nothing in the rulebook

A collective of creatives bound by a single motto: There's nothing in the rulebook that says a giraffe can't play football!

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Category: Short Fiction

  • Horrible Feet

    When I was ten I saw a ballerina tear her Achilles tendon. I was sitting on the side of the stage during a recital rehearsal, unrolling a leg warmer on my left thigh. It was April, and I could hear heavy rainfall beating against the emergency exit doors of the theatre. My face was warm,…

  • I Said I Like It Like That

    Justine’s mother bought herself a new phone when she moved to the States and, after that, Justine had trouble getting hold of her. She had the new number supposedly, sent to her via email from an unfamiliar address. She assumed the email was from her mother because it was characteristically brief and contained only the…

  • As elegant as a violin

    but suddenly it would come over her, If he were here with me now what would he say? – some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; -Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway The first time I met Leo was one…

  • The Dancer

    I saw Jane Hariott for the first time since our schooldays over the body of a dead Canadian. Normandy, June 1944.  I was fresh from England, still blinking away the things I’d seen on the voyage across the channel and on the drive down from the coast. As a nurse I was used to death,…

  • Short stories by Philip Roth you can read for free right now

    Celebrated as “the last of the great white male” American authors of the 20th Century, Philip Roth has died at the age of 85. Rather than devote pages (or pixels, as may more accurately be the case) to an obituary recounting the same great feats of an author who has towered over the US literary…

  • ‘The 8th Emotion’ – An Extract

    An extract from Josh Spiller’s forthcoming speculative fiction novel, ‘The 8th Emotion’…   In a tribdwell situated in Karthalia, but beyond the boundary of any tribe – like some exiled building – Pavneet worked frantically. Night-time candles glowed on his desk, while a cooking fire burned in the corner of his tribdwell’s main room. The…

  • White winter mist

    The woods are shrouded in a white winter mist. Snow falls from the sombre sky, trees twist and creak in the icy wind. There is someone lying in the woods. A girl. Her skin is as white as the snow around her, and yet it is a sickly pallor. Her mouth, once as red as blood, is now…

  • The Starling

    I paused. There was a noise above my head, in the attic. It was intermittent. I wasn’t sure if I’d heard anything at all it was so indistinct, so gentle. The child which remained somewhere within me played with the idea of ghosts and spirits but I wasn’t intrigued enough to venture into the cold…