Moon phases.Six months earlier.It was at a beach party that Jack was turned. Someone, an acquaintance, invited him and a few bottles, to the dunes on the South Kentish Sea front near Dungeness.As usual, he drank a bit too much, but he was sure afterwards, that his drink was spiked. Certainly, he had a metallic taste in his mouth the next morning and a monumental headache, the like he had never experienced before. He was a...

Home Alone.The world, on the other side of the glass, was suffering; buffeted and sodden. Gales had been lashing for the better part of two days. High winds had whipped the pines into thrashing wands, stripping the remaining pine cones to fall to the ground with little thuds, barely audible above the cacophony of the storm. Black, scudding clouds shrouded the landscape, creating bizarre, moving shadows of dark over dark,...

GillWe left the relative shade of the peristyle garden with its white marble fountain depicting Venus with a ewer hoisted on her shoulder. The trickling figure stood in the centre of a shallow square pool, surrounded by smooth flag stones and then by a grassed border skirting up to a colonnaded cloister that hemmed the garden in, providing a screen to the outside world.I took her small hand in mine to lead her away from t...

Game over.Chris paced the carpet. Driven by the temptation to go back a watch his wife and her lover, but he didn’t, knowing that he was most definitely excluded from the action of their bedroom, hearing the squeals of delight, the sighs and sounds of sex coming from the room only a few feet and a couple of doors away from him was pure torment. The television played to its self, unobserved and disregarded as his minds eye...

D’Oh!Jon sat on the park bench, lost in a world that included only the limits of his peripheral vision. His thoughts centred on nothing, just enjoyment of the warm summer sun that beat down to gently brown off the grass in Hyde Park.His bottle of mineral water became tepid, giving off a vapour, filling the plastic container so that it bulged slightly. Egg mayonnaise sandwiches fried in their wrapper destined not to be eat...

Foreword.It is a sad fact of life that many of our teenage children come off the tracks. There are many hypotheses that try to explain how it is, our society cannot cater for the younger generation, how it fails them at a fundamental level and leaves them to learn and fend for themselves. We teach our children the usual things, History, Geography, to read and write, numerical skills, but we seem to have forgotten how to t...

A day in a lifeBill had left for work an hour earlier. His last action before shutting the door was a perfunctory kiss on her cheek as he hurried out the door, his mind already occupied on the day’s events. Again, he had missed the significance of her squeeze on his upper arm; again he missed entirely, the questioning look she gave his retreating back.“Jay; get up, you’re going to be late.” Jean shouted at the top of her...