I work in stealth to clear forgotten artefacts from my mother’s closets as she surfs the night with the blessed deep sleep of a mildly demented woman. Lifting a final box from the floor of the hall closet, I catch a glimpse of black metal lying on the floor, a linear version of a coiled snake resting in the cool dark, the cane that carried a hunch-backed, broken man through his final years.

I am too slow closing the door and the memories strike. The stale, fruity tobacco scent of cigar as I kissed his ruddy cheeks. His socked feet shuffling worn Birkenstocks to the dinner table where Oxycontin lulled him to sleep mid- sentence, fork in hand. The bottle of small white pills riding in his shirt pocket above a beating heart that I longed to know, the “medicine” numbing his back pain and mind in equal measure.

As a younger man, he tried to outrun the unspoken pain of childhood trauma with speed. Those feet ran miles along the abandoned train tracks behind our house. His hands steered Harleys through New York state parks, kayaks through Adirondack white water, and our family’s party boat across the cool waters of Conesus Lake.

Decades later, driving him home from the Whit’s Frozen Custard in our North Carolina mountain town, my hand abandoned the steering wheel to find his. His silent grip spoke for him. This will be our new language, I thought.

A week later, the cane lay next to him on the floor of his bedroom. The smell drove me away before I thought to hold his hand for the last time.

That metal snake in the back of the closet is the last thing my father held. I can’t open the door fast enough.

Author: Stacey Crowley is a speech-language pathologist, literacy specialist, and neurodiversity coach. Her private practice, Learning Tree Literacy, is located outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Her work has been published in The Great Smokies Review and Yoga Chicago. She lives with her wife, Babs, and her pandemic rescue dog, Ruby Biscuits.

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Since Jane had walked into Carl’s life exactly 36 days ago, it was as if a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Just thinking about her made him feel lighter. Instead of trudging along the pavement as though he had dumbbells strapped to his legs, he now bounded along like an Olympic long-jumper taking his run-up. His friends had even begun to remark on the new spring in his step.

Prompted by their comments, he bought a set of bathroom scales and weighed himself. To his astonishment, not only had he lost weight, but subsequent weighs indicated he was getting lighter by the week. When the digital display nudged below 120lbs, he bought a second set of scales from a different maker to verify the figure. There was no mistake. His increasing levity was no flight of fancy.

It was all very puzzling as he was unaware of any change in diet or lifestyle. Even more curiously, when he looked in the mirror, he looked no thinner and his trousers still fitted just as snugly around the waist.

As the weeks passed, he noticed that whenever he thought of Jane, he became so light that his feet almost left the ground. Then one night they did just that. In the warm air of his centrally-heated bedroom, buoyed by visions of her loveliness and divested of the ballast of his clothes, his body rose like a hot-air balloon and hovered in an upright posture a couple of feet above the still-keenly-etched imprint of his feet in the deep-pile carpet. When a memory of her last phone call added to the image in his mind, he rose even further.

Unencumbered by gravity, his body landed softly on the ceiling and spread-eagled beside the light fitting. Flat on his back, he lay for a moment to consider his situation, then he turned onto his knees and crawled upside-down across the ceiling to the wall. From here he worked his way down with his hands flat against the wallpaper for friction. Once grounded, he managed to ensconce himself beneath the restraining security of a well-tucked-in duvet and slept peacefully without further anti-gravity hindrance.

The following morning brought no respite from his floatability, but he discovered that his new levitational power had unexpected advantages. Instead of bumbling around the apartment bumping into and tripping over things, he could now glide around in the manner of a hovercraft, using tables, chairs, worktops and various items of furniture and fitments for purchase. For breakfast he found he could sit at the table by hooking his knees under the table-top.

Then, this being a Saturday, it was necessary to visit the local store for groceries. To increase his gravitational pull, he tied a dumbbell to each calf inside flared trousers.

The leg-weights made him waddle with the unsteady gait of a toddler, but no-one seemed to notice. Indeed, as he passed his neighbours in the corridor and on the stairwell, they seemed unusually sociable.

“Have a nice day, Carl” they called out.

“How’re you doin’, Carl?” they wanted to know.

He’d forgotten how kind his neighbours were. It was as though they’d all come out just to wish him well. One even held the apartment block’s entrance door open for him. He resolved to spend more time with them.

As he shuffled along the pavement on his way to the store, the dumbbells worked a treat until he attempted to hurry across a road junction and the left one fell out. His leg rose into the air and, anchored by his right leg, he was pirouetted by a sudden gust of wind. A passing cyclist touched his baseball cap in greeting. How friendly people were this morning.

He now found he could make better progress by leaving the dumbbell behind and hopping along the pavement using garden fences for security. An ornamental fence provided the most reliable handholds. A rusty iron fence required more care. An uncapped brick wall proved the most challenging. But it seemed to be working. Passers-by smiled at him indulgently, as though oblivious to any eccentricity.

All went well until he heard one mumble knowingly to her partner, “He must be in love.” At this, the second dumbbell fell from his leg and his body inverted, executing a handstand on a wiry yard fence.

Now he could advance only by pulling himself along, hand over hand, while his feet hovered above him. This too proved an effective strategy until he had to cross another road junction.

Luckily, two kind-hearted construction workers were more than happy to help. Taking a leg each, they righted him and carried him across, his body floating upright between them, his arms raised. Anyone who didn’t know he was in love might have thought the three of them were practicing some acrobatic manoeuvre.

They deposited him at the foot of the large apartment block they were working on and left him clinging to a drainpipe.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Not at all,” said one.

“Any time,” said the other.

And with a friendly wave, and a tip of their hard hats, they left him to continue on his way.

Only then did he realise there was no obvious way forward beside the stark concrete wall of the building… and maintaining a hold on the slippery drainpipe was proving increasingly challenging. As his grip loosened, he compensated by squeezing the downspout between his knees, but this too was no more than a temporary measure.

As his knee-hold slackened, his body re-inverted, his hands slipped free and he began to slide gently up the side of the building feet-first. A small crowd gathered below to wave affectionately to him. Briefly his foot caught on the rooftop rain gutter. A few moments later he could be seen clinging to a chimney pot. Then he soared into the sky, passed a cloud, became a distant dot and was gone.

Author: Ralph is best known for his award-winning series of guidebooks to Scotland. His other books include the novel Love Scenes, The Joy of Hillwalking and The Sex Trivia Quiz Book. His latest book on Corrour Bothy won the Outdoor Writers & Photographers Guild award for best outdoor book of 2021.

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You always said the secret of these walls was stone, but the secret of this sky is light, leaking from the same-old sun, your sun, our sun, my sun now — though I still feel you in it as I walk across the carpark where all the other ghosts are floating. It’s dappling the gravel and making the scents of morning warm and fresh — light green fresh like cut-up cucumber or new-mown grass. And the air’s a soup of seeds and dust and lazy flies flying quick-quick slow, tiny flies, floating on currents or hazes of heat. And further along, on the way to the gate, the roses are dozing in their scented beds, not pruned or deadheaded, not dead anything, because every spent blossom is latent life — next year’s pinks waiting their turn. And as I steer myself through the pools of blue and sea-green shadows under the line of sycamores, I breathe-in those roses and look to the sky — denim and lace. Denim and lace. My left hand forgets or maybe it remembers, moving before I have chance to stop it, touching the stones for the hundredth, hundredth time — the agate from Cader, the quartz from Gairloch, I know without looking, the amethyst you bought online, remember? When it was raw and ragged and rough and unfinished, and you polished and drilled it to make it fit because I’d said I love-love-loved those violets and lilacs in that shop at the mine in South Carolina, in Abbeyville County, can’t remember its name, but we were young-lover broke, and it wasn’t until years later you threaded it onto the lace of leather, the bracelet you made me.

I slam my hands into my pockets, stumbling forward, acutely aware that my eyes are letting me down again, and though no one can see, I force a wide smile, a big-mouth, toothy wide-mouth smile which I aim at the last of the oaks as I round the corner, because I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing, walking two paths, the then and the now, under yesterday’s sun which is stinging my face with its pepper and salt and slowing my step where it’s leaked like treacle onto the old, stone slabs so I’m slow and sticky, like hot summer nights. Hot summer nights. Okay, it’s okay, I won’t fall back down that rabbit hole again, I’ll focus on now, on the birdsong, the birdsong — the quiet little trills, like they feel you here too. Just keep keeping on. Follow the track. Down through the field where its mown out of the grass — the tall, spiky grass, yellow and hollow where my shadow strides out before me — taller, longer, darker than me, and a slight breath of wind at the nape of my neck is the brush of a kiss or the sound of your name, and I want to go there, downward, downward, under the branches, into the gloom, where despite myself I know I’ll be glad of the shadows, where last year’s leaves will crackle under my tread releasing portents of autumn or whatever comes next. And I’ll leave the bracelet where the brook runs deepest, where someone will find it in millions of years, then I’ll climb the stile and stride to the park, to the manicured lawn where I’ll find crowds of visitors sitting or standing and chatting, and I’ll find a spot amongst them separate but together, and the birds will flute and trill and sing, and though I won’t be thirsty and my throat won’t be dry, I’ll swallow that birdsong like a draft of cold water.

Author: Jan Kaneen is a PhD student at York St John where she's investigating the use of silence and the blank page when writing novella-in-flash. She's won loads of flash comps and had three books published. She blogs here https://jankaneen.com/

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The car moves slowly, carefully, because she cannot bear speed here. The driver exhales repeatedly through his nose. All four window panes are lowered to the same height, not an inch higher or lower. The air circulates in a controlled loop. An ideal trap. She keeps her eyes fixed outward, searching. The dry, cracking salt flats stretch outward, unmoving. The land is so flat she almost believes she can see the earth’s curve. Vertigo rushes in.

The air thickens as the car slows among trucks carrying salt, coal, mica, crude oil. Highway construction claws toward heaven. Burning cow dung leaves behind its sweet, acrid trace. The smells layer until breathing becomes work. A sharp ringing fills her ears, like a disconnected phone line reaching back to another time. Her husband and children speak brightly beside her, their excitement scraping against her skin. They cannot wait to see her birthplace. The boat-shaped house she grew up in.

In the rearview mirror, she catches the driver’s tight expression. She folds into herself, apologetic for the space she occupies. Heat rises. Sweat beads along her temples. Her mouth floods. The nausea comes in a hard wave. She lowers the window and leans out, vomiting carefully, making sure not a drop falls inside.

The driver pulls over near a general store. Everyone steps out. After making sure she is steady, her husband and children make their way into the shop, in search of candies. Relief comes only after they leave. She sits on a bench opposite the shop, reassured by the illusion of stillness.

She turns, taking in the roundabout that once took forever to circle.

It feels smaller.

They have arrived. The boat-shaped house is not far.

Her jaw tightens as she struggles to swallow a lump in her throat. Everything she described to her husband and children exists, only altered in proportion, in form, in ownership.

For the first time, she longs for proof she once lived here—no photos, no journal entries, no one to talk about the past. She wants something to show her family, even if it is only ghosts burned into negatives.

She remains on the bench, gathering herself.

In that moment, her courage is stolen—not by loss, but by continuation. She sits there, thinking about the house and the lives now unfolding inside it.

When she looks up, the shopkeeper is watching her. Affection glimmers in his dark eyes—a quiet recognition for someone who once belonged. He lifts a hand in greeting.

She returns it.

***

The night moves slowly, relentless. She cannot bear its weight. The walls do nothing to stop it; they hold the sounds inside and press them on her. She buries her ears beneath her palms and pillows, but her mother’s broken cries and her father’s shouting seep through anyway. That afternoon, the newly developed photos of her last birthday party from November, when she turned ten, were delivered. She barely had time to look before they were torn into a thousand pieces by her father’s rage. She misses especially the photo of herself and her friends outside the boat-shaped house.

In the dark, she invents other landscapes—places she has never seen—and slips into them until sleep comes in fragments.

The alarm startles her awake with the cuckoo’s call. She bargains briefly with the blanket against the January cold, then remembers: Republic Day. The promise of school—of order—gets her out of bed.

Children stand in neat rows according to age, wearing pressed uniforms. She giggles with her friends when a teacher scolds them for failing to salute properly. The terror of the night dissolves into the wide courtyard and the morning light.

Little children dressed as flowers open the program with a prayer dance. As the sun rises, light spills across the stage. The flowers bloom one by one.

Then—thunder.

A crack. Columns buckle. The stage folds inward. Dust swallows the morning.

She runs. Screams blur with the sound of splitting concrete. It becomes impossible to tell what lies beneath the rubble—debris or children. She calls out her friends’ names. Faces dissolve into a single expression. Uniforms become indistinguishable. The ground that felt solid seconds ago turns treacherous.

Somehow, she reaches the street.

Relief comes first, quick and disorienting. She turns toward her boat-shaped house.

Something is wrong. Streets are askew. Walls split open. In eighty-seven seconds, the world she has known for ten years is altered.

There is nothing familiar to hold on to. Not her friend’s house. Not the shop where a man once sold sweet-sour candies from Dubai.

Her stomach clenches. The relief does not hold. She stops at a bench, searching for stability. The house is not far.

In that moment, her courage is stolen.

She sits there, thinking about the house and its inhabitants, and the possibility of its disappearance.

Above her, a purple kite sways in the dust-grey sky.

Author: Khushboo Balwani is an Indian-born writer, storyteller, and futurist based in Brussels. She has written futures fiction that has been adapted into radio podcasts, audio installations, and video works, and exhibited internationally. She currently experiments to write about inheritance, grief, memory, and the quiet ruptures of daily life.

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I don’t like leaving Caro in the hospital. Nobody speaks much English, and we don’t speak any Portuguese, but there’s nowhere for me to stay and she was falling asleep when I left the ward. I have to go back to the campsite and get some rest, so I’ll be in good shape to see her, tomorrow.

I have no idea of the route back to Ribeirinho, but Billy Connolly will get me there. His Glaswegian burr on the Sat-Nav is familiar and comforting. Soon I’m driving north on the coast road. The sky is pitch black with a sprinkling of stars. It’s been clear all week, apart from the trails of smoke drifting overhead.

In 800 metres, enter the roundabout and take the first exit.

The inland road snakes up the hillside toward a pass. I drive slowly and carefully. There is no traffic on the road and no-one to help if I misjudge a corner and slide into a ditch or roll down a slope. Twenty minutes later, I crest the pass and start down the other side. The Sat-Nav screen shows a junction ahead and Billy speaks for the first time since leaving the coast road.

In 400 metres, turn left. Turn Left.

He counts down.

300 metres, 200 metres, 100metres, 50 metres. Turn left.

The road to the left is a gravel track leading into the trees. Common sense tells me to stay on the metalled road, but I’m so shaken by Caro’s sudden illness that I’ve lost confidence in my own judgement. I look out over the hillside and see a dozen forest fires flaring in the blackness, between me and where I need to end up.

‘I hope you know what you are doing, Billy,’ I say out loud.

I pull onto the track and begin my descent through the trees. It twists and turns, splits, and diverts so often that I soon become disorientated. Billy confidently tells me which way to turn, but on the ground, it makes no sense at all. I’m not even consistently going downhill. The screen shows the maze of tracks as dotted lines. It’s obvious now that these are not public roads but forestry tracks, cut through the trees for loggers and firemen. There’s no point trying to turn back; even if I reset the Sat-Nav to return me to Viano do Costello it won’t necessarily calculate the reverse route.

‘For fuck’s sake, Billy. Where are you taking me?’

For once, he says nothing.

Fires glow through the trees in every direction. I can’t judge how close they are or whether they are big enough to be really dangerous. The track suddenly swoops downhill between two fires. Sparks fly overhead and dirty, yellow flames reach out toward the car. It’s the roller-coaster ride from hell. I grip the steering wheel like a drowning man clutching a lifebelt.

Fuck, I’m going to die.

I think of Caro, terrified and alone in hospital.

‘Come on, Billy!’

There is a fork in the road. The speaker crackles.

In 50 metres, bear right.

Stopping would be a disaster. The only thing I can do is follow Billy’s directions and pray that the Sat-Nav isn’t throwing a wobbly. I wrangle the car through the burning trees, playing snakes and ladders with the fires, each turn a new throw of the dice. After an eternity, the flames recede, the track levels out, and joins a tarmac road, from which – at last – I can see the welcoming lights of a village below.

I’m shaking. My heart is pounding. I feel sick. But I’m alive.

I’ll see Caro again, hold her in my arms, tell her she’s going to be alright.

I breathe a sigh of relief, relax my grip on the wheel, and nose the car downhill.

Billy leads me directly to the campsite. As I pull up, he declares: You have reached your destination. Without me you would have been hopelessly lost.

‘Ha, fucking ha, ha, Billy. What did I do to piss you off?’

But I’ve turned off the ignition; the glow of the Sat-Nav fades to black and Billy loses the right to reply. I sit down on a bench under the stars, pour myself a large measure of Talisker, and take a swig. It burns all the way down. Now that I’m safely back at camp, I’m thinking more clearly. I must have chosen the shortest route setting on the Sat-Nav so its algorithms sent me cross-country. They tried to save me four or five kilometres and were quite happy to shorten my life in the process.

I finish my whisky, undress, and crawl under the covers. The yurt is a warm, felted cocoon but I shiver as I reach across the bed to where Caro should be.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ I whisper.

I look up through the vent in the ceiling. The Milky Way is draped across the sky, almost close enough to touch. Tomorrow there will be more tests at the hospital. When I arrive, the man at the desk will again ask me if I have come to see my wife, and I will say yes, because he doesn’t comprehend the concept of ‘partner’, and because I discovered this morning when we negotiated my out-of-hours visit, that the word ‘wife’ feels sweet on my lips. He will smile and let me through the barrier. I will walk up three flights of stairs to Caro’s ward and ask her to marry me.

I fall asleep gazing at the stars and dream of fire.

Author: Geoff Mead is a freelance educator, storyteller, and writer. Life has taught him that only love and stories last forever and he hopes to live long enough to prove it. He was long listed for the 2019 National Short Story Competition, and his stories have been published in various anthologies.

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“Notification of deletion. Your memory of February 7, 2043, 15:03-19:06 has been flagged for removal. You have 30 days to appeal. Use the MTGT app to submit an appeal.”

Today is May 24, 2045. I knew the MTGT’s policies. I had to, I held indefinite protected citizen status. The Memory and Thought Governance Team’s purpose was to adjust the present, not the past.

A deletion for a past memory? The system had to be wrong.

I opened the MTGT app. There was a bright red banner “Click here to appeal”. It was just text, clicking didn’t work. I selected February 7, 2043, to retrieve a summary of the day’s events. Classified. How could I appeal to something I didn’t have access to?

I checked my work emails, then private ones, calendars, photos, credit card statements. Nothing. I moved on to public news archives. Nothing. That day, at that time nothing had happened, nowhere in the world. Not a single record existed.

Then I looked for build-up and aftermath for something that may have happened. I didn’t find anything. There were some noticeable gaps before and after that day, all minutes to under an hour.

2043... I wrote a journal back then. Old school, onto paper. The MTGT had access to memories, and digital archives were censored. But these were my personal notes. They wouldn’t know about it. I corrected myself, they did know. Journaling was part of my memories.

The dust on the journal looked different, too grainy. If anyone else had said that I would have laughed, called them paranoid. The journal was noticeably thinner than the others. Back then I logged everything, every day. Except February 7th, 2043. There were cut outs in the pages before and gaps in the weeks after. There was something missing. Classified.

What was it? Who would do that?

Other people would remember. I asked my manager about the day, about *classified*. His memory was classified too, but he hadn’t received a deletion request. Since he had advanced access permissions he would follow up. I thanked him. When I came back the following day he had no recollection of our conversation. I scrolled down to the previous day’s meeting notes. No mention of *classified*. I checked the document’s history, no edits after the meeting. I asked him again. He scoffed, it was classified, in the past and therefore not worth investigating. I was about to add a footnote. “Don’t bother,” he said.

Until now I had avoided involving my wife. I debated for a couple of days whether to ask her. She was intelligent, observant, critical; she objected to governance and memory management and participated in campaigns against it. For private citizens the MTGT had more freedom and less oversight. They could simply “update” her, or as she phrased it, manipulate her. It took a long time for her to accept my job, even after our relationship had become serious.

I only had three days left to appeal. I had run out of ideas and saw no other option but to ask her. Her response shocked me. She rolled her eyes “I understand it matters to you, but, this is the fifth day in a row that you are asking. And you’re not just asking, you are interrogating. I don’t know and I won’t know, no matter how often you bring it up. Please, let it go.” I was puzzled, “I did ask you already?” She stared at me, “Not again! Stop!” Did I miss those conversations? Or did MTGT implant new memories in her? I hugged her and apologised.

Inside though, I was furious, they had harmed my wife! I had to get to the bottom of this.

I called the MTGT hotline, they were painfully bureaucratic. Someone named Sam responded. They verified my identity and the nature of my request. As soon as I mentioned the timestamp I found myself put on hold.

What if this was another dead end? While on hold, I dipped into the dark web. There were rumours about doctors working in hiding. Pending the right fee they would stage an abduction and attempt a memory reversal. The odds weren’t bad, 40% chance of success, and 60% chance of temporary brain damage. Online I had found some stories about success, but none for that timestamp. Retrieval failure for that time period was 100%, with permanent brain damage and complete memory loss.

The hold music stopped: “Hello, this is Pat from MTGT support.” They validated the information I had given earlier. “Let me see if I can resolve it for you,” a brief pause, then she urged me “You have to reset the app before the end of the appeal period, then it will take 48 hours for the reset to be successful. Please listen closely to the following instructions.” I thanked her, and felt a slight wave of relief. A glitch, so nothing to have worried about. But this went far further than the app... what else could I do? I was ready for the instructions. Whoever recorded them did so in a hurry, it started with scratching and a strange sequence of tones. Just listening to it made me dizzy.

... I must have fallen asleep. I heard a hold loop. Who was I calling? I was about to hang up when I heard “Hello, Sam speaking from MTGT app support. How can I help you today?” That was a good question, why had I called in the first place? I apologised and hung up. I noticed the sun setting outside, it seemed late. What did I do all day? I tried to remember.

*Classified*.

Author: Kerstin Klein is a Cambridgeshire-based writer. After a 25-year career in IT, she now focuses on writing and community work. Her work has been submitted to the Missouri Review, The Sun, and several international competitions.

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I went because the theatre was closing.

The Bellevue had stood on Bélanger Street longer than most buildings around it. For years I passed it without looking up. Then one morning I saw the marquee half-lit again.

They were showing Midnight County, a black-and-white film I remembered seeing as a kid. I couldn’t have said why it mattered to me. It had stayed somewhere in memory, like a song you almost recognize when it plays through a wall.

The lobby smelled of dust and lemon cleaner. The carpet had worn paths where generations must have queued for tickets. A young woman tore my stub with ceremonial seriousness, as if honoring something already gone.

There were maybe ten people in the house. The screen trembled with light before the film properly began.

A man stood beneath a streetlamp in the rain. Narrow tie, tired eyes. I felt an immediate comfort — recognition without effort.

Then he spoke.

“I should have stayed,” he said.

I hesitated.

I had always remembered the line differently. I should have left sooner. I was certain of it — the way children are about small things.

I smiled. Memory drifts. That was all. The film moved gently, unhurried. Scenes lingered on empty streets, half-finished conversations, pauses that felt more important than decisions.

I realized I remembered less of the plot than of the feeling — a quiet sense that everyone onscreen was arriving too late to their own lives.

Halfway through came the diner scene. I recognized it instantly: chrome counter, coffee steam, a waitress refilling cups without asking.

Something tightened in my chest.

The street outside the diner looked familiar. Not movie-familiar. Personally familiar.

The pharmacy across the road bore the same crooked sign that had stood near my childhood apartment. Even the crack in the sidewalk appeared exactly where I remembered tripping once when I was nine.

I leaned forward.

As the camera drifted past the window, a figure crossed behind the glass, slightly out of focus.

I froze.

He resembled me. Not precisely. But enough that recognition arrived before doubt.

The scene passed quickly. Dialogue resumed. No emphasis, no music cue. Just another anonymous passerby in a crowded frame.

I thought actors resemble strangers all the time. Still, when the lights came up, I sat longer than necessary.

Outside, the evening felt strangely simplified. The air quieter than usual, as if certain background sounds had been lowered. I walked home with the lingering sensation of having forgotten something important.

The next morning I noticed the first change.

A photograph on my bookshelf showed a group of friends at a cottage years ago. I remembered a woman standing beside me — Joanne, someone I had nearly built a life with before hesitation quietly ended things.

In the photo, the space beside me was empty.

I searched my phone. Messages were gone. Emails absent. Even her name felt harder to recall, as if syllables slipped away when I tried to hold them.

I told myself I was misremembering again.

That evening I returned to the Bellevue.

The same film, with its gentle pacing. Yet certain moments felt… cleaner. A subplot seemed vaguely shorter. A conversation resolved more quickly.

During the diner scene I watched carefully.

The background figure appeared again — myself, unmistakably now, walking past the window without purpose, carrying nothing, heading nowhere in particular.

I felt no fear. Only curiosity tinged with embarrassment, like catching yourself wandering through someone else’s photograph.

Over the following days, small uncertainties accumulated.

A colleague spoke of events at the office I had no memory of attending, yet emails confirmed my presence. A café I frequented closed years earlier, according to everyone else, though I remembered sitting there merely days ago.

Life felt edited — not erased violently, just tightened. Loose ends trimmed away.

I began to suspect the film was not changing at all.

On my third visit, I arrived early and sat close to the screen. Dust floated through the projector beam like slow snowfall.

As the story unfolded, I noticed how carefully composed everything was. Every character served a purpose. No one lingered without reason.

Except the man in the background.

I appeared briefly in three scenes: crossing a street, seated alone in a bus terminal, standing at the edge of a crowd during a farewell. Never speaking. Never acknowledged.

Then, midway through the final act, the camera stopped returning to those spaces.

The story moved forward without me.

I realized then that I remembered my own life the same way — long stretches of waiting, observing, postponing decisions until circumstances chose for me. Relationships half-begun. Plans deferred until they quietly dissolved.

Just unfinished.

The final screening came Sunday night. The audience was smaller, the theatre colder. The projection flickered slightly, as if tired.

When the diner scene arrived, I watched carefully.

The framing had changed.

The window occupied less of the screen. The street beyond appeared emptier, more balanced somehow.

The background figure was gone.

The scene felt… better. Cleaner. As though the camera had finally discovered the correct composition.

I felt an unexpected relief.

The remainder of the film unfolded with gentle certainty. Characters reconciled with their choices. Conversations reached conclusions. The story narrowed toward an ending that felt inevitable.

When the credits rolled, the screen faded to white instead of black. The projector slowed, clicking softly as it wound down.

I sat alone as the house lights rose gradually, illuminating rows of worn seats and drifting dust. The theatre seemed peaceful, unburdened.

For the first time in years, my thoughts felt quiet.

The urgency I had lived with was simply gone.

I watched the blank screen a while longer, grateful for the stillness.

When I finally stood, I realized I could no longer remember why the film had once mattered so much to me.

Only that it was complete now.

I stayed until the lights came up, relieved to know the story no longer needed me.

Author: Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1966 and raised in the Saguenay region, Stanley Péan has published thirty books since 1988, novels, short stories, essays, and young adult fiction. Several of his works have received literary awards. He is also a journalist, broadcaster, translator, lyricist and wrote for French-language Canadian television.

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Hi Story Lovers,

I am delighted to share with you the winning stories in this year’s WestWord Prize and the words our judge, Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, has shared about the stories she read in this final round.

Sadly, one of the writers declined to have her shortlisted story published so there is a reference in the judge’s comments to a story that you will not be reading.

Many thanks to everyone who took part this year, to Kathryn for judging, and to the winning and shortlisted writers for their patience as I had to delay announcing the results and publishing the stories due to a family bereavement.

Congratulations to all of the writers whose stories appear here — the WestWord reading team loved them all!

With love,

Amanda 💙

Judge’s Comments

The seven shortlisted stories presented such a wonderful range of voices, genres and themes, making the task of judging particularly enjoyable, but more challenging too! Congratulations to all the writers who shortlisted – I have loved spending time with your fantastic work. There was much to admire about the four stories which, after much deliberation, didn’t place. The ‘denim and lace’ sky in The Slaking of Sorrow; a story brimming with sensuous imagery and language, its narrator ‘walking two paths, the then and the now.’ The impressive cinematic unfolding of a tragic memory, when returning to a childhood home in The Shape of Something Missing. The moving exploration of a character’s relationship with an object freighted with traumatic significance in Fate of a Rocking Chair. And then Forelsket, a joyful story in which the writer masterfully ratchets up the absurd to hilarious effect. Comedy is one of the hardest things to pull off and the visuals this story evoked made me laugh out loud.

1st Place: Love is a Burning Thing by Geoff Mead

It was voice in this story which immediately put it in my top three and eventually landed it the winning spot. Confident and authentic, the voice sets the tone from the get-go. After a strong opening, establishing both setting and stakes, we learn the narrator has no idea how to get to where they need to be, but that ‘Billy Connolly will get me there.’ I was in! This was a character I wanted to spend time with. When they say, ‘Common sense tells me to stay on the metalled road’ but that they’ll let the technology override their human judgement, we know this choice will end badly. The writer then weaves Satnav instructions into the unfolding narrative. This could have been overdone, but the balance and timing are spot on, adding momentum and revealing more of the narrator’s character. Throughout, the writer succeeds in evoking a range of emotional responses as they literally take us on a journey, using humour, tension and then, leading us out of the fire, to a moving moment of realisation. Great storytelling!

Read 'Love is a Burning Thing'

2^nd Place: Appeal by Kerstin Klein

I loved this clever, dystopian story for its futuristic world-building and how it spoke to our times. I was immediately immersed in the writer’s hell-scape of e-bureaucracy and invested in the protagonist’s quest for answers as they are thwarted at every step. I appreciated the darkly humorous idea that even in the future, the same old mundane glitches in the technology will continue to frustrate us: ‘Click here to appeal. It was just text, clicking didn’t work.’ The loaded political language succinctly gives us an insight into the regime’s system of control and manipulation, while also being close enough to current terminology to suggest that this is the way we may all be heading: ‘I held indefinite protected citizen status.’ The sense of dread and unease is successfully ramped up as the story progresses and the ending is satisfying and thought-provoking.

Read 'Appeal'

3^rd Place: The Last Screening by Stanley Péan

An unsettling story in which the line between the protagonist’s life and the film he compulsively watches becomes blurred, and where the nature of memory is put under the spotlight. The writer conjures a dreamlike atmosphere teeming with projector dust as the narrator keeps returning to a cinema to rewatch a film, all the while uncanny happenings are beginning to unfold in his everyday life. I loved the way the writer projected the protagonist’s sense of self onto the film; realising he’s watching himself on the screen, where he appears alone, at the edge of the action: ‘Never speaking. Never acknowledged.’ The film itself lingers on ‘empty streets, half-finished conversations, pauses that felt more important than decisions.’ An ambitious piece, tackling remembering, regret and letting go, possibly even the end of life, in an original way.

Read 'The Last Screening'

Shortlisted Stories

• Forelsket by Ralph Storer - Read it here

• The Slaking of Sorrow by Jan Kaneen - Read it here

• The Shape of Something Missing by Khushboo Balwani - Read it here

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Hi story lovers!

It’s the first Monday of the month so it’s Monthly Micro time!

Here’s how it works:

It’s completely free. No submission fees, no Submittable forms to fill out.

It’s simple. I post a prompt on the first Monday of every month. You have a week to write a micro fiction (max 75 words) and drop it in the comments below the post (no sending them as a reply to the email as it won’t be read or included in the prize draw!). That’s it.

There’s a prize. The winner will be selected randomly from everyone who comments with a story. Everyone has an equal chance, whether it’s your first micro or your hundredth. The prize is a free ticket to the Zoom workshop of your choice (must be used within 3 months).

The winner of the June comp, selected by random number generator, is Zannie Rose, who shared this story.

WHO DONATED THE KIMONO?

A white vintage wedding kimono wrapped in red tissue paper. A bargain she thought as she traced the embroidered cranes flying over a landscape. Perfect for the Japanese themed party to celebrate Himari’s engagement. She swept up her hair and held it in place with kanzashi pins, adding tsumami zaiku for extra flourish. She heard a rustle, felt movement as the white cranes escaping the kimono, lifted her up and flew through the open window.

Congratulations Zannie! You win a workshop and you can see what’s coming up here.

July Prompt

BUBBLE

A grandparent twists the cap off a pot of bubbles after their grandkid has been given a timeout, an economic bubble is about to burst, a teenager’s first hubba bubba, a relaxing bath after a stressful day, furtive fingers skate over a gift wrapped tightly in bubblewrap… Bubbles are always on the verge of bursting, explore those delicate moments of interaction.

Write a micro fiction (max 75 words) inspired by this prompt and share it in the comments below.

Deadline: Monday 13th July 2026

I’m really looking forward to seeing what you all create.

See you in the comments!

With love,

Amanda 💙

Hi Story Lovers,

Here’s the replay from this month’s workshop — and it’s one that upended a rule every writer’s been told to follow since day one.

We looked at how the best short sto…

Read more

Hi Story Lovers,

We’re open for submissions for our 2027 charity anthology — and this year’s theme is Hunger.

All proceeds will go to Mary’s Meals, the charity that sets up school meal programmes in some of the world’s poorest communities, giving children a reason to attend school and the nourishment to learn.

What we’re looking for

Flash fiction and creative non-fiction up to 1,000 words that explores what hunger really means. There’s the obvious — that empty growl in the pit of a stomach — but we want you to go further. What about the all-consuming desire for a better job, a different life altogether? The craving to escape a place, a state of mind, a way of being? We want stories that sit with hunger in all its forms: physical, emotional, spiritual, and everything in between.

Submission guidelines

• Theme: Hunger

• Genres: Flash fiction and creative non-fiction

• Word count: Up to 1,000 words

• Submission fee: FREE

• Deadline: 20th September 2026

Submissions are free however, to get the book listed with online retailers and real-life bookshops, we need to cover the cost of ISBNs — £174 in total. When you submit, you’ll have the option to make a voluntary donation towards this. Any amount received beyond what’s needed will go directly to Mary’s Meals.

Every story matters. Every donation helps. And every reader who buys this book will be putting food on the table for a child who needs it.

Submit your story

We can’t wait to read what hunger means to you.

With love,

Amanda 💙

Read the stories that were chosen for our previous charity anthology, Dislocation, and support St. Mungo’s — the UK charity helping people who are homeless.

If you buy direct using the QR code or button below it means far more money reaches the charity, since we’re not paying 55% of the cover price to retailers. The direct orders are available for shipping in the UK and US only. If you want to buy from a bookstore then it is available in Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Amazon, and can be ordered in by independent stores.

Buy the paperback direct

Hi Story Lovers,

There’s something alchemical about writing to constraints. When you’re asked to tell your whole story in a small word count, you can’t afford to include anything that doesn’t serve the transformation at the heart of it. You must strip away the noise and get straight to the gold.

This is the secret gift of the mini memoir form. It teaches you what memoir really is: not a comprehensive account of everything that happened, but a carefully shaped story that illuminates how an experience changed you, and how it speaks to our wider human experience.

Many people approach memoir thinking their job is to report what happened. They try to include the context, the backstory, the explanation of how they got there. In a full-length memoir, you have room to breathe into all that (but not all of it needs to be there!). But in a mini memoir, every single word has to earn its place.

Ask yourself: Does this sentence move me closer to understanding the transformation? If not, it goes.

What actually matters in your mini memoir? Not the list of events. But the emotional truth beneath them. Not everything that happened, but the moments that shifted something inside you.

This is where the real work of memoir lives. Not in what happened, but in what it meant. How it changed you. What you discovered about yourself and about being human.

By the end, even if you haven’t resolved everything, we should feel the transformation. We should sense a shift in you in the wake of this experience.

One Thread, Woven Through

In memoirs of all lengths, you need what I call a golden thread — a recurring image, question, sensation, or symbol that ties everything together. It might be something physical: a stain, a piece of clothing, a garden. Or it might be more abstract: a question you keep asking, a pattern you keep recognising, a feeling that returns again and again.

This thread is your memoir’s backbone. Everything hangs from it.

Maybe you’re writing about learning to set boundaries, and your thread is doors — ones you couldn’t close, ones you finally locked, ones you learned to open consciously. Or you’re writing about belonging, and your thread is the feeling of hands — reaching for you, pushing you away, finally reaching toward yourself.

The thread doesn’t have to be obvious. Readers often feel it before they can name it. But it’s what makes your story cohere. It’s what makes it memorable.

Show and Tell

You’ve probably heard the advice show don’t tell many times before, but there are times we definitely need to do both. It’s about recognising when each has the most impact and creates the most immersive experience. When writing about emotions and feelings, showing is pretty much needed every time. Instead of telling us you were afraid, show us your hands shaking. Instead of explaining that you felt alone, show us sitting in a room full of people, unable to speak.

This is somatic writing — grounding your emotional truth in physical sensation and sensory detail. When you do this, readers don’t just understand your experience intellectually. They feel it in their bodies.

Compare these two approaches:

“I was devastated when she left.”

vs.

“For three days, I couldn’t eat. The kitchen felt too quiet. I’d open the fridge and stare at the food she’d bought, unable to reach for anything. At night, I lay in bed listening for the sound of her key in the lock, knowing it would never come.”

The second version doesn’t name the emotion. It creates it in the reader’s nervous system through accumulated sensory detail.

The Voice of Now Looking Back

One of memoir’s great gifts is that you get to be two people at once: the person who lived the experience and the person reflecting on it now. The younger self who didn’t understand, and the current self who has gained perspective.

This isn’t about being certain or having all the answers. The best mini memoirs often sit in the complexity. You can show what you believed then and gently reveal how that understanding has shifted. You can hold compassion for your younger self while also acknowledging what you now know.

Your voice is crucial here. It needs to shift between the then and now while feeling consistent.

Let that voice be honest. Let it be a little wry, a little tender, whatever feels true. Your authentic voice is what will make readers recognise themselves in your story.

What Matters and What Doesn’t

In a mini memoir, you can’t include everything. You have to make brutal choices about what to keep and what to leave out. This is actually liberating. It forces you to get clear about what your story is really about.

Is this story about a specific relationship? A moment of reckoning? A shift in how you see yourself? Once you know the answer, you can cut everything that doesn’t serve that central truth.

Some scenes will be fully rendered — moments you stay in, with dialogue and sensory detail and time to breathe. Others might be summarised in a sentence or two. This variation in pacing creates rhythm and it lets readers know what matters most.

The most powerful mini memoirs carry wisdom that the narrator has discovered through living and reflecting. Not lessons imposed from the outside, but understanding that has emerged from experience.

This wisdom often lives in the scenes themselves rather than being stated directly. It’s in the moment where you suddenly see something differently. It’s in how your relationship to something has changed. It’s in the questions you’ve learned to ask and stay with instead of demanding answers.

Trust your reader to feel this. You don’t have to explain what your story means. If you’ve shaped it with care, the meaning will be present.

The Practice of Compression

Writing a mini memoir is an act of faith. Faith that your story matters even if it’s small. Faith that transformation can be shown in miniature. Faith that readers will understand what you’re reaching for even when you can’t spell out every detail.

This constraint teaches you to write with intention. To choose every word carefully. To understand that memoir isn’t about quantity of experience but quality of insight.

It teaches you that sometimes the deepest stories are the shortest ones.

If you’re drawn to writing memoir and want to deepen your understanding of the craft — the architecture of transformation, the power of voice, how to access emotional truth, how to find your story’s golden thread — and write in community, my 12-week Mindful Memoir course is starting this September. It’s designed for writers ready to bring mindfulness and spiritual depth to their storytelling, whether they’re working on a single mini memoir or a full-length manuscript. This post has been adapted from the course content. Early-bird pricing until end of July and applications open until 1st September.

For now, sit with your own story. What moment has changed you? What truth are you ready to tell? What does your story need to say?

Searching for the answer to those questions is where your mini memoir begins.

Then when it’s ready, send it to us for our Mini Memoir feature, which is open for submissions on a rolling basis.

With love,

Amanda 💙

Hi WestWorders,

The latest WestWord community workshop explores an exciting concept that we can bring to our fiction: eternalism and the multiverse — the idea that all times are happening at once, and…

Read more

We’re looking for creative non-fiction pieces up to 1,500 words — true stories from your life told with the precision, resonance, and craft of the best short fiction. Mini memoir sits in that particular sweet spot where a single moment, relationship, or fragment of lived experience is held up to the light to reveal universal truths about being human.

Submission are open on a rolling basis.Our usual submission guidelines apply (see below).

Words: Up to 1500 (excluding the title)

Submission fee: £8

Author payment: £35

Submit your Mini Memoir here

Submission Guidelines

• All submissions must be sent through Submittable and we cannot accept email submissions. Anything sent via email will not be read.

• Please use a legible, easy-to-read font of 12pt or 14pt.

• All submissions must be previously unpublished (never published in print or online, including a personal blog) and in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format ONLY.

• Simultaneous submissions are fine but please withdraw your submission via Submittable if it is accepted elsewhere.

• Our submissions are open to all adult writers worldwide. All work must be written in English and written by humans. No AI stories.

Please do not send us stories with racism, sexism, homophobia, religious hatred or any other kind of bigotry and hate. Any sex must be relevant to the story. Do not send us graphic stories of rape, incest, child abuse, bestiality, or gratuitous violence. We won’t publish it and we do not want to read it.

Authors will retain all rights and copyright to their works. WestWord requests one-time, non-exclusive rights to publish your work.

Hi story lovers!

It’s the first Monday of the month so it’s Monthly Micro time!

Here’s how it works:

It’s completely free. No submission fees, no Submittable forms to fill out.

It’s simple. I post a prompt on the first Monday of every month. You have a week to write a micro fiction (max 75 words) and drop it in the comments below the post (no sending them as a reply to the email as it won’t be read or included in the prize draw!). That’s it.

There’s a prize. The winner will be selected randomly from everyone who comments with a story. Everyone has an equal chance, whether it’s your first micro or your hundredth. The prize is a free ticket to the Zoom workshop of your choice (must be used within 3 months).

The winner of the May comp, selected by random number generator, is Christine shared this story.

CLEARANCE

It was a slow-moving river with steep earth banks, ideal for water voles whose homes nestled amidst lush vegetation. Kingfishers had lived there for years, tunnels excavated into the mud for their nests.

In autumn the banks were cleared of trees and vegetation, removing the natural barrier which slowed the rainwaters.

That winter it never stopped raining, fast-flowing water washed away the earth banks.

The perpetrators called it necessary. Illegal destruction declared the environmentalists.

Congratulations Christine! You win a workshop and you can see what’s coming up here.

June Prompt

CRANE

At a dinner they don’t want to be at, someone cranes their neck to observe a couple across the restaurant; construction workers dangle their legs above the skyscapers, a zookeeper helps an exotic bird escape…

Write a micro fiction (max 75 words) inspired by this prompt and share it in the comments below.

Deadline: Monday 8th June 2026

I’m really looking forward to seeing what you all create.

See you in the comments!

With love,

Amanda 💙

PS. The first poll to choose the charity to support with our next anthology was a tie! So we need you to vote again between the two who got the equal amount of votes.

Bleakholt Animal Sanctuary

Based in Lancashire, UK, Bleakholt Animal Sanctuary cares for those who have no one. Finding new homes for over 1,300 animals a year, they look after dogs, cats, and small animals awaiting adoption, as well as almost 40 equine residents in their stables and a variety of farm animals who will spend the rest of their lives in the sanctuary’s permanent care. A charity for anyone who believes every creature deserves safety and love.

Mary’s Meals

Mary’s Meals is a charity founded in Scotland, UK, that provides life-changing school meals to children living in some of the world’s poorest communities. The promise of a good meal brings hungry children into the classroom, where they can gain an education and better opportunities for the future. They are serving meals to more than three million children every school day in 16 different countries.

Hi Story Lovers,

Current pulls at everything. It moves beneath the surface of rivers and oceans, carrying things away, returning them, shaping the ground underfoot without ever asking permission. But current also runs through time — the current of a life, the current of culture, the undertow of other people’s ideas about who you should be. This edition brings you stories that understand current as both physical force and something deeper: the thing that moves us, despite ourselves, toward where we were always going.

In Walking the Broomway, Jay races across one of the most dangerous paths in Britain to reach someone before the current does. In A Life Measured in Sticks, Casper measures his entire life by the river that has always understood him better than people have. Worse Things Happen at Sea finds that when the compass stops working, something else takes the wheel. And in After Two Years in the Slammer, What’s a Real Boy to Do?, Pinocchio, fresh out of prison, stands at the edge of a simple question and tries, for the first time, to resist being swept away.

I hope you enjoy these stories. Please leave the authors some love in the comments.

With love,

Amanda 💙

When my life started in a prison of wooden joints and no autonomy by a well-meaning woodcarver, and when it was only the sheer force of my wanting wanting that catapulted me into realness, and when my wanting wanting led from yes, jolly japes and adventure - the belly of a whale, robbed, turned into a donkey, what a lark! - but also to Fox and Cat who said You’re a real boy with real boy desires, of course you are, real boys are rough and tumble, they thump and dump, you want her, you take her, and Fox’s voice all sly, Just bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck, well, look where that led me, incel and the black pill, trapped in sweat and swagger land in a prison of metal, where lying is a necessity but didn’t my nose give it away every time and yes, it’s good to be out, but here we are, you asking me a question and me just pondering pondering, because I’ve learned to question what’s behind the question, you know what I mean and your question - Hey, wanna watch a film? – could mean just that, or not, but you look pleasant enough, pretty low on the swagger count truth be told, but maybe Gepetto and the Blue Fairy left a bit of wood in my brain because figuring out this whole real boy thing is so much harder than I thought and all my wanting wanting has led me down some dodgy paths so maybe it’s time to try something new?

Author: Cole Beauchamp is a queer writer based in London. She's been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for Pushcart, Best Small Fictions and Best Microfictions. She’s a 2026 Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow and contributing editor of New Flash Fiction Review. Cole lives with her girlfriend and has two children.

Anyway, you would have done the same had you been in my shoes. Because, let’s face it, sailing solo with a gorilla for company was never my intention. Canine company would have been preferable, despite the farts and general lack of hygiene dogs exhibit. Deliberate sabotage of my plans is what I called it, shoving that gorilla in my bed so that I didn’t even notice he was there until I’d set off and was well away from British shores.

It was evening, and I was just about to get a bit of shut-eye, having set course and then double, treble checked all was well. Except it wasn’t. The current had already started nudging us sideways, though I didn’t know that yet.

‘Fucksake,’ I shouted, feeling slightly guilty about swearing despite knowing it was only the gorilla and the odd hungry seabird, maybe the fish, that could hear me. Gorilla
smiled a kind of toothy smile, curling his lips upwards and looking all fat and hairy and like my uncle Stan after he’d been on a bender. Hell’s teeth.

I tried to get him to shove over, but he took up half the bed and wasn’t budging. Just
turned onto his side and gently farted. King Kong came to mind, but not with the same fear I’d had as a girl - more a bemused madness that meant I felt utterly justified in kicking his butt. Little good did that do.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, we’d drifted miles off course because the kit I’d
bought with the money I’d raised was less than desirable, a bit like my bedfellow. No way was I going to cuddle up to this gorilla, even when he turned around, whispering sweet nothings in my ear. Other women might have fallen for his wiles, but not me.

Plotting my escape, I got out of bed and spread a map out on the tiny, cold deck, my
hanging solar-powered light casting unpredictable shadows. Quite futile, I thought to myself, until I spotted an island I hadn’t noticed before, sitting right where the warm current curved east. Restored despite no sleep whatsoever, I started the engine (I am not brave enough to row all the way or rely on sails alone to power me, sorry).

Sleepyhead snored, sounding strangely familiar.

The next thing I remember - and I can’t be sure I wasn’t delirious by now, but this is
the story I will tell the press when they ask - is that the gorilla came up on deck in a suit, looking surprisingly human, handsome, and totally out of place for the middle of the Atlantic. Unashamed, I went up to him and kissed his warm, muscular lips. They felt very inviting. Very. What a harlot, I hear you say, but please remember, I had taken on this journey to get away from a bad break-up, and I was desperate. X-rated, you might say. You might say, if you were being kind, that I was starved of masculine attention, at least the decent kind.

Zoos have dubious value, and I could not offload this gorilla into one, so I decided it
was best to sack off the idea of dumping him on the island and let him crew.

He came up beside me at the helm, adjusting his tie like this was all perfectly normal.
The sea had gone oddly calm - the kind of calm that makes you realise something else is doing the thinking.

‘Which way?’ I asked, though the compass had been spinning uselessly for hours.

He didn’t answer. He just placed one heavy hand on the wheel. The boat shifted
immediately, caught by a current I swear hadn’t been there a moment before - a strong one, pulling with purpose.

‘You knew this was coming,’ he said - or maybe it was the wind, or the water, or the
part of me that had finally stopped pretending I was in control.

Either way, I didn’t argue.

I just held on.

Author: Bonnie’s words appear in several literary journals, including Mslexia, Tiny Molecules, Ellipsis Zine, and Dribble Drabble. She shares a home near Manchester, UK, with her husband and sometimes offspring she’s never confident have finally left, or grandchildren whose size is inconsistent with their conviction that they’re in charge. Website: bonniemeekums.weebly.com

The river winds in ribbon threads, coursing its channel as it has done for centuries. An
instinctive stream of water on its way to the sea and then returned to the river once more. Deep between the wooded valley it wends its way. Eroding rocks and boulders, shifting pebbles and sand. Leaves on trees change colour, cascade down. And the river keeps flowing.

The little boy takes his time over his choice of stick. He instinctively knows which sort to find, the length to girth ratio, the weight in his hand. His older sister and brother, rush to throw their sticks in. Their footsteps thudding on the planks of the bridge, making it shudder. Casper shudders too.

Mother says, “Wait. Wait for Casper.”

They fidget and fuss, two figures in red coats, unable to keep still or silent. Casper in
his grey jumper, grey shirt, grey shorts, chooses his position on the bridge. Looks through railings separating him from water. Watches it flow, the fastest stream more silver than charcoal shallows, or steel-blue eddies.

Mother shouts “Go!”

His siblings hurl their sticks, but Casper drops his so it meets the fastest part without a
splash. Sister and brother rush to the other side of the bridge. Casper takes his time. Casper’s stick appears first. He ignores the whine of his sister, the complaint of his brother as his twig catches on the bank.

“Again, again,” calls his sister.

The game is repeated, the same result each time, until the duo bore of losing and race
into the woods. Casper lingers watching the water, patterns that repeat, slip by beneath him. Until he recognises in the tone of his mother’s voice that he must follow them.

From the first ripple of movement, I know the child developing within me, will not be
ordinary. During the day he is still and at night squirms. No strong kicks like those I recall from his older brother, nor the sharp elbow jabs his sister had inflicted. His is altogether a quieter motion, rotating; a naked mollusc tumble-turning in my womb.

As he was pulled from my body, there was a moment of hush in the delivery suite. No
cry. Icy fingers of fear ran through me. I shivered in the warm room. The thought numbing me that maybe this extraordinary boy had taken one look at the world, with its stainless steel, dazzling lights and hum of machinery, and decided we were not ready. Then a thin whine, otherworldly, called to me. Casper suckled, his round face pressed to my breast, his eyes wide and intelligent. I was reminded of meeting a turtle whilst snorkelling, looking into dark brown eyes, understanding this creature held a wisdom I would never understand.

The boy stands on the bridge alone. Rain drops pock the flow, join the river. They remind him of ants skittering across the paving slabs at home, hurrying to their destination. Casper holds a finger out, catches a droplet, peers close, as he did with an ant. The ant was all amber. This droplet reflects greys and captures rainbow, shimmering like pearl.

Damp air condenses the odour of trees and he sniffs, tries to hold the scent in his
memory. Imagines it curling from leaves like waves rolling over and being consumed into water.

An occasional holler carries from the wooded banks. His brother and friends are
making a den.

Casper searches for the best stick, weighing each contender in his hands. Watches
them drop to the rushing torrent below, experiments with placement. Counts, “One, two, three...” out loud, waiting for each to appear. He prefers to remain silent around people; they misinterpret what he says. But here the surroundings understand, absorb his meaning with a hush. Like the river which accepts the sticks without judgement.

To me, he’s never been a difficult boy. But to others, they find his looks odd, his silence strange; the way he watches them as if studying their reactions for research, unnerving. He can speak but prefers to talk to the river and trees. Murmuring in a secret language. He spends his time by the brook in the woods, watching the water, throwing in sticks, humming a tune as the water burbles by.

We tried the local school where his sister and brother attended, but Casper, ‘...does
not engage,’ ‘...needs more appropriate education,’ ‘...a special school.’

We home school him. He soaks up numbers and facts like drops of rain on sun baked
earth. By the time he was three he knew his tables, by seven could recite Pi and the Fibonacci sequence to numerous digits.

He memorises the names of rivers, can detail their origins and the seas and oceans
into which they flow. His father, Robert, taught him chess and soon Casper was winning games. Sometimes he disappears, but I don’t worry, know I’ll either find him on the bridge in the wood or in the garden selecting pebbles. Only round ones, sorting them into specific sizes, placing them in a circular pattern, spiralling out from the centre. It resembles a blue print for a universe.

As a teenager, Casper returns to the woods. A grey figure in the grey wood under a grey sky. He left the house quickly, didn’t take a coat. He’d taken apart his brother’s computer, and although replaced it back exactly, his brother shouted at him, called him stupid. Casper hadn’t replied. Arguments make his blood bubble, his pulse race. He takes comfort as the river unwinds, it hums a melody, always different depending on how full it is. A beam of sunlight breaks through the cloud cover, gleams on the water, like runs of silver on a motherboard. Again, he counts as he drops each stick, works out the time taken against the length. Calculates the flow of water beneath the bridge. Nature makes sense, never raucous enough to unsettle him.

Into his teen years, Casper takes to collecting other things in the wood to add to his pebbles; snail shells and twigs, acorns and leaves. On an area of the patio, he makes a collage. If anybody tries to touch the objects, Casper lies down, curls himself on the concrete slabs, becoming central to the design. Will not be moved.

At Robert’s grave side, beneath an Autumn sky, surrounded by trees clothed in gold;
everybody except Casper wept. Then his hand reached for my fingers, streaked with dirt from scattering soil, ‘...dust to dust.’

I started, at Casper’s rare touch. “Flowers,” he said.

We plant spring and summer bulbs around the memorial, will return to see them
bloom and multiply over the years.

“Don’t bother Uncle Casper,” his brother says, as niece and nephew barge down to the
bridge, shoving Casper aside whilst he selects his stick. Casper tries to tell them which twig is best but they won’t wait, have thrown sprigged branches too soon. Scream with dismay when the unsuitable tokens catch under the bridge. Casper walks away, the screams echoing, disturbing the trees as noise bounces from trunk to trunk. A breeze makes the leaves quiver. As the others walk further along the path, Casper returns to the bridge. Quietly throws a stick in. A twenty second stick. His name is called, “Come on Uncle Casper.” He obeys knowing there will be no peace until he follows. Fears the hurl of a small body against him, and a sticky hand clasping his.

I worry about the future, what will Casper do? His brother and sister left for university, jobs, independent lives. But Casper? Then he repairs my computer and I realise he has a commercial skill. I advertise locally. ‘Casper Computer Repairs.’ I take in the computers, speak to clients. Casper works silently, repairing them. Only the gentle tick ticking of metal and miniature screw drivers; the tap tapping across a keyboard. A rhythm that beats out time, reminding me of the woodpecker in the woods.

Our house is quiet unless my grandchildren visit. They shriek in the garden playing
football, “You’re not a very good goalie,” they tell Casper. He shrugs and wanders away. But in the evening when they quieten down, Casper teaches them chess. Patient, as he describes each piece, their movement, different strategies.

I try not to think ahead, to a time when I will no longer be here. But his brother and
sister reassure me, they will continue to look out for him. That he will remain in the house for as long as he needs.

White rose petals, drift down to the river, one by one. As the man’s fingers let go of the satin curves, he watches them meld with water like snowflakes. The trees bend beside the river, observing the offering of petals. They whisper words that Casper understands, takes comfort from.

It starts to drizzle, a fine mist clouding Casper, soaking him through his grey shirt,
flattening his hair to his head. He doesn’t feel it, is numbed by the loss of his mother.

“Casper.” A shout from his sister. “There you are. You’ll catch cold.” The words
resound through the damp wood, making everything shiver.

She’s walking towards him, dressed in black, a black umbrella over her head.

Casper drops the rose stem, before she reaches the bridge. Watches it arrow the water. A thorn catches his thumb as it falls. A bead of blood hitting the flow like a tear.

The river winds in ribbon threads, coursing its channel as it has done for centuries. Deep between the wooded valley it wends its way. An instinctive stream of water on its way to the sea and then returned to the river once more. Eroding rocks and boulders, shifting pebbles and sand. Leaves on trees change colour, cascade down. And the river keeps flowing.

They find Mother’s journals, lined exercise books. Inked pages, overflowing with
jottings and poetry. His sister is sitting on the floor of the study, removing them from a box. She flicks through pages, making them flutter like a breeze in tree-tops. She’ll stop and read, and then move on to the next. Tears begin to fall, her sobs filling the room. She stands, and turning, presses her face into Casper’s shoulder. He remains still. His tears unshed. Remaining within. Coursing through his veins.

The old man’s vision is fogged. It is difficult for Casper to see the stick he wants. But by feel, his fingers root out one that is the perfect size, without notches and knots which would slow it down. He smiles as he senses the optimum ratio of length to girth. Holds it in his clawed fingers. Anticipating. A throb in his fingertips. He listens to the water’s call. Recognising the exact moment of release. There is no splash, just a whisper as the river embraces the stick, as if it’s been waiting. Casper turns, limping to the opposite side of the bridge, patient. He knows when the stick has passed below him. The air’s breath alters, brushes his skin. He cannot see the stick; but is aware it is there. Smiles, as he views it in his mind’s eye, bobbing on the undulating water beneath him, being borne toward the sea.

This is where his ashes will be scattered, dusting the water’s surface, diffusing into it.
Sensing the pull of flow.

Carrying all that remains away.

But in the knowledge that all will be returned.

Author: Stephanie’s writing journey began, when she was a finalist in a national writing competition. She enjoys writing in different genres and experimenting with different styles. Her collection, 'How to Catch and Keep a Kiss,' includes flash and short stories that have been long and short-listed and won various competitions.

The lurid evening lights of Southend lend the September sky a tawdry glow. Unnatural
greens and reds graffiti the blue-black background like ghetto tags. Jay Abara navigates the traffic, braking and throttling until his ankle aches. Engines snarl, music blares and car horns blast, but Jay is oblivious. Only one sound matters. He jabs the redial on his phone and again hears the engaged signal. Anika is not answering.

Anika. She reminds him of wild raves and drum ’n’ bass. But she is also a cool
evening breeze and the gentle lapping of the ocean. She moves like a fast car, weaving
through traffic or drifting through corners on mountain chicanes until your blood races. And she is a Sunday drive through jigsaw villages to picnics in wheat fields. Serious and funny, outrageous and contemplative, loud and soft. Everything you dream in a girl. Just one problem; she is dating his best mate.

Until Jay picked up a phone message earlier. Dion is cheating on her. Dion no longer
loves her. They argued and fought and Dion pushed her and... She needs a friend, but she does not know what she needs. She is done with all this. She needs to get away. She is going for a walk. Somewhere near the sea. Don’t try calling.

Jay fears what that means. She confided in him once. Those wide brown eyes
lowered. Brow wrinkled, a corrugated obsidian. She spoke about a bad time, when job and family and friends were knocked sideways all at once like skittles in a bowling alley. It was not a serious attempt, too little vodka, too few pills, a flatmate sure to discover her. Maybe this is the same. Perhaps the voicemail is code. Come for me, I need you. Or is he panicking for no reason, putting two and two together to make some imaginary number? Just an innocent stroll along the beach to clear her head. But what if it is not? What if it is a walk into the sea? The end of a pier? A cliff-top?

He recalls again the conversation weeks ago about a strange coastal path Anika read
about. An odd subject to raise when everyone else was obsessing with wars or Trump or cost of living. She learnt about a walkway and the image struck her in a way she would not explain. Jay sensed her filing it away in her mind, a snippet of information that might come in useful one day. Only now does it become clear. The path had a name. Jay is convinced that Anika is making for the Broomway.

A centuries-old route running for six miles along the Essex coast, a public right-of-
way connecting the mainland to Foulness Island, now redundant with the arrival of a bridge. So far, so whatever. But some call this path the most dangerous in Britain. Over one hundred deaths in its time, probably more. Not because of steep cliffs or sudden landslides. Not because of dangerous traffic or nervous kids waving zombie knives in your face. This path boasts a simpler threat. This path is four hundred metres out to sea.

Jay googled before he rushed out. The Broomway sits on top of a sandbank parallel to
the coast and emerges only at low tide. Markers show the way and to stray off course is to risk being trapped in quicksand or mudflats. But that is not the half of it. Walk the path at the wrong time of day and the tide catches you. It moves faster than you can run and it never stops. No second chances. No get-out-of-jail-free card. No letting you off with a caution.

He leaves the town centre and makes for Wakering Stairs, the place where the path
begins. The lights of Southend dance in the rear-view mirror; ahead lays the twilight gloom of the Thames estuary coastline. Which would be worse? Anika had in fact taken a stroll along a quiet promenade for an hour then driven back to friends somewhere? Or she spoke with Dion and he is prepared to take her back. They lounge now on a couch sipping cool wine and laughing at Jay’s message about coming to find her. Then Dion leads her into the bedroom. Jay starts wishing he will discover her there, on the sands. Then he thumps the steering-wheel with both hands, hating himself.

A poorly lit lane down to the coastline. Farmland surrenders to common land as he
nears the sea front. Hedges and trees line the route, swaying as though responding to his headlights. No buildings other than a derelict house to the right. No people. No vehicles. No Anika. Jay stops the car at the end of the lane facing the sea and slumps his head onto the wheel. Relief grapples with shame. He cannot believe this mercy dash. What does it say about him? He sits up straight and determines to change his life, as of today. Move on. He pulls the car into the driveway of the empty house to turn round and then he sees it. Anika’s car, abandoned. The driver’s door left open like a cry for help.

For a few seconds, he just stares. That moment when a vase is about to fall off the
shelf and time stops. Then, out of the car and racing toward the path shouting her name over and over. Arriving at a man-made slipway that leads down to the shore, Jay freezes at the scene. His cries will never be heard in this vast arena. The sky now a darker ultramarine with just a suggestion of the setting sun, a pinkish blush of a departing kiss. Beneath lies an undulating sea as far as the horizon, placid but menacing, daring you to enter. Between him and that expanse, a netherworld. Sand flats poke their heads above shimmering pools, evidence of the retreated tide. A purgatory where life is permitted only with a guest pass. Where you might wade from one sandbank to the next in ignorant bliss until the tide races back to claim you.

Ahead, a fence festooned with warning signs, then a causeway down to the track
where poles at intermittent stages mark out the route across the wet sand and shallow waters. No sign of Anika, so Jay scans the route of the path as it bears left into the distance to start its journey parallel to the coastline. Once or twice Jay mistakes the posts and markers for her slender figure. In the descending gloom, he despairs of spotting her until, there, way out to the left, a solitary figure, motionless, staring out to sea.

His shouts are lost in that amphitheatre, dismissed by the mocking evening breeze, so
he runs. Down the rough-hewn slope and across cracked concrete. Where the pathway begins, her Dr Martens lie discarded off to one side. Jay removes his own shoes in a clumsy hopping motion, then bare feet on mud, feeling the oozing and squelching. Now onto the wet sandbank itself, following the route between the markers, picking up speed. A surface of hardened crenulations, the sand packed into tight wavy lines moulded by the waves. The slapping of his feet soon became splashing, the route submerged under inches of water.

He yells her name over and over but the exertion of the run and the focus on staying
within the markers consume him, so the words are mumbled, a Buddhist mantra. Spray flicks up until he becomes drenched and cold, sweat chilling on his skin. The posts, now irregular and haphazard, bear him to the left. He sees Anika ahead in the distance, sees her begin to step out toward the sea, away from the markers. He screams her name, elongating syllables between rasping breaths. Heedless, she continues walking.

Jay’s mind races through options. Leave the pathway on a diagonal course to
intercept but risk encountering deeper water? Continue the path, then what? Can he rescue her if she submerges? Can he resuscitate someone drowned? Can he carry her back to land, but to where? He looks to the left and the shoreline seems far away, distances tricked by the featureless surface and the impending twilight. He gives up thinking, lowers his head and concentrates on the rhythmic splashing of his feet, a stark tattoo in the stillness.

Time stretches. Distances have no meaning in this otherworldly landscape. Anika is
much further away than Jay first thought, but her movements seem slow and neither the treacherous sands nor the voracious tide have yet claimed her. He arrives at the point where she left the pathway then turns to pursue her. Within a few steps, he needs to stop, his lungs screaming, his chest beating. Hands on damp knees, gulping air. Precious seconds, then he raises his head and speaks her name, calmer now, sure she will hear.

Fifty metres ahead – or is it a hundred? She pauses and half-turns. Her face, those
delicate features, now drawn. Mouth turned down; posture slumped. Then she recognises him and her lips part. Her eyes widened and for a moment he sees the look he remembered.

“Jay?”

He spends agonising seconds analysing her voice. Is that disappointment? Does she
hope for Dion, ready to fall into his arms? Shall he run to her? Will that scare her? These and a thousand other thoughts scroll through his mind too fast to process. Stay cool, he decided.

“Hey Ani. Sup?”

She turns to face him full on and they remain in that position for several seconds. Jay
regains his composure enough to sense the absurdity. Then he remembers photos of those Gormley sculptures on a beach that Anika showed him once. Maybe that will be how they will look in the morning, stuck upright in the sand after the tide has receded again.

“How did you....? Oh, you remembered.” She nods to herself then looks at him, head
tilted, questioning. “You came after me?” Her eyes narrow and she runs both hands through her hair, as though trying to process it all.

Jay has not prepared a speech. They always know what to say in films, but they have
a team of scriptwriters and a full orchestra playing a John Williams score. Keep it simple, he decides. The fact is, he does not know whether Anika has any feelings for him. Prostrating himself at her feet with a gushing outpouring of emotion, may just cause her to turn and run.

“Yeah, well. Heard your message. Worried you were planning to do something silly.”

Anika drops her hands to her side and looks around.

“This place. It’s how my life feels, Jay. I can’t take it anymore.”

She looks back at him, body inclined toward him, trying to make him understand.

“I get it. I do. But the thing is,” Jay points out the pathway stretching off into the
distance, “even here, there’s markers to keep you on the path. They’ll always be there to look after you. They care about you.”

He holds his hand out toward her. Anika looks across at the pathway, then out to the
open sea, then back to him. Jay remains motionless, for the first time feeling the seawater freezing his ankles, the wind gusting. Above, two gulls pursue each other across the vast sky. He wonders whether they watch the drama beneath just as he watches their synchronised wheeling, neither sure how it will end.

Tracking their flight, he fails to notice that Anika is moving toward him. Her face
looks down, arms tight to her side. Then, as she comes close, she lifts her head and mouths a silent thank-you as she takes his hand. He looks up and sees the gulls make one more circuit before disappearing into the distance together. He turns and leads her back to the safety of the path.

Author: Several of his short stories have been published in anthologies and on-line since Richard Garcka attended Creative Writing classes in Guildford a few years' ago. He works across a variety of genres with a common ambition of offering uplifting tales in these difficult times.