Many congratulations to the 10 writers who made it through to the final round this month!
Our reading team are busy deciding on the winners of the cash prizes but the winner of the People’s Prize is over to you. The prompt word was LEAVES and the max word count was 175.
Read and vote below! Voting closes at 23.59 GMT on Monday 26th Feb.
All the Things He Left
His cup, which stains the sideboard with concentric circles that she doesn’t want to wipe in case she never hears the clatter of his spoon again. White, two sugars.
Spare keys. Dropped into the bowl beside the door, the one she’d thought too fancy for loose change and the odds and sods she still plucks from the sofa back and cupboards.
His laugh. The way it explodes at the things she says and lingers in the air like the silence which follows the click of the door.His face. The way his smile slid and fell, half of him the same and the other dragged from the wreckage.
His touch. The dent beside her on the mattress where he’d shroud himself. Like a crime scene, she’d joke, when she poked him awake, before the sirens were for him. She searches her body for fingerprints.
How We Will Leave
We will depart in triumphant glory, revelling in our bronzed age, soaring away like the horse-chestnut leaves and sycamore seeds blowing down the street, leaving the deep-rooted security of constancy for the unknown.
We will be scattered by our grandchildren chasing errant Labradors through the park-keepers crisp piles of gold and red and brown,
We will evaporate in next door’s bonfire, blazing under rimy starlight, our glowing embers fading into the night.
We will disappear in a gentle rotting away, our fabric absorbed by our resting place.
Whichever way we leave, remember us.
In this version…
the ashes gust together, gathering into the urn. My hands clutch back the children’s grasp. We walk back through the formalities; hymns choke down our throats. You unburn. We get back into the car, go back into the house, where I shed black clothes like snake’s skin. The children crumple back to foetal positions in their beds.
Two weeks follow, like the blankness of snow. Interspersed with implosions of grief. That still must happen, even in this version. But grief is only love with no place to go. In this version, the love is poured back in. Tears crawl up to our eyes. Our cheeks’ riverbeds evaporate. I hand back casseroles to our neighbours. The well-wishers eat their words.
The policewoman dribbles her tea into the cup. Her pitying face transforms to poker, as she returns to the doorstep. Knocks absorb into her knuckles. And you backpedal. Backpedal. Please Backpedal. Come back through the door. Peel off your cycling gloves. Suck a kiss from my lips. Swallow your vow of going for a quick ride.
Into The Wardrobe
Where the stale sweat in the fabric of your mother’s dress pulls your shoulders back and you feel her corset like grip to your throat. Sit still, she’d hiss as you stretched yourself mannequin straight at the thought of what would happen if you didn’t. It stinks of piss in here. Her winter coat pools at your thighs. Sometimes she brings visitors; you hear them puff like trains, the clink of their keys, their breath lingering on windowpanes with a damp sock smell of disappointment.
Never look, your brother said, before he passed you a tenner and left. You close your eyes, slipping your feet into her fancy shoes, imagining a love that could hold you tall in kitten heels that purr like the nine lives she didn’t choose. She used to paint your nails. Hers are chewed and chipped. You feel for the varnish as you push against the wardrobe back. When you climb out, you’ll colour them Vixen.
It Always Was And Is
By the Old Hall is a sunken trench. It is full of leaves. The guidebook tells me this path has been carved by the footfall of many years. I think of how the leaves have not obliterated its presence. I imagine women who went about their daily lives, the stories they carried from dwelling to dwelling, women visiting women to birth a child, sharing gossip gleaned from listening under the eaves of the hall, dropping the words like pebbles in a pond. The guidebook talks of witch marks, the scorching of beams, women punished for their failure to protect, the ducking stool, and the scold’s bridle.
I am brought out of my reverie by a notification on my phone. I look at the message. It’s Barry asking where his clean shirt is, followed by an emoji of an angry face. I press delete, slip the phone into my pocket, and then carry on walking.
Leaves
Stumbling out, into the sunset, tear-blind and lost in the aftermath of you, thoughts ricocheting round my head like bullets. You. Her. Us. Over…when the face-slap colours startle me back, way too intense for deep midwinter. I find myself standing at the turn in the track, lifting my chin to the fiery sky where a naked sycamore claws at the crimson, its twig-sticky fingers scratching the air, telling our tale in dry-tipped semaphore. Tap-tap-tap, the sun too hot. Tap-tap-tap, burned itself free.
I sigh out loud in powdery clouds my gaze slumping low to the fallen-leaf hedgerow where under the branches piles and piles of brittle vermillion lie crisp and haunted or sugared white – fragments of fire that died in the fight, then, in slow, slow motion, I raise a boot, bring it down to release the sound… and suddenly. Suddenly, I’m laughing out loud, stamping and laughing like the child I was, laughing and dancing and kicking and spinning like the girl I was, like me before you.
Morning Runner
The soldier jogging by the Pēblinge Sø says ‘Hi’. She smiles. When they reach the busy intersection at Gyldenløvesgade, he takes her hand; she’s not used to so many bicycles. She leaves him there. Back at the hotel, her husband is still asleep. She tugs the bag, packed last night, from under the bed, closes the door behind her, leaves him there. At the stall by Vesterport Station she pauses, looks at her ‘phone, nods to the blue-haired barista, time for one last strong coffee before she leaves to take the metro to the airport. She switches her ‘phone to silent. Will he even notice that her hairbrush and trainers have disappeared? She should have left a note. And is he still running, her Danish soldier with his flat open face and sparky blue eyes? Is he waiting for her by the Pêblinge Sø, waiting to see if she would keep her word? Or did he just shrug and sprint away? She should have sent a note.
Plenty of Sunlight
At the nursery, Rhonda hovers by a stand of poinsettias. Her son and his wife will think she’s coping if she decorates.
‘Excuse me,’ she says to a man her age in a nursery uniform. ‘Will the red leaves last till Christmas?’
‘Brats,’ the man says, or at least that’s what Rhonda hears.
‘Sorry?’ She glances around for naughty children.
The nursery man steps closer, touches a red leaf. ‘Bracts,’ he says quietly. ‘The leaves. They’ll last two, three months.’ He brushes his hands on his pants. ‘More if you’re a real green thumb.’
Rhonda shakes her head. ‘I’m not any kind of thumb. My husband was the gardener.’ And the awful sensation comes again, like being sucked down the plughole of a giant bath. She blinks and breathes.
‘You’ll do fine.’ The man’s eyes are bright against weathered skin. ‘Full darkness at night. Water every morning. Plenty of sunlight.’
‘Ah,’ she manages.
He holds out a poinsettia and she takes it, suddenly pleased. The pot is warm as summer against her palms.
Six Encyclopaedic Facts About Black Holes
- Black holes form at the end of stars’ lives.
Her life was 2 days 6 hours 46 minutes and 7 seconds.
- Gravity near the core of a black hole approaches infinity. This theoretically suggests infinite curvature of spacetime.
If I continue to refine her lifespan into milliseconds, nanoseconds etc, I could divide time infinitely. Does this theoretically suggest I could keep her alive indefinitely?
- Black holes are huge concentrations of matter packed into tiny spaces.
Like a premature baby. Like the baby-shaped hole she leaves.
- The gravitational influence of a black hole distorts spacetime. The closer you get to a black hole, reality as we know it, breaks down.
[See entry for grief]
- Although black holes are theoretically infinite, quantum physics propose they emit thermal radiation and thus eventually shrink over astronomical timescales.
Time can be a healer, and this is both true and untrue. (Another quantum paradox?)
- Black holes are among the most mysterious cosmic objects, much studied but not fully understood.
[See entries for love, grief, motherhood]
The Silence Of The Leaves
They look at my painting and see so much in it. Their voices fill the room with vacant clichés. Their eyes are gleaming, they’re holding the truth, they know me. In the soft rounded teeth of the edges, they say they see the fragility of the lives I carried inside me. They say that the two shapes are hugging,united forever. They say the colours are so telling. The yellowing tones, the blemished hues show untimely decay. In those yellow strokes, they hear my tears. Yet, the shades of green show youth. They say I’ll be ok because green is the colour of hope. They say painting that picture was therapeutic for me. And then, there are the grey, broken contorted stalks. They say those show how they were cut off from me. They think the dark red pot is my womb, that place that was not good enough for my baby twins to grow. They think they see so much. But I just wanted to paint the portrait of two leaves in a pot.
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