A man sits on a bench by a duck pond, waiting for his ankle monitor to be removed.
A girl tries to fly a kite in a supermarket car park.
A boy searches Kampala for a missing rabbit as a country quietly closes around him.

These are stories about people doing the correct thing, carefully, and discovering that correctness offers no protection at all.

Orange Juice in the Duck Pond is a collection of quietly charged short fiction about rules, systems, and the moments when they fail. About people who follow procedures, count minutes, observe boundaries - and still find themselves undone by weather, bureaucracy, history, or a single careless sentence typed too quickly.

Set in recognisable, ordinary worlds - council parks, school playgrounds, city streets, abandoned railway stations - these stories unfold with patience and precision, allowing meaning to accumulate rather than announce itself. They are attentive to the small details that matter: the weight of an object on the body, the angle of the wind, the distance between two paving stones, the exact number of minutes remaining.

Some of the stories are contemporary. Some are historical. All of them are interested in what happens when systems collide with love, when obedience meets conscience, and when doing everything "right" still isn't enough.

This collection includes extended versions of stories first written in response to creative prompts, preserving the full emotional terrain the characters demanded - the pauses, the margins, the consequences that linger after the moment has passed.

These are not stories about heroes.
They are stories about people trying to be decent inside structures that don't care whether they are or not.

If you're drawn to fiction that trusts the reader, resists spectacle, and stays with you long after the final sentence, this book is for you.