Brittle Sounds

Someone has a plan. He’s been thinking about it for a while. He has the numbers, the timeline, the sequence of steps from here to where he’s certain this is going. He isn’t asking what I think. He’s telling me where we’re headed. I’m listening. I’m also somewhere else. The other place has different numbers. A longer timeline. An assumption that doesn’t hold. He can tell I’m not as excited as he is...

Every Friday, I return to an earlier piece of writing in a series I call Flashback Fridays . Not reprints, but re-entries — the past offers a fragment, and I follow it to see what else it might hold. This week’s story began with a poem from 2021, No More Talk . That poem was about letting go of what couldn’t be, and turning toward what still might. Here I’ve stepped into the same theme from anothe...

This piece is an alternative version of my recent essay, What They Can’t Scrub Away . I came home from a month in the UK to find murals erased, rainbow crosswalks scrubbed under halogen light, and vaccine protections under attack—all dressed up as “freedom” for political theater. The original essay was measured; this one isn’t. It’s the result of simmering anger and frustration at a state that fee...

It began, as most small village incidents do, with the disappearance of something spectacularly minor: a biscuit tin. At precisely 10:07 on Tuesday morning, the vicar wheeled in the refreshments trolley—listing slightly, the way it had since the school jumble sale of ’09—for the Ladies’ Stitch-and-Grumble Society. There were two mismatched teapots, a stack of cups, four varieties of herbal infusio...

Most Fridays, this Flashback Friday series revisits something I wrote years ago. A memory, a draft, a story I left in a drawer too long. But this week, I’m breaking the pattern. Because last Saturday, I published Things You Don’t Talk About , a piece about a football pools win that my parents almost never talked about. And in the six days since, that story has stirred something in me—and in others...

He folded his old handkerchief twice and wedged it under the front leg of the chair. His dad used to do that—pub chairs, church pews, anywhere the balance was off. Not for comfort. Just to stop the noise. Only thirteen people had come. Four looked like family. The rest, former colleagues and pupils. The ones who showed up. The ones who still had something to prove, or bury. Two women sat near the...

The first companion piece followed Helen—full of longing, resolve, and the ache of quiet misrecognition. This one belongs to June. Where Helen offered presence, June offered something closer to insistence. Both believed they were helping. Neither was asked. Together, these two prequels sit behind She Stayed for Tea like silhouettes behind drawn curtains. Not to explain it—but to cast a longer shad...

Magda Beckos—Magda when she’s feeling fancy, Maggie B. when she wants to fly under the radar—hadn’t meant to uncover the Great Raspberry Scandal of Lower Tissington. She only went for the Victoria sponge. Technically, she wasn’t even a member of the Women’s Institute. Her application had been “misfiled” three times. Audrey Crenshaw, the Chairwoman, once muttered something about “aesthetic standard...

Sometimes, a piece you’ve written stays with you—not just because of what it captured, but because of what it still carries. This poem began as a reflection on the moment I first held my daughter. But yesterday, on her 40th birthday, I wanted to revisit it—not to rewrite the past, but to reframe it. To speak not only to the newborn I once cradled, but to the woman she’s become. The story is still...

He didn’t ask. Just wandered over as we slowed on Hepthorne Lane, slipping into a Top Gear-style review—handling, performance, ride—before finally arriving at the boot. “Boot on these is like a glove compartment with ambitions.” No one asked. That never stopped Hicksy. He moved like someone who’d skipped ahead in the manual and assumed the rest of us would catch up. It was the middle of the day, m...

Every Friday, I revisit an old story, essay, or poem. Sometimes the words hold. Sometimes they don’t. But what I return to isn’t the page—it’s the moment behind it. Like returning to an old dig—with sharper tools this time. Not to rewrite, but to listen more closely. To notice what I missed. What I wasn’t ready to feel. ‘I’m Desperate, Dan!’ first surfaced in 2013. I see it differently now. Becaus...

This is a story about trying to hold on to a self you’ve only just managed to build. About hair as armour, as ritual, as one small thing you can control when the rest keeps shifting. It’s about being young, being seen, and what it takes to stay seen. A good haircut can make you feel invincible. A bad one can undo you. Same as Last Time The trick was to hang your head over the end of the bed. Not h...

On a weekend when the U.S. Supreme Court offered yet another gift to autocracy—and the GOP pressed forward with their grotesquely named “Big Beautiful” bill—I found myself, as I often do, reaching for hope instead of rage. And I found it, unexpectedly, in Hungary. This New York Times article tells the story of everyday people—teachers, mothers, neighbors—marching through the heart of Budapest in q...

One-Post-Per-Day Rule (Temporarily) Suspended I try to keep it to one post a day. Rhythm matters. Boundaries matter. But so does democracy. When the Supreme Court drops a week’s worth of rulings that feel like constitutional Mad Libs—fewer rights, more smugness—I make exceptions. This isn’t just the end of a term. It’s a civic alarm bell wrapped in punchlines that burn. So here’s my second post of...

Dear Em, I know you never had children. I checked. Twice, actually. Which makes this all the more confusing. I uploaded my 23andMe profile to a site called MyTrueAncestry.com—mostly out of idle curiosity. The usual suspects showed up: a Viking or two from Iceland, a Bronze Age farmer from what’s now Prague, even Cheddar Man, skulking around Somerset in 7150 BC. And then, improbably, you—Emily Dick...

I came across this old-school meme on Facebook and couldn’t resist. You know the kind— pick your birth month, day, and the first letter of your name to generate a weird sentence. Mine? I killed + My best friend + To Kill Time Instead of sharing the sentence, I followed the feeling. The result? A short flash fiction piece:(Spoiler: there’s cereal, a peanut, and a fan that thinks too much.) Want to...

I was uneasy as I followed Katerina through the gate and down the overgrown path toward her apartment. She lived in one of the Victorian houses owned by the university, the kind that had been chopped into awkward units for single faculty. It felt like a place that held on to its ghosts longer than its tenants. Her unit was on the ground floor. "Three rooms in an L-shape," she’d said. I nodded, as...

If you’ve read Eligible, Not Suitable , you’ll know that by the end of date five, I wasn’t expecting much from date six—except maybe closure. But then K—let’s call her Katerina, though that wasn’t her real name (something to do with discretion and a fraught departure from the motherland)—Katerina asked me to take my birthday off. She promised a surprise. We were going to New York. Tickets to a sho...

The year was 2002, and the silence in my house no longer echoed—just hummed. My divorce had been finalized the day after 9/11. That fall, the world grieved—and I joined it, feeling everything and nothing all at once. We’d weathered a lot together—fertility issues, repeated relocations across the UK, my father’s long decline. Then came a transatlantic reboot with little support, as we tried to outr...

This narrated version of ‘Bridge Beyond’ was released to celebrate a milestone—200 subscribers. It’s my way of saying thank you. Not with performance, but with presence. The story itself is about the weight of absence, the pull of memory, and the quiet repairs we make—between people, across time, and within ourselves. It’s not polished. But it is honest. 🪶 If it speaks to something in you, feel f...

In yesterday’s Flashback Friday, I revisited a story I wrote four years ago—about a sledding mishap that ended with me breaking through the crust of a snow-covered lake of frozen chicken s**t. It was meant to be funny. And in many ways, it still is. But after I posted the new version, I found myself reflecting on how different it felt from the original. The first one was polished, practiced. It ke...

Before Holding On was a novel, it was a pattern: of gestures, silences, things people held onto because they didn’t know how to let go. The Ralph in Holding On —milkman, watcher, a man both there and fading—is a direct homage to the real Ralph from my childhood. He delivered milk by horse and cart, before his health gave out. Then his wife, Lily, took over the deliveries. After that, Ralph had jus...

I got to school early most days. My parents both worked retail, and Mum didn’t trust me not to leave the cooker on, or the door unlocked, or any one of the hundreds of things she’d worry about. So I waited in classrooms before anyone else arrived—quiet places where nothing happened, until it did. You learn early not to expect much. Especially from the people in charge. Same Bruises, Different Wall...

Not everything ends with a door closing. Sometimes it’s subtler: a line through a name, a drawer left unlocked, a ledger closed mid-page. This is the beginning of Iris’s quiet departure—not from place, but from record, from habit, from view. She’s not unraveling. She’s editing. This is Part One of a two-part story about withdrawal that isn’t absence, and presence that no longer asks to be seen. Th...

Some articles don’t demand a response. They plant something quieter. A resonance. A recognition. And later—sometimes days, sometimes longer—they surface again, not as argument or summary, but as poem. I read a piece about why many empaths choose solitude. It described the quiet violence of absorbing too much—of scanning rooms, softening tone, bracing for someone else’s storm. It spoke to what happ...