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Weekly 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 s...
Weekly 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. M...
Weekly 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 M...
Weekly 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 ...
Shortlisted for Weekly 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...
Weekly Contest #323
‘Now I don’t mind having a chat, but you have to keep giving it that!’ Chas and Dave, Rabbit (1980) The Problem Caitlin’s broad arse was swaying in front of the stove. Geordie watched it in a state of detached mesmerism. The steady expansion of girth merely reminded him how much he loved her, like having a favourite cake and finding that it had doubled in size. He was in the middle of telling her about that night’s match; about how the new Austrian manager called everything 'sexy.' He told her about their placement in the tables and what th...
Weekly Contest #322
I once knew a woman. A woman I thought I liked. I still know that woman, but I don’t like her anymore. Thinking you like someone is a game of exigencies, particularly when they live next door. You liked them because at a particular time in your life they seemed to cut the mustard. They seemed to appeal to whatever was clamorous in your nature, like knowing you were essentially a deadbeat but this one particular person might advance you to an upbeat. That’s not clear, is it? I could try this again, but I’m not Ernest Hemingway. I am not prepa...
Weekly Contest #321
Bosie checked the appointment diary and noted that he was expecting a short consultation with a Mrs Pauline Harbour. He was rearranging his fuscia Holland Cooper tie when there came a peremptory rap on the door. Mrs Harbour, it would seem, had arrived at the wharf on time and was clearly keen to offload her cargo as quickly as possible. ‘Dr Falcon?’ she enquired, as if he could be any other. ‘That is me,’ he said, waving a manicured hand at the commodious faux leather chair set before him. ‘Don’t you have a receptionist?’ ‘Indeed, but she’s ...
Weekly Contest #320
CW: Contains references to psychological abuse, cannibalism and implied domestic violence. Adalfuns had been taking the children into the forest with him of late. Never mind the lofty dangers of his occupation, or the aurochs and the wild boar. He told her the children would be safe with him. He knew exactly where they must stand when he felled a tree so they would not be crushed by the weight of them. He told her that animals were dumb and easily scared away by the thunder of a man’s lungs. He told her that it was good for Gransel to learn...
Weekly Contest #319
Caliban is not so readily evoked because of his low, feral nature, or to his pretensions as a would-be rapist. Characters such as these are common enough, a major motif without whom literature would barely exist. A part of the fabric, without which the tartan would have no plaid. No. Caliban is brought to mind so readily because he was ugly, and it is this singular deviation from physical form that so ensures his longevity. But was he a monster? Because if Caliban was a monster, then I, by definition, am the greatest monster of them all. If...
Weekly Contest #318
My desk is positioned across a bay window which looks out on the street. The segment left by the square and the curve will be full of dead flies, powdered moths and shredded dust, because I haven’t pulled it out in a while. I could hire a cleaner, but I have never enjoyed the idea of a woman on her knees before me. I shall live with the dust I cannot see. After all, beyond that which blows in through the open windows, the most of it is all mine. I was a published author before I lost my right leg to vascular degeneration. It irritates me th...
Weekly Contest #317
She was several minutes late for her appointment with Bram Dallaglio, and the reason for it was stupid. It was raining, or at least mizzling. The climate rarely produced a satisfying downpour, but preferred to wet the little people with light and persistent moisture, like being smothered by a wet towel. Her hair, straightened that morning, was prone to frizz, and she was vain enough to know that Mr Dallaglio was quite uniquely handsome. She saw him immediately, sitting in a booth with a pint of Guinness, sporting a suit and tie. If he appea...
Weekly Contest #316
We all wear a mask. You want to know who doesn’t? Every person of note, the saints and the sinners. That’s who - and that’s all. The rest of us feel the constriction of our disguise, but would rather die than take it off. Paula was a costume designer, a woman in network demand during her purple years. You have to have a feel for humanity, past and present, to set the tone of a piece; to live and breath it. You have to know what a fishwife would have worn in the soot of the 1880s, and what a middle-class mumsey wears now. You’ve got to feel ...
Weekly Contest #314
In the early ‘50s I went for a walk with my mother. It was heatwave hot, and she wore a pastel blue tea dress. We lived in Vauxhall, and when we took that walk, and for many decades afterwards, the capital was hollowed out by the blitzkrieg. It’s fair to say the Germans made a mess. I remember that her hands were sweaty, and all those cockney sparrows scavenging in the rubble, sweating in their unseasonal winter rags, reminded me what a mummy’s boy I was. I remember trying to slip out of her grasp, but in the end, she just let me go. We we...
Weekly Contest #313
The curtains were drawn against the mid-June light. The heat it brought to this London afternoon was uncomfortable, within and without. A woman in a nursing uniform sat near the window, knitting a baby’s layette and marking the rows on a cylindrical counter at the end of her needle. The other woman, on the other side of the bed which divided them, was reading a newspaper and tutting at its content. ‘I swear there’s going to be another war,’ she said to the nurse opposite. ‘And then there’s our erstwhile king living abroad with his American...
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