Bio: Vincent Wood is a Creative Writing graduate from the University of Greenwich, London. He’s had several short stories published both online and in print by various magazines. As well as winning a special commendation from First Writer Magazine’s Eighth International Short Story competition Vincent placed in the top three for Askance publishing’s 2018 flash fiction prize and was shortlisted for their 2012 short story competition and Aesthetica Magazine’s Creative Writing Award 2014.
Heroin(e)It was beautifully sweet, painful, fucked-up love. I knew it was love because I hadn’t fucked her yet, which is what I did to everyone I didn’t fucking like. If I hated you, I fucked you, because I hated myself. I tried to fuck with her head to compensate for the lack of fucking fucking, but she turned that right round on me.
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Easy Beasts“Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need” so proclaimed the small, grubby whiteboard hung from the wall. Tim knew little about Voltaire bar that he was responsible for the quote scrawled on the staffroom whiteboard in a rather lacklustre attempt to motivate the workforce. That and he very much doubted that he’d ever worked in retail.
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Coffee CultureHe picked me up in the van, that damn van.
“You wanna’ get a coffee?” “Yeah, I could go for a coffee.” “But do you want a coffee?” “What does it matter if I want a coffee or not?” “Because if you don’t want coffee we won’t get coffee.” |
The Writer and The Dancer
It was one of those houses that, if in Islington, would fetch a fair bit from the middle-classes, who would climb over each other to get their hands on something with such ‘character’. Being in the back end of Lewisham, however, meant the house had become a dive, let out to students and other scroungers who could barely scrape together enough pennies between twelve of them to rent the six rooms, but always had money for parties like this.
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Human of the Year
So the Human of the Year shortlist was announced and you get really excited because you think you’re in with a shot this time round. You look them up in a hurry and you don’t seem to be on there. There must have been some stiff competition this year, you think, but something doesn’t seem quite right.
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French On the Train
The French were on the train. Two beautiful, young French people speaking with their silver gilded tongues in my grubby, over packed carriage. They were so beautifully out of place, what the fuck were they doing there?
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The Tea Shop On Top of The World
It is a rather strange feeling to wish you are lost, to hope upon hope that the place you were struggling and striving to reach is not where you now stand, but it was exactly this desire that eddied around Georgette, mixed into the freezing air now nipping at her body like an unrelenting beast trying to peel the very nerves from her.
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Burning Bridges
A victim’s smile never lies and boy could that girl smile.
I drove up to Fairview Manor sometime after 2am. She’d been traveling again and I wanted to talk about her year. The smell of winter crosses the threshold and it’s the first thing we talk about in contrast to where she’s been. She says she’s tanned but I can’t tell so she flashes me her hip so I can see the different shades of skin. |
Revolutions
Imagine, for a moment you are happy. Truly happy. Not just the feeling of contentment some get from knowing everything is in order but an all-encompassing wave of euphoria that is often far too fleeting. Of course, no one is truly happy all of the time but it is these flashes, these rare punctures of the norm, that we must seek out and stitch together in order to make life worth living.
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GeorgeHe’s on TV again. You’re perpetually stuck in the silence that punctuates conversation and he’s on TV again. The sound is off but everybody in the bar is staring up at him, the hometown boy done good. Everyone seems to love the fact he’s made it, as though it covers themselves in glory through osmosis but it just hammers home how little anything happens here.
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Caffeine DreamsIf broken hearts make it rain, imagine all the lost loves in London. A city of hollow chests that have forgotten how strong they can be. Un-kept promises splatter the train window as he stares out at the lonely masses. He knows the city is a wilful vampire sucking souls and hope and lifeblood but he ignores it because he is occupied and he is occupied so that he can ignore it.
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Richmond ParkIt’s that sort of perfect cold; bitter cold that sits in your bones and gnaws away at the calcium in them, that causes them to sing when you try to dissolve it in bathtubs of hot water and even then that may not be enough.
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100 Days of March
Follow link and scroll down to the second story on the page. March went on for 100 days, morning after morning trickling into one another in a syrupy haze. It took half the year, but we’re now in April and everything is exactly the same.
Apron Review Issue 3 Featuring my Short Story 'Autopsy Report' which on be found on page 42/43.
https://issuu.com/talesmagazine/docs/tales_of_the_empowered