May 24 Monthly Micro Shortlist
It's so hard to choose!
The Shortlist is in!
The 10 shortlisted stories in the May Monthly Micro contest are now ready for voting. The Prompt was ROSE and there was an extra challenge of the 100 word limit so a huge congratulations to everybody who made the shortlist.
You can read the shortlist and vote for your favourite until 23.59 GMT on Monday 27nd May and the winners will be announced on the 28th.
At Last
Sister, mother, grandmother, tyrant. And now corpse.
There wasn’t a wet eye in the house. Churches proffer comfort. Those here today
greedily embraced the comfort in knowledge that Rose was no more. The thorny,
halitosis-riddled witch I was made to call Gran was breathless at last.
She once whisper-spat good riddance as I knelt before my father’s casket. It was the
most pitiable day of my ten-year-old life.
The priest stood. Rose was loved, he began, uncertain. Celebrants cast bemused looks
across empty pews. A beat. Satan loved her, I offered. As resolute Amens echoed, the
tittering swelled to laughter.
Don’t Take Away the Last Eleven Years, Four Months, and Nine Days From Me
There’s a bunch of roses tied to the lamppost at the bottom of the road; red heads drooping; fewer petals every day marking the time since. Soon only the family and the driver will remember.
Your flowers are in another town; nine-hour round-trip on the bus. Longer if I miss
the connection.
Yesterday, your brother’s girlfriend tried to tell me why you were there, but I stopped
her.
Like a rose after the bloom, memories need to be tended, or only wilted leaves and a
rotten stem remain and then, what would have been the point of us at all?
John Lennon Distracts You From Inviting a Girl to The School Disco
You agree to meet Linda at the market bookstall. You’ve screwed up the nerve to invite her to the end-of-term party.
It’s raining, and Linda’s late, so you shelter under the awning and riffle through the books, even though these days you don’t read anything — except for Lady Chatterley’s Lover from your Dad’s bedside when he’s at church — unless it’s on your syllabus.
Linda arrives just as you’ve discovered a signed copy of John Lennon’s In His Own Write. You borrow money from her to secure the treasure, impaling your courage on the red rose that stays in your pocket.
Serene Efficacy
Life can be so simple.
Extracting blood, refreshing the flow, soft-muscled leeches suck on grafted skin,
tearing holes, reviving veins while humming bees are shifting pollen, spawning seeds
to fertilise and form new plants and flowers, sustenance for insects, birds and bats
and on the stem a gleaming red black-spotted bug of beauty walks, ignoring prickles,
nibbling, chewing noxious aphids, safeguarding leaves and petals of the rose,
ensuring blooms in spring, unfolding glassy, fragile wings and taking flight, a fingertip
landing, now crawling on my palm while Gertude sighs above the skies:
A ladybird is a ladybird is a ladybird...
Sod Sweetness; Thorns Are My Thing
Why can’t you be more like Rose? Mum always asks. My perfect little sister, with her beautiful face and beautiful manners, who can afford to be nice because everyone gives her everything without her even having to ask. Men want to marry her; they only want to fuck me. So a week before her wedding I’m up against the wall of a grotty pub toilet, her fiancé grunting into me in his last flail at freedom, just so I can feel like I’ve won as I watch them say their vows while Mum dabs at her eyes, looking so proud.
The Collector
He noticed her in line. Rainbow hair, both arms inked from wrist to shoulder, blazing
galleries of colour, pink flamingos and purple mountains.
At the bar, he felt a hand on the small of his back, gentle breath in his ear. “Come” she
whispered. She led him by the hand and sashayed through the dull beat of limbs and bodies of the ordinary. Outside, he noticed the tattoo of a rose on her stark white back was achromatic, ashen like the embers of yesterday's fire. “You’re my first” she said, and his world turned to black.
The Dead
It seemed like a bad joke, at first, when Ronald Reagan rose from the dead; but after considering the alternatives, I went ahead and voted for him. No one knows why he was the first: the lightest sleeper, if you will. It was a great novelty in those early years when they would turn up sporadically, digging the dirt out of their ears. A real lifeline for a declining porn industry, for one thing. But that was before we realised how much their time in the dark had changed them. And now the graveyards are emptying, and they keep coming.
The Perfumer’s Wife
At first, she wore the scent of his handpicked May roses, infused with heady cinnamon spice and a top note of sweet naivety.
The chemistry was undeniable.
By the following season, his formula had changed. Now, it was complex, exacting, and
absolute: deep red Damask roses, crushed and steeped with the trappings of amber and a base layer of despair.
In time, she began to craft her own extract that would finally renounce his cloying hold. She anointed herself with a fresh fragrance that broke free from tradition, the lightest aroma carrying a heart note of hope in her wake.
Visits to My Aunt
We stood at the window, drinking wine, admiring the garden. Pink roses threatened to conquer the lawn. A watercolour. One flower bleeding into the next.
The next time, the bush was meeker. You poured a glass and said it would bounce back. No worry.
A few months later, I thought it sick: branches swooping low as a willow. You denied it, offered tea. You had no milk. No wine.
Now, you grip the countertop, pouring lukewarm water into an oily glass. I curse myself, the clock, your lies: stare at those last delicate petals, shrinking and fading before my eyes.
What Rose did with her blue paste stone necklace (which cost her lover £2 at a car boot sale) on the ferry to a new life
She tells herself it brings only pain, and throws it overboard, like the other Rose did
in Titanic the movie, whom she’s always wanted to be, so much so that she brags
how her lover sketched her naked (it was photos, leverage), how they’d made love in
a stagecoach (a Ford Fiesta, no consent), how he’d drowned at sea (it was a bath),
and she thinks of him as she watches her knock-off jewel sink below the waves, how
unlike Jack he was and more like nasty Cal, and wonders if anyone will ever find out
she’d held him under.
What a choice this month! So difficult to pick just one. Well done to everyone on the shortlist.