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Weekly Contest #376
Henry glanced down at the menu – looking, not seeing. He gripped, too tightly, the thick embossed card and took nothing in. The words blurred before his eyes like tiny smoke trails. Miranda, by contrast, appeared inspired. She too was scanning the offerings, the odd ‘ooh’ and twitch of an exquisitely plucked brow indicating that she was greedily devouring the information, washing it down with delicate sips of chardonnay. Her pale fingers held the stem of her glass as if it were a precious flower, and the deep blood red of her fingernails di...
Weekly Contest #362
Hunger So, this is how I die. Hacked to pieces with a rusty chainsaw by a deranged loner with broken teeth in a broken house in the middle of Christ knows where, at night, a storm bellowing above the tin roof, cannibalised cars out front, my julienned body out back. Terrific. Death by cliché. Elizabeth turned the key again, pleaded with the hire car, “Come on!” – leaning on the syllable with all her might as if trying to shoulder the Toyota out of the ditch. And the hire car with the cheerful decal across the back that read ‘We Get You Movi...
Weekly Contest #335
What would you do if there were only 20 minutes until the end of the world ? Too little time to cook a pot roast or run a laundry cycle, but sufficient to ask forgiveness, make amends, get some answers. Then again, some might use it to watch porn. Or to chug back a bottle of single malt, in search of their own bespoke oblivion. Look, it’s up to them I guess. It’s their 20 minutes. As for me, I know my answer. I know because it is here, right in front of me. The world isn’t ending, but I am. And in the 20 minutes I have left, I have chosen to...
Weekly Contest #326
Ethel Pilkington was a disaster. No, that’s not fair. The potential for disaster clung to Ethel like cheap body spray. She was clumsy, forgetful and impractical. Six foot tall and lean as a Conservative public spending budget, she contained neither a superfluous ounce nor a milligram of common sense. Exceptionally well-read, she could tell you the difference between a trilobite and an isopod, explain the origins of Lebanese kofta (and of that country’s fiscal stew) and unpack the main tenets of Socratic thought. Yet she could take a full fou...
Weekly Contest #319
What if, by carrying on a deception for long enough, you assimilated it? So that it moved through your bloodstream, took up residence in your brain, colonised your cells, seeped into your very marrow and sinew. Changed you, chemically. There would be a kind of integrity to it, surely? Because if duplicity became in a sense a tool for survival, just as we are equipped with nails and teeth and body hair, then that which is false would have become that which is authentic and true. Amanda likes this notion, takes a self-congratulatory sip of her...
Weekly Contest #314
Sarah had been melting for some time. Months before the heatwave, and the policing of garden hoses, and the road surface warping and cracking like chocolate sponge left in the oven too long. Way before we felt summer’s hot, menacing breath and scurried indoors to the breeze of our fans and our clandestine showers. Long before people began dripping like candles just walking to the mail box. That girl was way ahead of us. She had begun her meltdown in August, when everyone else was scraping ice off their windscreens. By January, she was turnin...
Weekly Contest #305
The bridge was crowded. Not ideal, obviously. Didn’t want some do-gooder trying to stop me. The old bridge was a tourist attraction, hence the need to be here - for its symbolism. The cold grey statue that stood sentinel at the start of the curve, guarding this portal to the other side of the city, stared indifferently. Contemplating hurling yourself off? Knock yourself out. Thinking of machine-gunning down the entire crowd? Be my guest. Come to take a selfie? Cheesy, but okay I guess. I started to wonder how that would feel, to be made of s...
Weekly Contest #300
We journey along the coast, mountains poetically blue in the distance, hillsides brittle and brown up close. Everything parched, including me. Should have bought water at the airport. Forty-eight years old and still the basics of self-care elude me. The cab is air-conditioned, but that is temporary comfort – the heat is out there, waiting to mug us all. Four hours ago I was in London, rain loud on the roofs like distant applause. Now this alternative reality, where to shower is futile and underarms drip like rain-forest canopies. I lean back...
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