Here you can read some short slices of my published fiction. A few pieces have been published by Reflex Fiction and my story “Bonsai” was shortlisted for the Urban Tree Festival in 2021, featuring it in its “Canopy” anthology.
Larger projects are underway, so watch this space.
Bonsai
My eyes scan the pavement below, glum chin resting on the palm of my hand. When the street is lined with nothing but cars—fat metal slugs that jostle with one another—your inside has to become a kind of outside. You welcome nature in.
For me, that means this clutch of wood that stretches across the desk beside me, its leaves cut into a delicate canopy. Everything’s scaled down to fit the box we inhabit. We face the window, watching fingers of sun stretch out from behind clouds.
Sunlight and water, that’s what we both need. Every break, every breathless pomodoro, I make a tea and it gets a spray of water vapour. Tea, spray; tea, spray. I’ve seen an aunt do it with houseplants and figure this tree will want the same. I hope I’m right. If it chokes on the mist, roots clogged with the dizzy drip-feed of moisture, then I’ll be left alone.
No. The bonsai’s going to thrive. No more cutting back its branches. I’ll open the window so it can wind its way out of the room, resolute like a weather vane, like a satellite aerial receiving Netflix and an overabundance of chill.
Following its possible path, something catches my eye—another window and another well-watered pot with something green in it. And another, peering out from behind cigarette stained curtains. Another. Hundreds of windows with hundreds of tiny trees, Chinese money plants, monkey mask monsteras, and boat lilies. Between us, we have an entire garden.
Three Legs
Time changed when the foxes came out. At night they poked heads over low walls, all ear and black eye, with a low gait that didn’t come at the cost of speed. The eyes spiralled and time slowed; that was how they did it. More hours until morning to pick through bins, discarded takeaway cartons, and refuse.
People oozed on their way home. Streaks of pavement bled into other streaks into other streaks into other streaks. The walk felt longer somehow, drunkenly elongated, with the light of the blocks ahead smeared and distant. Terraced houses and those front gardens with lattices of red brick turned purple by the dark. Headlights glare and they’re white —railings and shivering brush. The cab crawls round the next turn and glows the road behind it red.
Was that a tail? Out past the car and behind the hedge. Yes, that’s it. Three legs and a wobble. Hour, minute and second hands turning in series, sliding past one another in the practiced motion of a time turner. Hairy. A looter of moments, scraps, and bones. It ate them whole.
How to Kill a Mockingbird
‘Do you have How to Kill a Mockingbird? My friend said it’s the best book she’s ever read.’
‘You know a lot of people say that about Moby Dick, by … Who’s it by?’ She pauses. It’s his bookshop. ‘Doesn’t matter. American, anyway. People who know what they’re talking about say it’s the best book in the English language, that you should “read between the lines”. Tell you what, I read it and it was a load of bollocks — a good book to fall asleep to. George Eliot, that’s a book. Middlemarch, that’s a book. The best female writer in British history; the best British female writer.’
‘I was actually looking for…’
‘Thomas Mann, too. What a load of bollocks. Now that’s a good book to fall asleep to, a good man to fall asleep to.’
It became clear that he had been sat on his squat throne between the bookshelves bestowing recommendations of works to devour, or in more cases to avoid at all costs, for the entire day, week, month, and year. Years. Not the kind to be amused by the performance, she did her best to nod along. Wouldn’t George Eliot be a man? She couldn’t help looking at his hands; cracked and blotched and porous from years of poring over yellowing pages with cigarette stained edges like fingernails.
‘Let’s find you Eliot, not T.S., George, spelt different. Spelt differently. One with a ‘T’ and one with a… One has another letter, added on. Or does it? Funny ways people go about spelling their names.’
The well-trod alleys through backstreet shelves welcomed him as he ushered her through. No discernable pattern dictated placement, Dewey Decimal or otherwise, but in just four and a half short minutes he had found it. ‘Ah. Here. Middlemarch.’ He passed it over with a smile that exuded the thrill of a successful chase, a conquest of his own shelves. It had a sorry excuse for a cover and underneath loosening pages, barely bound. A treasure.
‘Thanks. Thank you. But… I was really wondering whether you had How to Kill a Mockingbird.’
gabriel burrow 