Sample Story Extracts
- Six Pitches by Nadia Crandall
- Hard to Explain Funny by Rosie Rogers
- The Cock Thief by Parselelo Kantai
Six Pitches by Nadia Crandall
Charmian was my climbing partner for the week and I didn’t like her much. We had walked in from the Falzarego Pass well before dawn to be ahead of the weather. It was almost two hours up through steep meadows, and a forest of spruce and larch, until we reached the scree. She had chattered all the way, telling us how the rope cut into her shoulder, how her new boots rubbed, and marvelling at our progress as the valley fell away behind us. And she fiddled with her hair. Climbers don’t do that. They know to conserve energy.
Up here at the base of the climb, there was nothing but wind and rock with the occasional clump of purple gentian clinging to the slopes. Across the valley and hundreds of metres below, a small village was waking to the early sunlight, but this part of the mountain was still in shadow. I wandered over to where Chris stood, and in the sharp morning chill I could feel the heat and tension radiate from his body. He was watching the horizon to the east.
‘Like Tremadog?’ I said. That was the cliff in Snowdonia where the weather had come in too fast and we had made an emergency bivouac on the mountain, out all night in the storm. Something had started between us there. It was something very small, but I wanted it to be in Chris’s thoughts the way it was in mine.
Hard to Explain Funny by Rosie Rogers
Mum reckons Terry Wogan’s her soulmate. She wrote to him and he’s reading her letter out on the radio. The volume’s up so loud her words are bouncing around the kitchen. It’s so loud that Max and Daisy’s ears are pointing backwards like it aches their tiny skulls. They are in the hatch waiting for some Go-Cat. They don’t care that Mum’s letter is being read out, they just want breakfast. The letter goes like this:
Dear Terry,
I was never a great woman with the quill but I hope this letter is fit for reading on your radio show. How could you have left me here on the auld sod? And me with three hungry mouths to feed? Well, folks now tell me you’ve made it over there in the Land of the Oppressor – that you’re nothing less than a national treasure these days. Now then, Terry, don’t forget your roots and your first love. I just have one little request. Could you play our song by Foster and Allen? In memory of us. And perhaps let your mind wander back, to when, as the song goes, ‘you and I were young’.
Yours truly,
Maggie (Convey)
The Cock Thief by Parselelo Kantai
John Naiguran woke up suddenly and blinked, adjusting to the dimness inside the bus. There were people around him, strangers, fellow travellers. And the hand on his shoulder had been shaking him for some time.
‘Alfred, Alfred, amka. Wake up.’
It was the student – Janet? – on her way to university in Kampala, she had said. They were on the night bus from Nairobi. She had boarded the bus in Limuru, half an hour into the journey. He had told her he was Alfred, a money-changer on his way to Busia at the border.
He felt for the bag beneath the chair. It was still there, still heavy. He sank into his seat and sighed.
‘Did you know you sleep with your eyes open? You were looking at me as if I stole your grade cow.’