Throughout June, we invited flash submissions in response to one of two prompts below!
A. Tell the story of your life in a flash memoir by following one type of image that recurs in three or so episodes of your life. It could be songs, food, clothes, hairstyles, furniture, houses, cars.
B. The spirit of a wild place manifests itself in physical form. What shape does it take? What message does it have?
The Winner
Musical Balm by L.C. Ferguson
I. From the ditch, the red Mini Metro is blasting Pulp, Jarvis posturing into the darkening summer’s evening. The three of us have spurned alcohol for driving local country lanes, to celebrate the end of “A” levels. The damage is minimal, I’m relieved but disappointed. The day before the damage was maximal and life changing: parents threatening to throw me out because my latest fuck turned up, “looking like a man”. I’m leaving in a month anyway.
II. Opera and dramatics through the wall: Pavarotti and mum. Last year’s holiday, with siblings and mother was joyous. This year she’s making up for it with the ranting shouting craziness that is the roulette of our time together. I lie sobbing, rubbing my baby bump, wishing myself gone.
III. We’re travelling the country, house-hunting. I’m useless in our choosing, oblivious to the present or the future, full of grief from suicide. Two young children look up before I go as if I’ll never return. I hold their faces, one in each hand, wondering how mum could leave. Kissing heads before lacing up trainers, I run into the hills, headphones full of Kate Bush, crying out the pain.
The Responses
Skin and Blister/Big Sister by Tamsin Cottis
A small motherless girl, glimpsed at the South tip of Epping Forest, where smart houses wink order through the leaves. She turns off the wide main path of soil packed concrete-hard by a million fancy running shoes, walking boots, trip-hazard dogs in designer jackets. Sharp right, away from the loud-shout, schools-out cool kids: the girl is fast. On a damp thin track – slippery, root-bound spine down a wild back – she weaves between skinny, random-seed trees: sycamore, oak, elder, yew. Ivy and thorn.
Deep in overgrowth, she is contained, not constrained; not crowded out but held. Heading for the open glade, dashes of light dance to her. A parakeet screech is wind at her heels, skiddy-sandal feet powering her on. Until a bramble witch-arm catches her bony wrist.
Flesh scored by a line of blood, the girl stops, shocked, hand on hurt. From the unbridled green she conjures longed-for Big Sister. Voice in a breeze says,
‘I told you, kiddo, there’s no getting past the scratches. ‘Don’t fuss. You’re fine.’ Sister cleans her calm with a finger-lick, lip-flick of a kiss-it-better. A little shove at her back, whispers, ‘Remember, Titch. You’ve got this.’
Small girl runs anew.
Prompt A by Jennifer McGowan
We never sing Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve. There are other traditions instead. The lump of coal swapped for bucks fizz at the front door and in bed by half 12. Yet the old tune cranks on like a music box in my head. Again and again, my thoughts catch on notches of longing.
One night on the sofa, Morrissey sings me Asleep, just like Dad used to do. Although, this time the lullaby doesn’t send me to sleep. There’s sunlight breaking through my lilac curtains, morning windchimes and the smell of freshly-baked bread. And, as Morrissey fades, the music box winds on, slow and familiar with Auld Lang Syne.
The next day, It’s a Wonderful Life is on the telly – Dad’s favourite film. No huge coincidence, it’s always on this time of year. Except somehow I can’t remember the ending. At least until that old familiar music box starts up again. This time there are lyrics, too and suddenly I’m up on my feet, hand on my chest, not sure of the words but still attempting to make the shapes with my mouth to show my patriotism. They’re telling me something. About another world. A better world.
Pins, Needles by Jack Houston
Mummy’s holding it & it’s big so big & Mummy’s gonna put it in me gonna put it in my leg & Mummy tells me it won’t hurt not too much but it will i know it will & Mummy says she’s got to got to got to the doctors have said they’ve said they have
Take the lighter from underneath. Give the spoon a little shake. Make sure the business is fully cooked. Grip a cigarette filter in my teeth. Pull it in half. The liquid hit soaks into it quick. Like it needs it. Needs this. Pull it. Up. In. Home. Almost. Flick bubbles. Flick flick. Slide smoothly into the found vein. Gently. Draw slowly back. Yes. Plume. Curling. The talons of a dragon. The warming shmuzz of its roar.
There’s quite a few at the local chemist waiting with me, everyone keen to get themselves protected. Someone calls my name and I go into the little room where there’s a nurse, I assume they’re a nurse, and a chair. Which I sit in. The slick procedure handled with skill. Straight into the muscle at the top of my arm. Barely felt a thing.
My Hair by Chrissy Sturt
When little, the troublesome frizz was groomed away by an older sister who enjoyed smoothing me into something less ugly. Then she left. Who would tackle the terrible hair? Mother’s answer was a crew cut; mistaken for an unfortunate-looking boy, I vanished into the family’s turbulent slipstream.
A teen friend, keen on rebellion, doused me with cheap chemicals that stung and choked. Mother clutched her throat, and requested a hairdresser do something, only more dye scorched my head with angry orange streaks. I became a warning against wildness, invoked by teachers when the class grew restive. Nobody wanted to look like … me.
At university, a lover flipped me upside down and scrunched my hair into plasticky spokes. See, beautiful. Mysterious products were pressed into my unpractised hands.
These buttery curls secured me a career and husband, but motherhood made diffusing and defrizzing an indulgence; I retreated to a sharp pixie cut, and him indoors lamented my glossy ringlets.
And what now, as I push on into middle age?
I am long, short.
Brown, blonde.
Straight, curly.
Up, down.
Tight, loose.
Styles as shifting as my moods.
It’s impossible to pinpoint the real me.
Maybe turning grey will settle it.
You Don’t Like Numbers by Chris Cottom
You don’t like numbers, particularly seven, which you decline to say. ‘Five, six, NO, eight, nine, ten.’ When big cousin Sally asks you how high you can count, you say ‘twenty-nine-thirty’, because you think it’s one number. You take your Friday sixpence to the sweetshop where everything’s a puzzle of pennies and halfpennies and chunky threepenny bits.
Those hard sums defeat you. If Boy A has half the cake and Boy B is aged eight, how many apples does Johnny have? Algebra isn’t a town in Spain, but a land of danger where x and y lurk behind brackets to beat you with BODMAS, who’s really a James Bond villain. Your log book has no pictures of lumberjacks, no words at all. The boys in Set One talk about calculus, but not the Tintin professor one.
In your, ironically named, Elementary Mathematics O-Level you get the worst grade of fail. You retake and fail again. Oxford won’t let you in without it, so at nearly eighteen you have a private tutor, a first-year Somerville physicist called Susan, who gets you through. She teaches you more than maths and you’ve been married now for thirty-one years, or it might be thirty-two.
Love Of Apples by Jacqui Hodge
I twist my first homegrown ‘love apple’ off the stem. My first attempt at growing tomatoes for over fifty years.
Now an instant urge for a tomato sandwich for lunch.
As a child in an isolation hospital my mother brought me the thinnest tomato sandwich, white bread, crusts removed. It tasted heavenly.
Apples featured strongly in my childhood. Halloween, my mother spent all day making toffee apples. They stood on crinkled paper, sticks leaning left and right, unable to keep them standing tall. I watched golden toffee trickle down into a thicker puddle at the base. Reaching up just above the table, I poked the toffee hoping it was set, so I could enjoy the promised first taste.
I remember a large garden with an orchard, or maybe it was just one apple tree appearing that grand to me, allowing me to climb and play.
Now one look at the fruit, brings my mother to mind.
After many years in the profession I never did receive ‘an apple for the teacher ‘, regarded as a means of attracting favoritism. However it’s nothing too concerning, especially remembering my happy childhood. After all an apple never falls far from the tree.
The Singing Stones by Bean Sawyer
Chattering crows. Lambs bleating. Laughter between two hikers, now dots, walking the Golden Road over the Preseli ridge. I can hear them all. Sound travels differently up here, not contained, like it is below. Even a whisper can carry for miles.
The stones rattle and shift beneath me, tumbling, knocking together like hollow bones as Draig’s head emerges. An eye, deep as space, blinks. I stumble into the dragon’s pit. It smells of death. And life. Roots twist around my limbs pinning me down. Bluestone, glittering with dolomite stars. Silver veins running through rock. Layers upon layers. Years upon years.
‘Stupid humans, so busy making your own noise, you’ve forgotten to listen,’ Draig’s breath like mushrooms silences my cries.
‘I was here before Man ran barefoot with the auroch and time was measured by the rise and fall of the sun. I’ve had enough of your talk,’ Draig leaned in, ‘the Earth holds many secrets.’
Voices rise like distant rumbles of thunder. Bubbling up in springs. Rocks ringing, humming, singing in languages I can’t recall. ‘This is who you are. Remember your roots.’
Draig sinks back into the earth. Eye turned to stone. An echo whispers over the hills.
The Final Encounter by Karen Waldron
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he says to me without speaking.
The thin cobwebby mist encircles his downy ears, which are as copper as an old penny. They twitch and flicker, tuning in to the frail sounds in the pale wood.
‘You know, it doesn’t have to be how it’s always been between us,’ he says mutely.
His long coat ebbs and flows in the white breeze. He leans, nonchalantly, on his silver cane, but his apparent lack of concern is betrayed by his quivering fur.
A sudden breeze makes the lake shiver, and a thread of drool escapes my mouth as his warm, fleshy scent fills my snout. I can’t help but flick my brush.
It would take just one leap to be on him, I know. And as soon as the thought has formed in my mind, I see that he sees it, and his soft eyes fill with tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ I mouth, ‘But, it’s taken a long time to find you and though I hoped it might not be so, you are just too irresistible. My dearest, delicious Master Rabbit.’
TICK-TOCK by Judy Graham
‘You look fab!’ says Cynthia as I glue on the third pair of eyelashes.
‘Who’s the fairest in the land?’ I ask the mirror.
‘Paul McCartney. Go on, do the bottom.’ I paint spider legs along my lower lid. ‘More mascara. Use Mum’s.’ The worn block, which I’m sure is dried shoe polish, requires a good spit. A bit of undigested sandwich mixes into the sticky glob: the make-up cake will grow mould. Dusty doesn’t have this trouble.
Tick-tock.
The tannoy silences Wham! ‘Beginners, please.’
‘All right, love?’ It’s the wardrobe mistress.
‘My eyelashes are not sticking.’
‘Don’t worry. Get on stage.’ I hold out my palms, offering up two worn centipedes.
‘Never mind, you aren’t playing the ingenue anymore.’
Tick-tock.
Listening to Radio 4, I sit before my new 5X magnification mirror with an LED ring. My reflection is not clear. I put on my spectacles. They don’t help. I add reading glasses on top. I can see. I squeeze glue on lash extensions. Stop. Impossible to fix them with a barrier of two convex lenses in between. I smash the mirror. Ten years bad luck. At my age, I may not make it till then.
#lostglove by Hannah Smith
==
Red mittens, knitted by Nan. Stitched to elastic for safekeeping and fed through the arms of my coat. This is her love language.
I hate the tangly binding, so snip-snip the mittens free… And lose one.
==
Rainbow-striped gloves from C&A. Fingers = big girl-ness; store-bought = cool.
Nan says: “take good care of them”, but I don’t, and two gloves become one.
==
I buy myself long evening gloves for a party. I am briefly glamorous, quickly drunk.
One glove drowns in the hot tub, the other vanishes.
==
After Nan’s funeral, I find eight pairs of her gloves, tags-attached, never worn, lovingly nestled in tissue paper.
I think about all I’ve lost.
==
In a bar, I meet a man who photographs lost gloves, and posts them online – #lostglove.
He tells me that the gloves which are lying prone on the ground make him sad, but the ones positioned waving on railings bring him hope.
I tell him about my mittens on elastic… And all the other gloves I’ve lost… And about Nan’s unworn gloves… And then I realise that I’m crying, and that he’s slowly backing away.
He leaves one glove behind, in the bar.
The Amber Diver by Alexandra Packer
I hear her sing-song summon over the bellow of the Baltic and I run back from the waves to our city in the sand.
There, among sandwiches and cousins, grandmother reigns from her beach hut. Her favourite necklace drips like the sun over the oily leather of her breast, strings of yellow stones I suckled as a baby, willing them to melt into honey.
Now I slurp the strawberry compote she hands me and I ask:
“Babciu, where does amber come from?”
She leans out from the hut, eyes twinkling with stories.
“Where now we have our sea there once was a forest. When the deluge grew near all the trees began to weep, mourning the end soon to come. Sticky floods of golden tears, all aglow like fireflies, drowning tiny insects as they fell.”
“How do you know?” I demand, small and coarse with fear.
“Because I was there,” she laughs and winks and holds up to my eye the biggest of the ambers. I squint through it until I can almost see her: fish-tailed and swift in the primordial waters, diving for her jewels, those luminous little graves made by the drowning forest.