Stories From the Edge of the Precipice

She was still trembling.  The rasping inscrutable voice still hung in the air ; rest would be elusive, her breathing too fast for comfort.The silence almost choked her : its implications of further torment were the stuff of nightmares. She wished to be able to forget, if only for a moment, and vanish into a vortex of calm and nothingness. When someone spends a long time in isolation with only a few stimuli to assuage their  thirst for entertainment even the faintest of noises can become noticeable to such an extent that it turns into a persistent obsession.  She couldn't make out exactly where it came from, but it didn't matter anymore.  The only sure thing about it was that it never stopped, not even when she slept. Her eyes could not fully open. Not until the swelling went down. Outside it was dark already. The dim street lamps shed a very particular kind of light into the room,  filtered as they were by  the muddy crumpled curtains behind her. The...

Ok... this is not a story for the faint hearted. If you are easily offended or you are my mother, please stop here. Not suitable for minors... (please note: all content is subject to copyright) Susan is sleeping in her flat. It´s late morning but she likes sleeping the morning off. Afternoons seem so much gentler on the soul. More than anything else she hates it when something interrupts her sleep, especially when it´s the phone, so when Mr Shapiro calls her once again to ask her whether her flatmate has come back she is feeling quite grumpy. Penelope hasn´t been at home for a few weeks now, and she hasn´t been paying the rent, which means that now she needs to move out: something she rather not think about. With a groan she picks up the phone. - Good morning Mr Shapiro. No. I still don´t know where she is.. Yes. I do realise that. Like I said I´ll be out of here by the weekend... When the call has ended she cannot possibly go back to sleep. She beats the pillow down but it´s mor...

To answer Fi's comment on "The Path": yeah, the Path is the second chapter of a collection of stories that are connected together. The first chapter is 'Leaving". The idea is that you can either read each story on its own or you can start at the beginning middle or end and although each chapter makes sense alone it also is connected loosely with the other stories but no explanations are given as to how you go from one to the other, as that's up to the reader to imagine.

It was a calm, empty morning. She’d woken up at six o clock just before anyone else. Everything had been silent. From the windowless room where she slept, she’d walked right through the kitchen. This morning, like every other morning, she’d walked up to the window hoping to catch a glimpse of the sun on the dirty brown bricks of the internal courtyard. Usually, she’d see an overcast day, the grey flat clouds making the morning look almost indistinguishable from a late afternoon. But today something had been different.  During the night snow had fallen onto the city, smooth and gentle, and had covered the courtyard with a beautiful mantle of white to mark the first day of the New Year. She’d been surprised to see it: snow made everything look a bit more beautiful; it covered what was imperfect and it made it pure. In the few months she’d been here she hadn’t seen anything but rain. And now this. She’d been staring at the window for a while when it had occurred to her to go fo...