ya! They’re like Steve Reeves’! They’re like Popeye’s! Of course Popeye had huge forearms, but his biceps ...

Jemima occupied a box in my father’s study. It had once contained an Xpelair fan. The cardboard was quite thick with copper staples to keep it together. The texture set my teeth on edge. Perhaps that’s how they made cardboard in 1962. Jemima terrified me. She was about twenty years old compared to my five but I was taller. She walked at night. I could see her through the bed clothes that I drew up around my head for protection.  Her method of locomotion was necessarily unconventional. She had been decapitated and buried with a few pots of Roman provenance by the side of the ancient trackway that passed the front of our house.  Her skull was found between her knees, as if she was looking for her missing feet. In my imagination she walked with her skull perched directly on her pelvis.  Close by is the church of St Michael and all Angels, its name and unusual north-south alignment hinting at a pre-Christian foundation. The church was in the care of my father, the...

The bookmark is the part that I keep coming back to, perhaps because I think that it is the thing about the whole incident that says the most about me, the only thing that means anything. The exact placement of the bookmark, the way that I precisely, if quickly, wedged it into the book so that the bottom edge cleanly revealed a line of text and its top edge protruded out of the book at its customary surplus of about 1.5 inches. I was reading in the park, engrossed in a world very far from my own, but one in which I was reading a highly coincidental passage about a car accident. I’m sure that it means nothing that I was reading about an accident, but when I heard the bang of the collision, it was a shock to my mind as much as my ears. It was as though the life of the pages were playing out before me, and as I looked quickly up at the car accident coming to a stop only yards from the bench, I became very confused. I was already in action of course, as the papers went to great length...

Summer, and Priya was visiting Uncle and Aunt in rural Jainampore. It was her favourite time of day, late afternoon, when they migrated to the rooftops to catch the southeasterly breezes. They perched on the ledges, clutching glass tumblers filled with cardamom  chai . Their view, the nine mile stretch of Trunk Road with its cluster of smart middle class residences on each side thinning to slums at the far end.      A scooter trundled by. Two men with lustrous moustaches were crouching on it, a flat screen TV between them.      ‘See the struggle of common man,’ Uncle said.       About five minutes later, a khaki-clad policeman approached on a rusty bicycle. If the scooter was leisurely, this vehicle was a shade speedier than stationary.       He gave them a salute. ‘I am hot on the heels of burglars. They’ve stolen Mr Sharma’s TV. Did you see which way they went?’      ‘Down Trunk Road.....

Cherry laid out vegetables in order of cooking on the black marble surface. Golden summer garlic, pale sweet onions, leeks, carrots, green pea pods. Fragrance and freshness. It was a safe kind of chore—making soup. Two cloves of garlic on the old wooden chopping board. The wide body of their Japanese cooking knife, bought in Kyoto where they’d celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She still had strength to crush garlic… He would be crushed. She’d kept their last summer together joyful, organising excursions to visit places they’d been happy before; walking once again their easier walks – all the cliché things their older friends had done. Why do people despise cliché, she wondered. It was a slow-growing cancer, inoperable. If she wished, her doctors would give her radio and chemo, but the statistics weren’t promising. She reassured them, feeling sorry for the young men who had to give her the news––once her husband’s students, then colleagues––ethically boun...