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Submitted to Contest #341
In the New Forest there is a rare kind of crossroads, the kind you usually see in the prairies and deltas of the US. When they laid down the asphalt in the early twentieth century they could not have predicted the speed of modern vehicles. In fact, the crossroads simply followed the path of ancient, well-trodden cart tracks. There are no lights at these crosswords because the New Forest is a National Park and the locals get sensitive about light pollution. The council have been trying to create a dog-leg on the approaches to the main road, b...
Submitted to Contest #340
Claris? Clarissa? Claire?The last time I saw Fereshteh was distressing. Aaron had just returned home, crumpled, too thin and absurdly handsome. Within minutes he was racing down the stairs again, clutching a leather box in his right hand and rubbing his cheeks in a gesture of distress. I was afraid he might fall, and moved, (too quickly?) in front of him, offering to drive, waving the car keys to prove my bona fides, but after the briefest, (startled) glance towards me, he muttered something about a taxi and disappeared from view.I wondered ...
Submitted to Contest #339
Robert stands at the sink in the kitchen above the pub. His view takes in a bus stop where a woman nervously smokes, picking bits of loose tobacco from her teeth. The bins at the side of the Indonesian restaurant are overflowing. Cars crawl along, stopping, starting, whenever a pedestrian wants to cross the road, which is often. The Army Navy Surplus Store is opening its shutters three doors down from the restaurant. On the river, a ferry boat takes passengers to the other side. It is cheap and worth it. The bridge is a mile downstream.It be...
Submitted to Contest #338
Men write journals for posterity. For this reason it must be assumed that not a single word is true.Women write only what is true, but forgo the posterity. The blank page is our confessional, the detail known only to ourselves. Every woman who keeps a journal fears its discovery. Every woman destroys their journal when death feels imminent - unless, of course, she confined herself to decorative sketching and whimsical observation, in which case posterity might yet be its purpose.Every woman who keeps a journal fears sudden death the most, no...
Submitted to Contest #337
The fumigator rapped on the black vicarage door using the lion’s head knocker, a door which Reverend Lefroy’s wife had called ‘too traditionalist.’ It should be changed, she argued, to something more modern. He remembered her saying it and thinking of falling. In his mind he imagined a hole opening up to swallow him, to consign him to depths unimagined, where the roots recoiled from him and allowed him to just plummet, without hope, to the centre of the earth.His mother had once told him that the centre of the earth was where all the odd soc...
Submitted to Contest #334
Once upon a time there was a young woman, all of eighteen years, who was trapped in a multi-million town house in Chelsea.Isn’t this how all fairy tales begin? The home may be grand or humble, and the girl may be a princess or a pauper, but it is imperative that the girl is good and the girl is beautiful - and that is the beginning and end of all things.She was not, of course, a princess. Her father was a theatre director and her mother a high court judge. They moved in air-kissing circles of egregious insincerity. She was their only child. ...
Submitted to Contest #333
Terence Bay, Nova ScotiaJune 1873 The Reverend William Ancient returned from a job of ministry to find James where he had left him, in the vicarage kitchen staring at a bare wall on which the only adornment was a crude cross. The bowl of chowder, untouched, sent his stomach growling. The aptly named Mrs Isabel Cook would be rightly disappointed if she knew just how little James ate. He was getting thinner while the Reverend was undoubtedly getting fatter by eating all that surplus.The glass though, the glass by the side of the smoked cod cho...
Submitted to Contest #332
The summer of '76 did it for me, back when everyone was still imperfectly alive. My father, an infrequent visitor, chose that year of all years to convert the loft into a living space. The image of him lying prone, slick with sweat while unravelling a bale of fibreglass for the lower rafters is sharper than other memories I have of him.It was also the year I went on a class trip to the Welsh borders. It was the last act of our primary school days before we had to grow up in September. Some of my friends fainted on a walk we took on the secon...
Submitted to Contest #331
CW: contains allusions to child abuse and death. Maris is a beautiful woman if you like them ice cold. Her blonde hair is styled in an immaculate chignon and she has such a little waist. Waspish, one might say. Tonight she is at a party hosted by a neighbour, tinkling and twinkling with her dry martini in one hand and a Sobranie cigarette in the other. But, despite her supremacy amongst the shackled wives, she is bored. There are no conquests to be made in this vanilla landscape. Who knew that plain women could be so Valkyrie-like in the pr...
Submitted to Contest #330
What a wonderland! What a heart’s desire! Beyond the wooden doors it was fearfully cold and yet it was not. It was bracing and wonderful and still and everything, just everything that is not hot, and fetid and grasping and hopeless.She whisked on her cloak, dyed red with summer berries, while Nicholas straddled the stove and cooked an enormous fish, simmering in tundra grasses and berries. There are chickens and livestock here, there are potatoes which grow in special cloches, and cows which produce milk and butter and cream. In this barren ...
Submitted to Contest #329
CW: Mental health, Substance abuse Jez Turner saw a woman stumbling along the moor’s edge, just as it breached the road. She was limping heavily on both feet, it seemed, and was poorly dressed for the weather conditions. It had turned full dark an hour before and there were no city lights in this part of the world. The stars, occluded by scudding clouds, were brilliant when they did appear, yet they offered no guidance. She had no torch, and the lights from his vehicle made her cringe as he passed.And he did pass, when once he would have sto...
Submitted to Contest #328
In 1888, when Jack the Ripper was sharpening his blades and the Queen was mourning her Scottish gilly and making old eyes at Abdul Karim, a young couple moved into the street. It was newly built, and yet even in its infancy the red bricks were coated in the soot of empire, and such little grass as there was in the strip about the porch was not green but queerly grey.The wife was heavily pregnant when they arrived and Mrs Garfield noted to a neighbour that she was not a natural brood mare. ‘She does not have the hips for it,’ she confided.Mrs...
Submitted to Contest #326
Aunty Maureen bought Maddie a diary for her fifteenth Christmas. It felt like a thoughtless gift for a digital creature unused to paper and pen.In Year 10 she had been forced to read extracts of Anne Frank’s Diary. How could Maddie, a foolish child, begin to understand the mind of a less foolish child? The teacher said that keeping a diary was good for you, and Maddie had replied that it did not appear to have done Anne Frank much good in the long run. That didn’t go down so well. Much of what Maddie said never did. Maybe that’s why Aunty Mo...
Submitted to Contest #325
Pet wheels the trolley. It’s what she does. It’s not everything she does, but the patients follow a Pavlovian instinct to open their mouths and swallow their pills when Pet comes rattling through.She is thirty but she looks fifty. When she is fifty, she will carry on looking fifty until she dies. Some people are just like that. Born to middle-age.Pet is devoted to religion, but there is no evidence that religion is devoted to her. There is no room in her head for allegory, and so she sucks up the contradictions through a single straw. She do...
Shortlisted for Contest #324 ⭐️
An old man, a young woman and a helmsman pulled up at the boat ramp, slick with East River slime. The short voyage had been a little rocky, this not really being a river but a saltwater estuary of conflicting tides.A crow’s mile from Manhattan, the ghost island was sedately fragmenting, brick-by-brick, frame-by-frame, beneath a kudzo canopy. They say it is now a bird sanctuary, a plumaged excuse for Parks and Recreation to sit on their backsides for rolling decades debating what to do with it. Few people were allowed there, but the old man w...
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