America

‘America’ was first published in The Interpreter’s House 26 (2004), and now appears in Reasoning: Twenty Stories.

Gwilym Lloyd stepped out of the house in Fforest a little after six in the morning. There was dew on the ground, a fox was barking, and another search party were looking at maps in the lights of a police Land Rover. Gwilym put his coat in the car and crossed the road. On the fringes of the group he approached the hotel manager, and touched him on the shoulder.

‘What’s the news?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ said Pennant Hughes, ‘we’re waiting for the parents. I hear they’ve got dogs further up.’

A man in a headlamp glanced their way. His light revealed Hughes’s weariness, but his own face stayed in shadow.

‘I can’t come today,’ said Gwilym. ‘I’m collecting my daughter from Heathrow.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Hughes; ‘we’re looking for a corpse. I’m afraid she won’t be seen alive again.’

Read on

Books by Rob Mimpriss

Pugnacious Little Trolls

‘freely and fiercely inventive short stories… supercharged with ideas.’

Jon Gower, Nation Cymru

Prayer at the End: Twenty-Three Stories

‘heaving with loss, regret and familial bonds.’

Annexe Magazine

For His Warriors: Thirty Stories

‘sketched with a depth and sureness of touch which makes them memorable and haunting.’

Caroline Clark, gwales.com

Reasoning: Twenty Stories

‘dark, complex, pensively eloquent’

Sophie Baggott, New Welsh Review

The Sleeping Bard: Three Nightmare Visions of the World, of Death, and of Hell

Translated by T. Gwynn Jones, with an introduction by Rob Mimpriss.

A Book of Three Birds

‘Lucid, skilful, and above all, of enormous timely significance.’

Jim Perrin

Dangerous Asylums

‘In this exemplary collaboration between medical science and imagination, lives preserved in official records, in the language and diagnoses of their times, are restored not just to light, but to humanity and equality. This anthology is a resurrection.’

Philip Gross