Liars' League

Fish-fish by Cherry Potts

Read by Math Jones - full podcast here (fourth story) 

She has a small cloche hat pulled down so tight it’s a wonder she hasn’t ripped the rim. He has his hair plastered to his head so smoothly that Joel half expects beads of Brilliantine in the crease at the back of his neck, but despite this they are immaculate, both wearing some fabric between velvet and moleskin that shimmers and tempts the fingertip to explore its textures.

Joel shows them to a booth at the back of the room, with a mirror behind them, which will allow him to keep an eye on them without quite staring. He cannot fathom what it is that draws him. They could be sister and brother they look so alike, round-eyed, broad-cheeked, flat-nosed; his wonderful whiskers the only feature that truly distinguishes them one from the other, but the way they behave with each other is not sibling-like. She gazes and gazes, her round eyes drinking him in with something like awe, and he caresses her with his glance. It is barely decent.

Lili of the Valley of the Shadow by Derek Ivan Webster

Lili of the Valley of the Shadow MP3

Read by Alex Greenhalgh - full podcast here.

The woman at the store assured him there was nothing to be ashamed of. He was almost fourteen and it was natural that he would be exploring these things. That she was dressed in a leather harness with studded choke collar didn’t prove as distracting as the pale curves and bulges of her barely covered skin. She wrapped his purchase in a black satin bag. It just fit in his backpack.

“Don’t worry about the sign. You can come anytime.” She patted him on the head and he was almost comforted. “No judgements here.” It was the glimpse of her nipple that sent him running for the door.

The Wicker Heart by Alan Graham

Read by Peter Kenny - full podcast here (last story)

“Nervous?” my girlfriend asks, briefly taking her eyes off the road ahead to look at me and smile reassuringly.

“Of course.” I reply. Or at least I try to. Seeking to hide my nerves, I make a real effort to sound calm and overdo it. I end up just making a slight gurgly noise.

“My parents will just adore you,” she declares.

I don’t believe her for a second. “I’ve always been bad with parents, that’s why I said the first time we meet needs to be a quiet affair. Somewhere low-key. Like a Burger King.”

She sighs loudly, “You were not meeting my parents at a Burger King.”

The Red Satin Flag of Resistance by Mark Sadler

Read by Silas Hawkins - full podcast here (fifth story)

Gerald and Kathy's forbidden love existed in defiance of a powerful dating algorithm, which had declared them mutually incompatible.

They first met in the lobby of the Wayward Hearts dating agency, where they were waiting to be provided with the identities of their ideal partners, selected for them through the impartial medium of computer software. A conversation concerning a rise in parking charges had quickly blossomed into friendship. They had departed prematurely, walking away hand in hand, to the horror of the agency manager, Lynda Jolly, who ever since that day, had been determined to correct this cosmic imbalance.

Soul Searching by Liam Hogan

Soul Searching MP3

Read by Keleigh Wolf - full podcast here.

The first thing Tammy did on getting back to a guy’s flat was to check on the state of his soul.

If it was listless and lethargic, or worse; aggressive and ill-controlled, if it was poorly housed, moulting, or just plain sick, then she’d make her excuses and be out of there as fast as she could.

It would be a lot easier if men carried their souls around with them as she and her girlfriends did. The idea of going anywhere without her soul filled her with dread, a panicky feeling that soured food, wine, and conversation. Men obviously didn’t feel the same way and it was rare to catch a glimpse of their soul before they’d be trying to show you a whole lot more besides. Men even left their souls at home when they went to work, which always astonished Tammy. How could anyone go that long without their soul? How could a soul go that long without company?

A Shared History by Seth Marlin

Read by William Teller - full podcast here (fifth story)

In the years after your retirement, you’ll continue to make regular visits to the cafe where your wife once worked. This will be one of the two indulgences you still allow yourself. One such occasion will fall on a snowy afternoon in early February – you’ll push the door open with a jingle, stomp off your boots, unwind the scarf from around your neck. The transition will fog your glasses, imbue the scene with a glow like nostalgia. The establishment will be nearly empty, save for a few patrons working on laptops. The young woman behind the bar will be following their example, her attentions drifting between screen and page. She’ll look up from her own work as you enter, will smile and push back from the counter. “Mr. Simmons.” This will not be your real name.

Valentine's event: Love & Lust on Tuesday 12th February

The six pulse-pounding stories for our Valentine's event, LOVE & LUST featured pagan bonfires, lustful teens, scarlet knickers, ill-advised one-night stands, fish suppers, sex at the Imperial War Museum and - naturally - the end of civilisation. The YouTube playlist is here and the full podcast is here, for your audio-visual pleasure ...

WINNING STORIES FOR LOVE & LUST

A Shared History by Seth Marlin NEW AUTHOR, read by William Teller
Fish-fish by Cherry Potts, read by Math Jones
The Wicker Heart by Alan Graham, read by Peter Kenny
The Red Satin Flag of Resistance by Mark Sadler, read by Silas Hawkins
Soul Searching by Liam Hogan, read by Keleigh Wolf
Lili of the Valley of the Shadow by Derek Ivan Webster, read by Alex Greenhalgh

As usual, doors open at 7pm for a 7.30 start and tickets are £5 on the door (currently cash only, sorry, but there is a cashpoint across the street). Drinks and food will be available at the bar, though there are also free Loveheart sweets and the infamous interval quiz features swoonworthy brand-new books to be won! There's no pre-booking, but tables for four or more can be reserved by calling 07808 939535.

The venue is the downstairs bar at:

The Phoenix Pub
37 Cavendish Square 
London 
W1G 0PP

Accessibility note: Access to the basement is via stairs: there is no lift, sadly. 

The Phoenix is 5 minutes' walk from Oxford Circus tube station, which is on the Victoria, Bakerloo and Central lines. Map here.

Mr Cromerty of Boston by Richard Smyth

Mr Cromerty of Boston MP3   Full podcast here: (3rd story)   Bonus Xmas podcast story here!

Read by David Mildon 

Outside, a cold, clear evening, men going about bundled in woollens, steam rising from a rubble of horse manure in the road, the air steeped in stovesmoke – a hard frost in the night mail, if I am any judge. Inside, a table by a fire, ink and a pen, two heaps of paper, a mirror trimmed with a little holly. A glass on the table beside the paper, and in it a measure of bourbon whisky.

Between them the fire and the whisky almost keep the cold at bay.

It’s queer to think that before last spring I had barely ever written a word (aside from the dry documentation I assembled, the legal letters I drafted, the contracts and covenants I compiled in my work at at the real-estate office). Oh, as a young man I had attempted poetry, awful stuff, as young men do, but I always knew I had no aptitude for it, and soon gave it up. And then in more recent years I never seemed to have the time.

Now – tonight, last night, the night before that, a string of nights and days reaching back into darkness – time seems to be all that I have.     

Santa: Judgement Day by Dennis Zaslona

Santa - Judgement Day     Full podcast here: (5th story)       Bonus Christmas podcast story here!

Read by Rich Keeble

‘Merry Christmas, motherf**kers. Here I co-ome!’

The wind ripped away Square Jaw’s yell as he dived from the stealth bomber and into the belly of the Mexican night sky. Two thousand feet below, the lake was a silver puddle, a second moon. S.J. hugged his Takana sniper rifle tighter to his chest. He was diving into the moon, a Christmas eve angel of death. A Wenceslas warrior. ‘Yeeeeha!’

At eight hundred feet above the villa where Hector Cabello and his cartel leaders were gathered, he pulled the release ring. But before the canopy fully opened, his feet smashed into something solid. His knees jammed into his chest and he was slammed onto on his back.

For a moment he just lay looking up at the stars while he caught his breath. His legs were bent so far over his head that his knees were touching his ears. The moon swayed as the platform, or whatever it was he had landed on, gently rocked. Absurdly, he thought he could hear the snort of animals and the tinkle of bells.

Christman's Present by Lauren Van Schaik

Christman's Present MP3

Read by Lois Tucker

Inside, Christman’s department store was shimmering and the same, smelling of wax-polish and tinsel. I wasn’t sure why I’d brought Sinclair here – a drunken impulse, maybe – but I’d always loved it: the chill marble of the first floor, how my pumps clinked on it like teacups. How the glass cabinets glimmered and mirrored into forever. The necklaces, draped on velvet hillsides like the Hollywoodland sign; the hundreds of gloves folded in prayer. I used to think they got Christmas from this place. At least my Christmas morning stockings from Aunt Mill always came in the same battered Christman’s box. But the stockings, always worsted and thick, not silk, were never from here; I’d never known the dress that was, that had come in that box when it was new.

I’d only been to Christman’s for the first time with Inez, when we were thirteen. I remembered it as clear as today. She’d bought a broderie blouse with money her parents had given her. The blouse was beautiful, and cool as a dollop of sour cream on the baked potatoes we ate in the third floor café afterward, tucked among her boxes. The whole time, I hadn’t known where to put my hands.

Gluten Tolerant by Mike Clarke

Gluten Tolerant MP3

Read by Amy Neilson Smith

‘Fuck you, Jack. Merry Christmas.’ That’s what I should have said.

Instead I mutter ‘See you later, then – at home’ with a calculated passive-aggressive cutting edge. It’ll be wasted on the pissed-up arsehole.

We’re in Bermondsey, last Friday before Christmas. Done the Beer Mile. Again. With mates – mostly Jack’s. You know the place – a mile-long strip of craft breweries under the railway arches? If you’re too basic to know it then you’ll never work for my PR agency.

Jack swears virtually all his social media deals are sealed here over a pint of craft IPA on a Friday afternoon. All free-range and fair enough. But the evenings inevitably end with contracts celebrated at someone’s new-build flat in Rotherhithe or Limehouse – the boys in a daze of drugs and videogames and their bored girlfriends bonding over competitive stories of sex and shoes.

Not this time.

The Man Who Brought Gold by Mark Sadler

The Man Who Brought Gold MP3

Read by Sophie Cartman

From a seam of molten gold, on the wounded bed of the Adriatic Sea, a curl of magma, drawn from the earth on a serpentine current, was warped into a bottom-heavy S-shape. It hardened as it cooled on a rising stream of bubbles; breaking the surface a few minutes after it formed, where it assumed the bobbing silhouette of a swan in profile. By late afternoon it had entered the Venetian lagoon, nudging itself unnoticed along the battered walls of the interior canals that reflected murky cross-sections of buildings, garnished with Christmas lights.

A pair of large hands, the colour of mahogany, the flesh welted with buried shrapnel, reached down, raising it from the channel, water pouring from the honeycombed rock.

The man's name was Melko. The object that he held was called a lava swan. He had lived in the city long enough to know that the people considered them lucky and displayed them in the windows of their homes and businesses. He left it leaning upright against the green door of Della Cava, a seaport vintner that traded medicinal wine, made from salt grape. Wiping his scarred palms on his trousers, he ambled across the plaza towards a pair of towering double doors made from dulled, embossed metal, with a smaller wicket gate for pedestrians inset at the bottom.

My favourite Christmas story: Mike Clarke on Posy Simmonds's "Cassandra Darke"

My Christmas story is both very new and very old.

It’s new because the book, Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds, was only published on 1^st November this year (sorry, only a few sample pages can be found online). It’s old because it’s inspired by (if not a faithful reworking of) the classic seasonal story, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Cassandra Darke is also a graphic novel. Actually, novel might be pushing it a little as, at under 100 pages, it can be read in the time it would take a long short story. But it is told mostly with pictures – and wonderful ones they are too.

Cassandra herself is a curmudgeon on a par with Ebenezer Scrooge – a wealthy septuagenarian West London art gallery owner. She’s as mean towards others as Dickens's protagonist, but her solitary Sloane Square existence is considerably more indulgent – she has a cook (whom she reprimands for being “heavy handed with the dill”) and polishes off bottles of Chateau Haut Brion during weekday dinners.

My Favourite Seasonal Story: Rachel Karyo on Shelley Jackson's "Snow"

Rachel Karyo writes: This short story is written in snow, one or two words at a time, photographed, and then published on Instagram. Shelley Jackson has been writing “Snow” (now in its twelfth sentence) since 2014. The story is still in progress.

William H. Gass writes that when we read works by authors such as Kafka, Beckett, Barth, and Borges, it’s “as if we’d stepped into a two-pound puddle of mirror glass and come out as wet as Alice.” This is how it feels to read a Shelley Jackson short story.

Her prose is graceful, playful, inventive, and poetic. An example: “There are snows made of clock faces and circular slide rules, of maps to undiscovered countries, of the shattered breath clouds of those who have cried out for help unheard on a clear winter day.” I love the beautiful strangeness of “shattered breath clouds,” the paradox of the map, those unexpected, evocative, analogue objects, and the music of the sentence, its consonance and repetition.

My Favourite Christmas Story: Mark Sadler on Saki's (H. H. Munro's) "Reginald on Christmas Presents"

Reginald, the narrator of this short meditation on unwanted seasonal gifts, wastes absolutely no time at all in stating that he does not want a "George, Prince of Wales" Prayer-book as a Christmas present. In this opening sentence Saki uncannily identifies a trend that has endured for over a century since the story was first published. The author was a casualty of the battle of Ancre in 1916, where he fell prey to a sniper's bullet, and sadly did not live to see the better world that followed the war, where no-one would ever think of gifting a loved one a copy of a "George, Prince of Wales" Prayer-book without being expressly asked to do so.

Equally enduring is Reginald's account of the dread that accompanies the arrival of a tie from a well-meaning, country-dwelling, female relative - “some spotted horror that you could only wear in secret or in Tottenham Court Road”. As with the "George, Prince of Wales" Prayer-book, the undesirable nature of such a gift is as relevant in 2018 as it was when these words were first committed to paper.

Christmas event: NAUGHTY & NICE at The Albany on Tue Dec 11th

We made our list, we checked it twice ... and here are the winning stories which were read at our tinsel-tastic Christmas show NAUGHTY & NICE (click for Facebook event) on Tuesday December 11th, downstairs at The Albany, Great Portland Street. We had seasonal shoplifting, sexy sourdough, kidnapped presents, one VERY naughty little girl and what happens when Santa meets the Special Forces ...

UPDATE: All the videos from the night are now up on our Naughty & Nice YouTube playlist and the texts and podcast will be online very soon. 

WINNING STORIES for NAUGHTY & NICE

Christman's Present by Lauren van Schaik NEW AUTHOR - read by Lois Tucker

 

Santa: Judgement Day by Dennis Zaslona NEW AUTHOR - read by Rich Keeble

    

Mr Cromerty of Boston by Richard Smyth - read by David Mildon

 

The Man who brought Gold by Mark Sadler - read by Sophie Cartman

 

Gluten Tolerant by Mike Clarke - read by Amy Neilson Smith
 

As usual, doors open at 7pm for a 7.30 start and tickets are £5 on the door (cash only, sorry, but there is a cashpoint across the street). Drinks and food will be available at the bar, though there are also free sweets and the infamous interval quiz features fabulously festive books to be won! There's no pre-booking, but tables for four or more can be reserved by calling 07808 939535.

The venue is the downstairs bar at:

The Albany
240 Great Portland Street
London W1W 5QU

Hide. Go Seek. by Dan Howarth

Hide Go Seek MP3

Read by Math Jones

Amy liked to hide.

Whenever she got the chance, she would jump out on Mummy or Daddy. Amy always liked to hide in the cupboard under the stairs when she got home from school. Mummy would go into the kitchen to make tea; Amy always hoped for chicken nuggets but rarely got them.

While Mummy made the tea, Amy would burrow into the cupboard under the stairs. Beneath the coats and behind the shoes. She shoved the broom to one side and wriggled behind the ironing board with a soft metallic clang.

The cupboard under the stairs was dark but not totally black. Light got in under the door and around the sides. Amy hugged her knees to her chest. Daddy would be home soon and she was going to get him. She listened as Mummy clattered in the kitchen, moving pots and pans. The steady chopping sound as she cut things up. Mummy hummed as she cooked.

Amy sat in the darkness. A smell rose up around her. What was Mummy cooking today? It smelled gross. It reminded Amy of the time that Tommy from school left a sandwich in his bag for weeks until it went green and turned to liquid. All rotten and mouldy. But there was something else to this smell. Something worse. A burnt smell. Like the time Miss Jacobs lit candles for them in class and licked her fingers to pinch the match.

The Dungeon Master's Guide by Rhys Timson

Read by David Mildon

Welcome, heroes, to the stygian plans of Morkalanazzxx! I am, as always, your Dungeon Master and guide through these ashen wastes. And what a terrible place to be on Halloween, of all nights. Evil is at its zenith on this day, and only the pure of heart will survive.

What we call Halloween is known in this world as ‘Gloomfeist’ in the common-tongue, and ‘tis said that on this night every year the souls of evil-doers return to the scenes of their transgressions, and are justly punished.

No, Ollyganth the mage, you may not ‘nip to the loo’. There is no time for such fripperies. Adventure awaits!

But seriously, Ollie, now isn’t a great time for a toilet break. You’ll find out why very soon. There’s a good reason. Trust me.

I’ve always been trustworthy, haven’t I? Scrupulously so. What a pity none of you can say the same for yourselves.

Another Mother by Michael Harris Cohen

Another Mother MP3

Read by Miranda Harrison

She wakes, gasping, sputtering sea and sand, thrashed by coughs, till the saltwater is out, only air in her lungs, at last.

She breathes.

Alive.

Her eyes focus. A beach. No boats or houses. No people. An island. No lights but the moon and its shine on the sea.

Endless sea. It’s calmed now, a sheet of black metal. Not like before.

The memory of the storm cyclones her head, as if she still reels under house-sized waves and shrieking winds, the terror of the sea depths. Of her death.

She wrenches her thoughts back. She’s here. Alive. Unlike her boat, whose bones nod in the waves, she’s unbroken.

Rounds by Anna Savory

Rounds MP3

Read by William Teller

1am: St Thomas’ Hospital I.C.U.

I’ve been in a tremendous amount of hospitals over the course of a distinguished career, and this is the first that has smelt of Vicks. I don't think that’s normal. Hospitals have a list of approved smells and it runs, in order; bleach; urine; the tinny reek of blood; sweat; faeces; the earthy musk of fear. They’re more unpleasant odours than Vicks, objectively, but they’re fitting. A place for every smell and every smell in its place. Vicks is inappropriate. Facetious, even, because it creates the impression that here, in this intensive care unit, all they have to treat the patients with are tubs and tubs of Vicks.

‘Get more Vicks on him!’ they cry as a patient flat-lines.

‘Quick, Nurse! This woman’s body is rejecting her new heart, get a line of Vaporub into her, stat!'

Mr Ernest Lassiter, supine in his plastic-fenced bed and stinking, like everything else, of camphor, is long past the smelling stage. His organs are failing and no-one’s worked out why. It’s agonising, but the sooner they establish nothing can be done, the sooner he can be moved, pumped full of diamorphine, and guided out.

I want to be there when that happens. He’s got at least an hour though, so there’s no point in me hanging about, clearing my airways. I’ve got rounds to make.

Strawberry Creams by Victoria Finan

Strawberry Creams MP3

Read by Margaret Ashley

It’s a cold one tonight. Funny, isn’t it? The most sweltering of summers can lead to such chilly autumns. My Bill used to always say that if we’d a really hot June in Yorkshire, he’d make sure we were booked in for a week in Majorca or Lanzarote in October. He never took us though. Bridlington, more like, to a caravan up on Thornwick Bay. Once, to the Grand on Scarborough sea-front. That was the month before all the guests ended up with dicky tummies, and they had to shut it down for a week. Harry Gration, that nice man from BBC Look North, came and did a report outside the hotel. We watched it on the telly. We had fish and chips that night from Drake’s. Batter weren’t brilliant.