Author: Lauren Thomas

“Open the box.” “I can’t. It hasn’t got my name on it. That’s illegal.” “To be fair, it hasn’t got anyone’s name on it.” They continued to stare at it. It looked so out of place tucked into the long grass, its bright red ribbon an attractive warning. “But the tag literally says ‘don’t open…

“Do birds cry?” She loved these conversations with her daughter. When she was pregnant she had researched why the sky was blue and why grass was green. But she continued to be wholly unprepared for the depth of her young questions. “I”m not sure sweetpea. What do you think?” “I think they cry with their…

She watched them all drop. One by one they fell like chess pieces. First the man with the ego and the moustache. He succumbed first, his face a grimacing death mask. Then it was the petite lady who couldn’t make eye contact. She went as quietly as she existed. She couldn’t remember the order of…

I’d lived with them for years, but now my time had come. We met on their wedding day, when they welcomed me into their home with delighted faces and naive smiles. I was by their side when they made their daughter’s first birthday cake. They ate most of it themselves, her small piece mashed into…

He didn’t know when he began to doubt gravity. Maybe it was the time his cat leapt on to the bed and hovered in the air a fraction too long. Maybe it was because his glass seemed to fill too slowly, the drink from his can taking on a rebellious quality. Maybe it was the…

She had never seen the ocean, and yet it was all she could think about. She painted canvas after canvas of its great unknowable depths, of its curving horizons, of its impossible shades of blue. They stacked up against her wall like nagging doubts. She based her work on photographs. Of the stories told to…

She looked at her son on the couch, only recently a teenager, and frowned at how disinterested in the real world he seemed to have become. “What are you going to do today?” “Nothing. It’s raining.” She thought back to those previous summers that could have been a lifetime ago. When the all too common…

She saved countless social media videos of recipes she would never make. Sometimes she bought ingredients only for them to languish in her cupboards behind jars of pesto. But today she remembered her mother’s advice when problem solving. “Start small.” Selecting the jar of cornichons she blew dust from the lid. Popping a bagel just…

They hid behind the hedge and watched the porch across the street. The click clack of the needles competed with the birdsong. “I heard she’s been knitting it for twenty years.” “Pfft. Who would need a scarf that long?” Click clack. “I heard she has a son who’s a giant. He lives in the woods.”…

The world had become obsessed with finding happiness in the everyday, and it was becoming humankind’s undoing. Drink cans cracked open would elicit hysterical laughter, the condensation on the cans sending people into raptures. The recycling plants were overwhelmed, and teeth were slowly rotting. The lacing of a shoe would take hours, children awestruck at…