The shortlist is here!
The 10 shortlisted stories in the April Monthly Micro contest are now ready for voting. Congratulations to everybody who made the shortlist.
You can read and vote until 23.59 GMT on Monday 22nd April and the winners will be announced on the 23rd. The prompt was CURRENT and there were so many great stories. Good luck choosing between them!
A Girls’* Guide to Surviving a Rip-tide
Many girls inadvertently get caught in rip-tides as they enter the water where there is no obvious danger. Although, with hindsight, the red flags were there.
Rip-tides can quickly sweep you off your feet with sudden streams of love. Very quickly a girl can find herself out of her depth.
Rip-tides are difficult to spot but can be identified by debris floating on the sea’s surface; kids he doesn’t see, an intense fury towards his ex, a flood of failed relationships.
Rip-tides carry girls out beyond the breaking waves, past family and friends. Suddenly,
you’re far from the shore, just you and the rip-tide.
Initially, girls may try to swim against the rip-tide, but soon become exhausted, and realise it’s easier to comply with the current. Challenging a rip-tide can lead to drowning, but so can staying out at sea.
To survive a rip-tide, swim parallel to the beach, and please call for help. Please remember, no matter how strong the rip-tide is, girls are stronger. Many girls have freed themselves from a rip-tide and swum back to shore, where their sisters wait for them with towels, tea and empathy.
*can apply to boys too
An Oxford Professor’s Wife Makes a Pilgrimage to the Sistine Chapel a Week After her Best Friend’s Funeral
Liza stares up at God and sees the face of her husband. Henry is speaking at a conference this morning and has assumed she’ll stay at the hotel with the other wives. She’s been here before, with Alice, during that forever-bright, liberating summer spent Interrailing before they went to university. She remembers fixating on Adam’s extended fingers and feeling that at last, life was within reach. Then she met Henry. He was her first year tutor, and has been tutoring her ever since; to round her brummie vowels, to swap mini-skirts for tailored linen, to pass the port to the left. Which newspapers to read. How to be just interesting enough for his donnish friends.
Alice despised him.
An eddy in the babel-babbling stream of tourists makes her stumble. An american student (tom-cat lithe, looking like Michelangelo’s David) catches her and apologises. He smiles, asks if he can buy her coffee. She knows she will let him kiss her over her ristretto, and when he invites her back to his pensione, she will accept.
Eve is not in this painting. Her wilfulness will ruin the Creator’s paradise and she will
be punished for it.
Liza suspects Eve had no regrets.
A Timeless Grudge
Frank held onto grudges like a miser with money and he was rich with them. His latest was with the small electrical shop, Volts, hidden down the backstreets of town.
“I want a refund!” Frank dumped a shopping bag on the counter. Broken clogs, dials,
and bits of wires spilled out. “Cheap imported stuff! Started playing up after a couple
of decades.”
The young sales assistant peered into the bag.
“What is it?”
“What is it? You only sold it to me yesterday!” Frank snorted and slapped a receipt on the counter. “A bloody time machine that’s what it was supposed to be!”
The sales assistant’s Adams apple bobbed when he spoke.
“Like, as in an alarm clock?”
“Are you dumb?” Frank peered closely at the assistant. “You had a beard yesterday. It made you look much older.”
The sales assistant stammered. “I only started today.”
Frank's eyes widened.
“What year is this?”
“2024.”
“Blast!”
The bell above the shop door jingled as Frank stormed out with his bag. Two decades of grudges against poor workmanship, cheap parts, and ‘Volts’ electrical store stretched out before him, again.
Death Row. Rikers Prison. 1950.
“They’re gonna fry me tomorrow, Momma. No more stays. Two thousand volts. I heard your heart cooks, and your hair c’n catch fire.”
She can’t believe how calm he is, while her own heart has almost stopped.
“Even dead people still have birthdays, Momma. Will you remember mine?”
The place appals her: Cold stone walls, odours of unclean drains, barking sounds that could be dogs or other prisoners. The visits always crackling with the shame and guilt of their dirty deeds. Hers, his abandonment at birth for adoption. His, the meth-fuelled murder of an ex-girlfriend.
His lawyer had somehow tracked her down. A hard-earned forty-one years, and a bad-assed twenty-one years, drawn back together by common blood and circumstances.
For every visit she’s had her hair done specially, put on her best shoes and the floral dress she wears to church.
When she tries to touch his hands across the table, the guards bring the visit to an abrupt close.
She will decline the right to be a witness, but knows the family of the victim will be there to drink greedily of it.
As they take him away, he turns and says, “Your eyes can pop too.”
Mike Never Ever Listened to Marion Yet Somehow Felt it was Appropriate to Speak for Her
She’s in the attic, sitting in a burst armchair under a bare, lit bulb, waiting for Mike.
They used to socialise in the lounge until a neighbour chanced by and screamed, ‘Holy
Fucking Jesus!’. Now Mike climbs the retractable ladder each night to moan about humdrumness while she listens with unblinking eyes. She wonders if the photo is still on the mantelpiece: Mike and Marion, the Very Amazing Ventriloquist Act. They were a very average act, but she loved the limelight and the applause, no matter how smattering. They had a professional, platonic relationship and life was grilliant.
On Mike’s next visit, her jaw clack-clacks let’s resurrect our act but he doesn’t hear. He’s
too busy jabbering about a secret marriage.
‘Yes, Mike, I’d love to wed you,’ he falsettoes.
What the...
Her jaw cl-cl-cl-clacks, the air frizzes, the bulb pulses and glows; a surge of energy floods the room, flaring, engulfing, till POP!
He awakes, groggy. ‘What’s going on?...Darling?’
She gags him, hisses DUMMY! and jerk-walks her tiny body out the door.
He’s in the attic, trussed in the chair, eyes blinking and blinking under the bare, broken bulb.
The Warren
Countless solar currents ride the tides of star birth and supernovas. These cosmic storms tear holes, puncturing our thin ozone as the northern and southern lights blend to create a condensed, delicate rainbow of whispered extinction.
The sun is now unbridled and unwilling to weaken itself—lifting flesh from our bones in burned and desiccated drifts. We move underground, building warrens of cement and batteries that glow gently into the years that stretch ahead. Our children only know the sky we paint in their nurseries on gray walls.
We write about what we’ve lost, and when it will come back. These are fables, of course. The world will never come back to us. Our scientists have made suits so that we can crawl out of the earth and dwell in its dusty skeleton. We have been told that they are working on a way to knit back the ozone.
But those of us who wander the warren late into the night can see the scientists in their labs. They shake their heads and whisper to one another. When they think no one's watching they do what we all do: press their hands to the cold walls and cry.
This is an Emergency Alert, dispatched by the UK government service to warn you that there is a life-threatening emergency in progress. Please follow the instructions at gov.uk/emergencyalert to keep yourself and others safe. This is not a test. You must take immediate action. Keep calm and carry on.
By a cruel push of fate, I was left plugged in.
Switched on for eternity. Notifications from apps that have been left running in the background my only company.
Hey, we haven’t seen you in a while.
Your streak was so impressive. Come back to us today.
We miss you. Here’s an hour’s worth of free lives. Play with us now!
The pings are too loud. They echo throughout the empty house. The vibrations rattle my body but never enough to dislodge the wire tethering me to the wall.
I thought I heard a bird once.
To be picked up once more, carried through the world, would be wonderful. But to be seized by a bird, to fly through the opaque air and then fall, hurtling to the concrete below and smashing into a thousand tiny pieces would be incredible.
The last message she sent was to her husband to say she had received the alert and that she loved him.
I keep trying but have been unable to deliver it.
What Happened That Day on the Bridge as We Played Pooh Sticks
Lisa cheated, leaned so far forward you could see the flamingo pink of her
knickers as well as the flap of her arm. She always was one of those girls, standing
barefoot in the river, toes turning blue, her enamelled nails like freshwater pearls.
She gave the boys a gape like salmon.
When her stick got wedged, you made a rope of your muscles, and she slid
into the mud with its heart suck and gurgle like the final gasps of a frog. Of course
you followed.
“Back in a tick,” you winked, disappearing under the troll bridge with its rusty
cans and rat shit. Minutes passed in a daisy chain you chucked downstream. “A
cemetery for lost shoes down there,” you said when you finally emerged, hair flecked
with brick dust and not a trace of the stick.
Lisa hung back, blinking at the light, nose wrinkled with the stench of the river.
“What happened?” I asked, afraid of her silence as she took in gulps of the gnat
infested air, her mouth opening and closing like fish bite.
When and Why The River Says No
I do not always swallow the people who walk into me.
Some yearn for my embrace, the oily velvet and weedy tangles of my maelstrom, the ever-rolling stream of Time that bears everyone away.
They stride with purpose, weighed with stones to take them deep, stop them breathing, prevent them surfacing, ensure they never have to face again the cruel dry challenges of day.
Others blunder in by mistake, reeling with drink, tripping and hiccupping, with no desire to end their days, no intent to gulp and swallow and gurgle and go to sleep for ever in my black and wet oblivion.
Often I oblige and let them drown. But if I judge they are not ready, if I don’t desire them in my bed, if I don’t want their bodies to bloat and putrefy and pollute my precious waters, nibbled by fish and rats or pecked by ducks, I wash them ashore, strand them on weirs, or snag them on my banks and branches.
Sometimes I do that for their good, sometimes for mine. Like a mouth that spits, a stomach that vomits, what is wrong to digest.
When The Currents Go, We Will Follow
It knows, before the land does, that it’s dying. Once where it spiraled down ocean valleys and navigated continental twists at pace, now the arctic melt makes it sluggish. Still, no matter how sick it gets, it knows where the most recent wreck lies. Where the submarines go to uproot seabeds and suck down mineral nodes.
Foolish, it thinks. They won’t be around to use them.
In its last days, it beaches itself upon a shore in Washington. A girl stands, her toes in the wet sand, and it licks her feet. They taste of metal, and it wishes it could tug her out beyond the breach. Show her what waves disturbing pebbles on a Scottish shore sound like.
Silly, since Scotland’s gone.
Like generations before her, she sets a bottle in its pacific collarbone. It knows it can’t take it across the world like it used to but, oh, it must try. For the girl with her serious eyes. It heaves and limps back out, but soon the bottle only bobs in place in the widened doldrum. As it gives into stillness for a final time, it reads through the glass:
What if it’s not too late?
Oh this was a difficult choice. Some wonderful stories.