She was radiant and good, a queen among her people if ever there has been one, even though no royal blood ran through her veins. She was attentive in her silence, listening out for small undercurrents of a change of tone, or a change of light in a room. She was self-assured in her character, […]

There’s a tree outside his window. It’s a willow, strong and bony, her hair reaching to the ground in tearful sorrow. She makes him sad every time he looks at her. He’s not sure if that is her fault or his. Might be no one’s in particular, just his mind sometimes. It’s worst of all […]

Sun rays, light tones, blurring tail lights in the fast lane, a worn-out hat, a glass of lemonade – half-empty, golden hour, scent of ocean, a laugh trailing away.   She sits on a wooden bench underneath the window sill, looking out into her backyard. She has lived a long life. She’s come to the […]

The concept of a moon had always seemed strange to him. That there should be a heavenly body up there somewhere, always crouching in the obscure, hidden in plain sight by the shadow of the world and all the while shining brightly for everyone else. How was it to be explained? Matter of the universe […]

Strong was never a word she thought of when people asked her to describe herself. Or rather; she did think of it for a fleeting second but dismissed it decidedly as fanciful thinking. She wasn’t a woman of wrong modesty, she knew her worth and her good traits. She knew that she knew how to […]

He served us wine and homemade Spanish tortilla and he spoke with a soft ‘c’ and his nose was sharp and his hair was sprawled out onto his back in black curls, and all the while he was rushing and talking and joking and smiling. He’s from the Basque country, he said. How come a […]

Since she could think, the lighthouse tower had always been there, and before that, too, printed in shapes and colours into the windings of her mind. It sat there on the rocky tongue of earth that slipped out into the ocean just to the right of the small harbour, where boats anchored, never more than […]

Words have always been her home, a respite from not quite being herself yet, a palace built out of sweat and ink for her to live in as long as she pleases, until she is old enough to not need them anymore (& she hopes she never will); a world of adventures and hope and […]

He was taken aback. Whatever he had expected to come out of this, it certainly wasn’t this. He could have lived with rage, with spiky words thrown at him, refusal, anger, dismissal, anything. But silence? That was probably even worse. He heard his father’s footsteps, heard him tread up the windy staircase to the first […]

He had never been one for big words or grand gestures. If anything, these things appalled him. He held a subtle grudge against anyone who over-shared, overdid anything, over-imposed themselves in any way. He thought it bad taste. To him, the grace and beauty of a person lay in subdued elegance, quiet beauty, understated modesty. […]

There are tulips everywhere and you didn’t even like tulips. Why would people make the effort, take the trek to the nearest flower shop upon themselves just to bring the wrong fucking sort of flowers to your funeral. It’s not like you hated tulips or anything but it’s just that you thought it was nicer […]

She’s staring out of the window as if her life depends on it, as if every single time she blinks all hell could break lose and the world could be turned upside down. Her eyes search the woods surrounding her house, the space in between the thick tree trunks and the space between the branches […]

He has the rambling, unsteady gait of someone who has been to sea for too long and can’t really remember how to walk normally, on steady ground, feet planted firmly onto the earth. He is used to the low and reassuring sway of waves underneath his boat, and he prefers it. But no matter, that […]

I already knew back then. Judged from an outsider’s point of view it may have seemed like an insignificant stretch of time, all of us standing on the brink of our own lives; not yet old enough to understand the weight of all that was to come looming above our shoulders but neither young enough […]

Last year I started to write a book I didn’t quite finish, but this one character Jonathan has been stuck in my head ever since. There’s a heaviness inside of him which seems to stifle everything that he wants to say or think. Where his very own thoughts and joys used to be there’s just […]