Liars' League

No one can hope like Precious by Magnus Nelson

Dec 10 No-one Can Hope Like Precious

Read by Claire Louise Amias

Precious won the talent contest on a mini-break. It was a last minute thing; Ma was taking a bunch of kids from the children’s ward to Weston-Super-Mare, only one of the boys was too sick to travel. Precious took his place. Half-price.

She sang Tomorrow from Annie, and she meant every word of it. But the kids from the hospital said she hadn’t won it fair and square; the judges must have thought she was one of the ill children, taken pity on her. And what did that say about Precious, them thinking she was sick, when she wasn’t even special?

‘Ignore them’, Ma had said. ‘You’ve got star quality. In buckets’.

Day Trip by Bill Adelson

Dec 10 Day Trip

Read by Lin Sagovsky

Elizabeth and her son Jason are standing in the atrium of the Museum of Design on Columbus Circle, bewildered.  They took the train into Grand Central that morning just to see the exhibition of Danish Modern children’s toys.  Elizabeth thinks for a moment of her Saab station wagon sitting where she left it at the Mamaroneck station and wishes she could walk outside right now and get into it.  But then, what’s the rush?

Bang! by Adrian Brown

Dec 10 Bang

Read by Alex Mann

Smith sat and stared at the computer screen. He had one more cracker joke left to write before he could leave for the evening and today was the final deadline.

He’d never understood the point of crackers. Never even pulled one, well, not since he was a child, and even then he hadn’t liked the noise, or was it the anticipation of the noise?

‘One quick pull and a bang and it's all over in a flash, just like sex with the wife,’ as Alan the security guard at Chapman’s Gifts Ltd always said to Smith at every single Christmas party.

Lavender Bunny and the Ninth Circle by Quintin Forrest

Dec 10 LB and Ninth Circle

Read by Will Goodhand

It was the night before Christmas, and I was drinking alone, in front of the television. On the menu  for the evening were a selection of wines, a bag of heinous chemicals and Nigella Lawson's Festive Feasts.  

This isn't quite as sad as it sounds. I had thought, earlier, about maybe going for a beer, in one of the fash media bars up the road in Shoreditch, but for one thing, the weather outside truly was frightful, so much so that Ladbrokes had stopped taking bets on a white Christmas days earlier, in the face of conditions that had apparently sent the South East's transport network, never the most robust of systems, screaming, finally, over the edge, and for another, if I had gone out, there was always the chance that I might have been recognised. Or, maybe more to the point, not recognised.

So the telly it was. The telly, and a toast to absent friends.

Kalachakra by Amber Dorko Stopper

Dec 10 Kalachakra

Read by Ben Farrow

The monk begins work on the mandala on a Tuesday morning. A dais has been erected in the lobby of the YMCA, and a short wooden bench placed before it. The monk, with tea-colored skin and a blunt, eraser-shaped nose spattered with freckles, leans on his forearms, with protractor and t-square. On the blue surface of the dais he etches white lines and curves, making a blueprint, an understructure. The posts that rise from the dais are scaled with brocade, like a crowded sale rack of flamboyant neckties. The monk’s sneakers are Reebok. A man in a sweatsuit, and with a white beard, sits in a hard backed wooden chair against a wall, and fingers a set of wooden prayer beads.