Anthony

His bags are packed, his hat set straight. He checks his watch. The train is late. Everything was planned, had been planned to the letter. Timetables checked, the parked car filled with precisely the amount of gas he needed so as to get him to his destination without wasting excess money on fuel. They would need what he could spare them.
It is precisely 4.43 am on a cold January morning. Snow drifted gently across the tracks, onto the abandoned platforms, settling on his shoulders, illuminated in the soft lamplight. Good. It would cover his tracks. Two minutes. Two minutes until the train.
He checks his pockets on more time, certain that he's left his chequebook, the majority of his bank cards, his pocketwatch. The picture of his wife and children is still in his breast pocket, and he pulls it out, to glance at it briefly. 'Molly, with Sam (7) and Elsie (5), Summer 1992'. They had taken a train from this very station down to Barnstaple, connected to the coast, and spent a day on the sand. Elsie had got sunburn on her nose, and Sam had caught a crab which he'd begged them to let him keep, but of course they said no. Sam got a dog for Christmas instead.
4.44am. In the distance, he can see the lights of the train, but it's a long straight track; he has a little time yet. He grips his suitcase handle tighter. One of his shoes has a slight scuff on the toe; he bends to swipe at it with his gloved thumb. Molly always polished his shoes when he was too tired to do it. Folded his tie over the back of the chair in their bedroom. Hung his ironed shirt ready. Molly was good. Better than him.
 The train is getting closer now, he can begin to feel the rustle of the wind it generates pull at his coat. Snow drifts, catching the light from the headlamps, seem to slow time down. For a split second, as the train eats up the ground between it and the platform edge, he sees them on the opposite platform. Molly in her light summer dress with bare legs and sandals, Sam and Elsie (perplexingly) in their bathing suits. A shaft of something like sunlight. It catches Molly's hair. She looks up, sees him.
The train has made it to the edge of the station now. It should be slowing down, to allow passengers to alight, to board. But it is a goods train, and does not stop at this station. At 4.45am, he is the only person around.
Molly smiles at him from across the platform, as he takes one step out towards her, into the path of the oncoming train.

(Conceived and written in less than ten minutes, using this picture via Lorrie's blog as a prompt)

The Lie Detector

Jessie S Scotland is a compulsive, accomplished and repetitive liar. 

Jessie S was born on the 15th October 1985. It was a Saturday (it's always a Saturday, that's the one consistent part) and her mother had been preparing for a quiet afternoon in while her father went to watch the football when Jessie decided that the time was now. 

Jessie would have had a twin sister too, but the twin sister took about ten breaths of air before giving up, leaving Jessie squalling and alone in the bassinet next to her exhausted mother and confused, scarf-wearing father, still with the foam of a post-match beer on his top lip, or his moustache, depending on the day. 

Jessie S lives in a terraced house on the outskirts of Manchester with her mother, her father and two brothers, one older and one younger and both somehow looking up to Jessie, even though they both towered over her. She is slight, like her mother and her father, but her big scary imposing brothers were built like Greek gods and were the perfect tool to threaten tormentors with. Jessie S's fictional monstrous brothers were the scourge of the town. Jessie S, safe in her fantasies, was never bothered. 

Jessie leaves to study Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, before realising, quite suddenly one morning in bed that she would go no-where and switches that same day to a degree in Psychology. This is the less improbable of Jessie's facts; students are so want to switch degrees all the time and everyone knows someone who had an epiphany one morning while hungover, torn between throwing up on the stranger still in the bed next to you and throwing the sheets off and shouting carpe diem, seize the day, boys. 

So Jessie S gets her degree in Psychology, finding it far less challenging than someone with three Arts A-Levels should, and upon graduating couldn't face the terraced house in Manchester with the brothers, the parents, and the floating little ghost of the sister. Instead, like every pilgrim in a graduate gown, Jessie S and her bags and her rickety bedframe go to London, to carve out a niche in the darkest corners of the pubs in N1. Jessie works part-time in a bar (she tells her parents), then gets a job as an editorial assistant, writing fractious copy for a trendy youth magazine (she tells her friends), while combining it with a part-funded post-graduate course.
Jessie lives alone in a studio flat overlooking the park. She gets up at 6.30 every morning and runs in the park and has a travelcard and a pension and a bag full of business cards and a keyring full of keys and a phone that is full of numbers, no names, so in the night when she wakes up scared or when she lies and stares at the ceiling she reaches for the phone and picks a number at random, Russian roulette-like, risks calling a family member, a friend, a shrink, a dealer, a lover, a confessor, to break up the silence of a life so populated with falseness. A key that opens the door to a huge room or a cupboard or that leads to another door, a window, an office or a safety deposit box where her true self is kept. 

Jessie S has told so many lies that the next one may well be the truth.