Spilling Ink Review is proud to announce the winning and shortlisted entries for the
June 2010 Microfiction Competition
First Prize receives £100. Second Prize receives £50.
All of the following entries will be included in our annual print anthology and will receive a free copy.
Special thanks to
Unbound Press
For graciously serving as Guest Judges!
In the name of fairness, all entries judged by Unbound Press were presented anonymously.
1st Place
Robert Peett
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
2nd Place
Kathrine Sowerby
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Shortlisted
Carly Pluckrose
Helen McClory
Charlie Taylor
Brindley Hallam Dennis
Dorothy Fryd
Christina Brooks
Rosie Adams
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
1st Place
A Child in Paris
Robert Peett
Near Chateau Rouge where gendarmes eddy round long vans, caressing guns like teenagers stroking spots, I lived on the top floor of an old house in a post-colonial street. Black-clad concierges sat on wooden chairs, gossiping and watching Algerians saunter and smoke. One evening there was a knock at my door. A wide-eyed woman I didn’t recognise strained to see past me, saying, I heard a child crying!
There’s no child here, I told her.
I heard a child crying. I cannot bear to hear a child crying, is it here? she babbled, head dodging right and left, poking forward like a chicken’s.
No, I said, no child here.
She smiled, eyes trembling, neck taut. I cannot bear it. I am a woman. I cannot bear to hear a child in pain. Perhaps it was a man I heard crying? she asked slyly.
Perhaps a cat, I said.
Her long-nailed hand reached out but didn’t touch me. We shrugged and she turned away.
I watched her tangled hair as she disappeared downstairs then I returned to my bed by the window. I looked down and after a few moments she emerged and crossed the street, entering the house opposite. I sipped the harsh red wine left over from breakfast, and gazed to my left where the street vanished into a haze of bars and intersections; then to my right, looking past the market, up and over until I could glimpse Sacre-Coeur white and wavering in the heat. When I look straight ahead, across the street into the window opposite my own, she was standing there staring at me. Then she turned away.
Though I lived there three more months, though I looked for her in the street, the market, the window, I never saw her again.
2nd Place
Theft
Kathrine Sowerby
Light spilled onto the floor giving Roslyn time to memorise the positions of the slugs before the fridge door swung shut; a trick she’d learnt on her nightly trips to heat milk for the baby. Salt on the skirting boards didn’t work and too often she’d felt the squish of a bulbous body between her toes, so she stepped carefully across the room to the sink. As she filled a glass the breeze from the open window blew over her hand. All the windows downstairs were painted shut, always had been, but now pine needles dangled in disturbed cobwebs from the splintered frame. And her purse, left by the cooker to dole out dinner money in the morning, was gone.
Her boots were in the porch. She stepped into them and pulled the door shut behind her. Out of the garden she followed the hedge that bordered the house onto the path that led up to the school. She stopped to listen for sounds in the bushes. There was only the distant clanking of work on the railway tracks. She shivered, drew her cardigan round her chest and crossed her arms. Something bigger than a fox moved on the hill.
Roslyn’s breath grew heavier as she reached the top. Lights sparkled across the city. The fence round the school was high and the path overgrown but she could see, sitting on a low brick wall by the school’s entrance, a man rummaging in his lap. She watched him toss receipts, used train tickets and library cards to one side. Passport photos of her children. She took a step and heard a crack. The man looked round. He threw the purse in the bushes and ran. Roslyn lifted her boot. Shards of shell pierced the snail’s flesh, releasing its iridescent slime.
Shortlisted Entries
Sometimes Cary Grant Needs Defending
Carly Pluckrose
They say it’s the little things. Little things you can’t let go. The little habits and ticks that were once so cute but now frustrate and annoy. Little things that have grown too large to sweep under the carpet.
David likes to sing. Not in public (thank God) but when we’re watching TV. He can’t resist singing a line if a song title of lyric pops up on the news.
‘Experts claim the results are not unusual…’
And off he goes. ‘….it’s not unusual to be loved by anyone….’
Whilst I admit early on I may have encouraged such behaviour, three decades of marriage have dampened my appreciation somewhat, especially when he does it during the soaps.
‘John please,’ begs a terribly wooden actress, ‘don’t leave me this way.’
Cue David, ‘Don’t, leave me, this waaaay,’ he sings, forever out of tune.
I let it go. Seemed like I’d been letting things go for years – the clicking of his tongue during meals, his assessment of the Dirty Dozen as the greatest movie ever, drunken dancing, his hatred of French cinema (and the French). But we all have our breaking point. Mine was Cary Grant.
I was watching An Affair To Remember when David began insulting dear Cary. Now he knew full well Cary was my all-time favourite, but must have thought I’d just sit there in silent agreement as usual. But something inside me snapped. I jumped, as swiftly as my arthritis would allow, to my feet and screamed. The look on David’s face was comical; he seemed genuinely scared. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the staple gun or said those things about his sister (she probably does know the names of at least two of her children’s fathers, if not their postcodes), but sometimes Cary Grant needs defending.
She Would Have Made a Fine Crusader’s Wife; Keeping Just Account, Breaking the Necks of Hares, Their Poachers
Helen McClory
Aida lay on the mat in her tent sprawled against the body of her K.O.’d lover, her body separate now and struggling to cope. Not all the way starved of breath; wracked more with that anxious euphoria she’d experienced on getting stuck under a ledge of sea-rock, her snorkel a useless straw piping water in gulps. This heady taste, not salt, was of the latex air in deflating balloons. Everything slowly going back to humid and dim. She could feel Tick’s chest rising and falling evenly under her soft belly.
Side effect, she thought. Gleeful over-exertion under a mad-dog sun. Leading to peach-tongued, orgasmic dehydration, and reeling while horizontal. She wouldn’t be drawn into that again. It felt like gusto, a romantic bilge her mother had harped on, dangling her brush over another canvas of watery cascades. L’esprit de coeur! Byron! Sublime! Turner! I think a little wood-sprite tree, don’t you, petal? Before the inevitable nuzzling in of one of her ever-dreary rainbows. Aida looked up terms, and scoffed. L’esprit de corps, wasn’t that what she had meant? Morale, stupid mother. Belief in one’s own goals, concrete steps.
Fucking the new neighbour and then a second time in the same way outdoors in the brush was not in any way gusto, al fresco. That was meals, usually tomato salad. It just happened, and was biological; a good and justifiable sequence of responses. The aftermath was troublesome, still. Vision of a river and the odd little Freudian – not Tick, a sudden stranger – peering over her as she writhed. Aida held tight her packet of sanity and unsaid vows, and had great reserves of missionary purposefulness. The teeniest psychic vulnerability – air deprivation or not – must be dealt with. However, now, scuttle metaphors, banish mothers, and take up a clean and practical snooze.
Please Sir!
Charlie Taylor
Jerry ‘Juicy’ Jewison looked forward to history lessons. They were on a par with bunking off to town every Wednesday afternoon, thumping Kenny Tunstall in the kidneys, shoplifting from Woolies on the way home, and masturbation contests in the school’s old air raid shelters.
Juicy finished cutting Brian Povey’s cap into four pieces and deposited the tattered remains on the table standing at the front of the rows of old wooden desks, all set on iron frames, with inkwells no longer used in this just-post-war age of the Bic and the Biro.
“He’s coming!” hissed the lookout at the door.
Juicy and his pals began a slow, rhythmical banging of their desk lids, the pace increasing until the classroom door was flung open. An insolent silence greeted the tortured presence of Mr Stott, human stick insect, all billowing black gown, horn-rimmed spectacles, jerky movements and hysteria.
“Stop that damn noise at once!” he shrieked.
Juicy twanged a wooden ruler against the underside of his desk: boinnnnggggg! Mr Stott’s head twitched in his general direction. Rammy Ramsdale twanged a ruler on the other side of the room and Mr Stott’s head twitched the other way. Minger Morris twanged in turn from his desk by the window and as the head turned this way then that way, Ned Cartwright fired a paper pellet from a sturdy rubber band stretched between thumb and forefinger. It stung Old Stotty below the left ear. The class erupted.
It came as a surprise to Juicy to learn, after the trial, that Old Stotty had been blown up in a tank in the First World War. “That’s still no excuse for beating young Ned up,” said his dad after the trial. “The man deserved all he got.”
Juicy smiled and thought of Kenny Tunstall.
Don’t Tell Me the Story
Brindley Hallam Dennis
Martin sat in the café with a half full cafetiere of coffee in front of him, making it last. He knew they wouldn’t mind because the place was more than half empty and he was sitting in one of the window seats where he could be seen from the street.
It was to see the street that Martin had sat there. He was watching the people. It amazed him to see them walk. How many ways there were of doing it, this simple thing that he had learned before the age of two.
Some walked as if the paved square were a field of mud, pressing their heavy feet firmly down. Some walked as if on a deck, rolling slightly in an unseen swell. Some walked with delicacy, as if something carried above must not be spilled. Some walked with a wobble. Some walked with several wobbles. Some strode. Some scurried. Some advanced, heads turned away, as if they were blind. Some were blind. Some walked as if to avoid being seen. Some walked as if only to be seen.
For each walk, more so than for each person, Martin could imagine a frame of mind: resignation; determination; exultation; relaxation. He could devise stories for each walk: where it came from; where it was going.
The walks were stories in themselves, untold stories: stories you had to make up for yourself, from what you saw. Having said that, for all his imagination, they were false stories, and he knew that for each imagining there would be countless other possibilities, only one of which, at best, might be the true.
The counter staff watched him watching, each one imagining who it was that he was waiting for, and why.
We Have Come a Long Way From Where We Are
Dorothy Fryd
In Ffestiniog railway station waiting room, a man sits with his head in his hands. He is not wearing shoes. When Grace enters the waiting room, she looks at the man and wonders what has happened to him to make his hands tremble.
A train slowly passes them and the flashing light rouses the man and he raises his head. The train passengers look at the two strangers in the waiting room and feel glad to be inside an air conditioned carriage. Grace looks into the man’s eyes and watches his pupils slowly dilate. The man looks at Grace.
Grace knows that the man wants to talk. As Grace turns her shoulder to leave the room, the man speaks to her, saying something which she can’t quite determine.
Grace thinks about her father. He told her that a person can recall anything they hear within twenty seconds. She wonders if her father will now be entirely bald. She thinks about what she will do when she reaches him.
-I said, I found my wife in bed with another man.
Grace turns to face the man, giving him her full attention.
-Do you have any idea? He continues, unable to meet Grace’s eyes. Two hours ago, I held a gun to my wife’s head and nearly pulled the trigger.
Grace fingers the gun in her own pocket.
The man draws a figure of eight with his big toe. Grace looks at the figure of eight. She is hypnotised. She replays the image of the big toe and the figure of eight for thirty seconds. She is about to use her voice for the first time in six years. She clears her throat. She wonders if her voice will work.
-I’m sorry she says, her voice cracking and juddering and starting up.
The Stench of Strangers
Christina Brooks
At first it felt like any other Saturday morning as I returned home after perusing antiques in the Portabella road. As usual I parked my mini in the driveway and as I locked the car door, I looked up at my house as I had done a thousand times before, but this time something was different. The bedroom window was open and the curtains were flailing over the sill, flapping against the brickwork like fish tails smacking in wet sands. My heart began to quicken as I hurriedly made my way to the front door.
Stepping into the cool azure hallway, I moved from the reality of suburban London into a dream. The once familiar territory of my home was now unfamiliar, and as I slumped against the walls, my feet scrambling beneath me trying to find their strength, I knew that my life had changed. There was an indescribable stench of strangers hanging in the air, sweat mixed with drugs and the potent reek of urine. Precious items were dashed to the floor and lay like flotsam and jetsam on the shoreline after a violent storm. Upstairs my clothes spewed from their drawers like vomit from a seasick sailor and badly spelt graffiti adorned my bedroom walls. With my head spinning, I stumbled back downstairs to the kitchen, where the churn of destruction looked like the aftermath of a flood. The impact of this violence made me reel and I choked on the fluids of adrenaline that were flowing in my throat. My harbour of safety had been violated and wrecked beyond repair. For the teenagers who had done this, it must have been a ‘well good,’ mobile phone slap happy moment. But for me I wasn’t waving at this point, I was drowning.
Gills
Rosie Adams
Your mum has gills on her neck but it’s not a big deal. She doesn’t usually need to use them in the week and she wears colourful scarves outdoors so most people don’t know. But sometimes, on a Wednesday or Thursday if she’s doing the washing up, she might plunge her head into the sink all of a sudden and refuse to emerge, even when you yank so hard at her shirt collar that it rips off and you have stuff it down the back of the sofa incase she realises later and gives you a slap. On the weekends she stays in the bath all day. She doesn’t hear or feel anything when she’s under water. You can turn the tv up till the neighbours bang on the walls, run around with no clothes on, pull all the tape out of her cassettes- she won’t notice. But those things get boring. Mostly, on Saturdays, you sit on the toilet, watching her hair flutter around her shoulders, her breasts bobbing like buoys, hoping that by some miracle she’ll wake up early and take you to Laser Quest.
