I’ve a new short story, RUNNING BOY, in ‘The Recunsant’m, an on-line magazine.

Here’s the opening.

RUNNING BOY

He sits at the back of the class. The teachers blurred voice distant as if talking in the school’s echoing corridor or in some distant swimming baths. Teachers suspect drugs. Everyone leaves a force field around him as if touching him will shrivel them. He attends school most days but has never been there for years. His fingernails are filled with dirt and his uniform hangs on a by a thread. His brown eyes and black hair suggest a mediterrian background he has never considered. He once created interest and pity but now he is too far away, everyone agrees. In the staff room there is a grumbling agreement: there but never really there.
The boy leaves school alone. His too big jacket hammocks from him as his belly ruptures over his too tight trousers. Black shoes and socks reveal gaping holes. No one tags along beside him. School is forgotten as he trundles to the shop. He buys crisps and can of lemonade. Coins clatter in his top pocket. He is served with a mannered indifference. The shop keeper does not like this fat boy. He is unaware of this. The boy aims to eat, sleep. The rest is perma-frost.
He is shocked when his mother shouts, ‘James’. He doesn’t think it’s him. He is genuinely surprised that someone knows his name. He doesn’t find that strange. Doesn’t say. His mother examines him as she has not seen him for weeks. She is busy with her new boyfriend who stands in a blur outside the bar, his cigarette weaving from his long arms. She holds her son for a moment and places money in his top pocket. She knows where he keeps his money. That’s one thing she does know about him. She asks him to smile for her boyfriend. He forms a smile as if slowly making concrete. The man walks toward him and takes his mother without speaking, they topple off together, her heels clack on the pavement as he walks home eating crisps that stick to his full lips. Soon he can’t picture his mother.
He does not have a front door key. He clambers over the back wall and likes to listen as the key scrapes in the barrel. The old man sits by the fire and doesn’t raise his head as the boy enters. They don’t speak. The old man’s head is lost to the fire that crackles with the wood he places carefully as if it were a child. They appear golden as the flames rise. This is their moment. The old man should not be here but he has nowhere else to go. He came dragging a heavy suit case and the boy pointed to what was going to be his mother’s bedroom and that was it. They play with silence. It is an instrument they love. They create other noises: the scraping of the old man’s shoes across the bare floor the smacking of the old man’s hands when the wood runs out for the fire. They sit. Old man and boy. Happy with their silence.

http://www.therecusant.org.uk/