AUTUMN WRITING COMPETITIONS - WINNERS!
Dear Readers,
Merry Christmas to you all,
What fun I’ve had reading all of your wonderful stories. Twenty-three entries and all of them written with precision, nuance and intelligence.
It really was difficult picking the winners, at the expense of sounding trite, you are all winners. Writing is immensely hard, and every story is an adroit piece of prose. Thank you for the time you spent on them, I am moved by your commitment.
The ones I’ve chosen accomplished the almost impossible task of telling a long story in a small frame of time. These are enigmatic, curious pieces of writing, and everyone should be extremely proud of their contributions.
Until next time,
Your loving writer,
Hanif.
STRANGERS
There are many different accents on the boat going to the island. I hear one I don’t like, move away from the others and lean on the bow. The captain is a Shetland man, but the rest of us are strangers. We’ve come here to see the visitors.
The accent provokes the old pain in my shoulder. I try to think of something else, and end up thinking about last year’s World Cup.
“It’s England versus Germany,” Tony said, jumping up and down, the way only children can, “and Bobby Charlton will be playing. You can watch it on our new telly!”
I said I was busy. It was only a white lie.
The boat nudges the jetty. I wait for everyone else to get off first as I don’t want anyone making a fuss. The captain insists on helping me off the boat and says: “Remember what I said, auld fella.”
An old yellow GPO van and a local guide are waiting. I hang back, sit down on a barrel and look out to sea. The van engine grumbles into life and they leave without me. Then the boat returns to the sea and soon the only sound I can hear are the waves gently breaking. I am alone, but that’s alright. I want to find the visitors on my own. They’re strangers here too in a way – rare migrants that haven’t visited Shetland for a century.
The newspaper cutting rustles as I pull it out of my pocket. I read the headline again: ‘Birdwatchers flock to Shetland to see rare Snowy Owls’.
Fred, my eldest, and Tony’s dad, didn’t approve of me coming here.
“You’re 72, Dad,” he said.
I should have told him how the birds had saved me, after I came home from the trenches, and showed him my little dog-eared bird guide. There were faded pencil ticks by every illustration, except one, and that’s why I had to come north, before it was too late.
The captain told me where to find the owls. I shift my weight on the barrel and take a deep breath. The breeze is salty and cool. I put the newspaper cutting away and get up. My legs hurt. Everything hurts these days, but the shoulder pain is the worst. It always has been. Got to get moving. I button-up my duffel coat and pull my bobble-hat down. Turning to face the island, I realise I’m not alone.
A tall man with a white moustache stands by some lobster pots. He’s about my age, I think. He’s wearing an Ascot cap and a long tweed coat. The binoculars around his neck are twice the size of mine. He smiles at me. We are strangers, but I feel I know this person somehow, so I don’t mind sharing the captain’s directions. He listens and nods, but he doesn’t say anything. Must be the quiet type.
I lead the way and he follows. He has a bad leg and we have to stop three times as we follow the steep path onto the moorland. The third time we look at each other and smile. His face is red and I’m sure mine is too.
The moorland is a dull green, and a powerful wind makes the small plants shudder by the path. We spend two hours, maybe three, looking for the owls, without success. I can’t help grumbling, but my new friend doesn’t say anything. My shoulder aches as I scan the moors again. Then I feel a strong hand on my arm. It’s my new friend. He points at a rocky outcrop – a huge white bird is floating above the dark stone.
“It’s the male,” he says. “Oh yes, most definitely.”
The accent is strong, and unmistakeably German. I push his hand away and glare at the man who was my silent friend a moment before. His smile fades and we recognise each other for the first time.
He takes a step back and taps his bad leg: “Verdun,” he says.
I put my hand on my shoulder and say: “The Somme.”
A high-pitched bark draws us back to the rocky outcrop. It’s the female. She’s even bigger than the male, but with black flecks on her white plumage. The two ghosts fly side by side and disappear behind the rocks. I look at the old man next to me. His coat is too big for him. We nod at each other and set off for the rocks together.
BELCH
It was a winter Tuesday, and I was commuting home from work. The subway was crowded, and I sat beside a homeless man. You don't need to know much about him; all that matters is that he burped.
The belch was cartoonishly violent. Its production sounded painful; the man's esophageal structures flapped like a stiff playing card in bicycle spokes. It overpowered the train's rumbling, yet no one seemed to notice.
Perhaps I was the only one.
My body reflexively straightened, battening down my nostrils for the looming olfactory siege. The space between the sounding of a stranger's belch and the arrival of its humid intestinal air turns out to be its own breed of purgatory.
Everything vanished. It was just me and the belch.
My mind raced with anticipation.
I felt perplexed—even concerned—that, as I felt the warm air push at my cheeks, my first thought was: "I want to smell it." I immediately felt the urge to submit, to let the stench invade me and burn my nostrils like a fine whiskey.
I'd long been fascinated with the homeless: Where do they go? What do they eat? Who are they? If, as it is said, "we are what we eat," could I meet this man? His belch is what he ate, and what he ate is he.
Would it smell like me?
I felt a tickle in my nostrils.
I imagined watching as he ate his last meal. It's dark. I see him hunched over, his oversized Dickensian rags flapping as he speedily scurries after a plump rat. He pounces and clasps his hands around the rodent. Like Goya's Saturn, he violently bites the squirming varmint's neck as it omits plaintive tea kettle shrieks. Tufts of mangy fur sail through the air; the blood spills from his Santa Claus-like lips, shooting down his forearms in purposeful tributaries and dripping back down to the pavement.
My cheeks grew rosy in the gaseous air.
His mother used to hold his little body against her bosom as he cried, feeling the pressure of something unfathomable rising inside him. She bobbed up and down, gently patting his back until he belched. She'd praise him and kiss his forehead.
I thought I saw condensation on the windows.
Maybe excising his gut in confined public spaces makes him feel powerful. Each belch is an act of chemical warfare against the elites, a way to force entry into their posh bodies and become unmistakably present.
Or maybe he's generous. Perhaps the flatulence of the dregs is a cure for something, a secretly powerful smelling salt. One good whiff will knock you flat on your ass, freeing you from all your disenchantment and malaise. You'd wake up safe in your childhood bedroom. You'd hear your parents laughing in the other room. You'd rise out of bed feeling more content than ever. You'd notice a spider on the wall. Rather than fearfully squish it, as you were once prone to do, you'd gently guide it into your palm and place it on the window sill.
Maybe it's the cure for modern callousness: "Inhale my gaseous runoff and share my struggle; thou shall know compassion." He understands that empathy is penetration: the other in you, yourself in the other.
All you have to do is submit.
The moist air clouding around your face is the stranger's extended hand.
He's offering a gift.
It's all around you.
I enthusiastically inhaled.
…
It smelled like Diet Pepsi.
SPRING ROSES
Claire was washing dishes at the kitchen sink when she saw her in the garden, a woman crouched in the flower bed and working at something in the soil. She wore a cloth tied around her head and a long, shapeless dress that lay bundled around her thighs.
Claire’s first impulse was to phone someone for help, but instead she left the dishes and went outside by the back door, into the chilly morning. Cautious of this odd intruder, Claire walked slowly but without hesitation up the garden. When she was a few feet away, close enough to see her own trowel buried and sticking upright in the ground, she gave a small cough. The woman seemed not to notice and continued flattening out soil with her muddied hands.
“Excuse me”, Claire said, she hoped calmly.
The woman turned and looked up, showing a hard face, scored with deep lines around a mouth that barely opened as she said, “Your roses are besieged, young lady. Aphids. They won’t make it into May if this keeps up”.
She turned back to her work and left Claire stood there, feeling ridiculous in her pink marigolds.
Not knowing how to respond, Claire returned to the kitchen and stood again at the window, watching the woman clip roses with a small pair of scissors. Claire took out her phone and looked at herself in the black screen, then placed it on the table. She returned to drying dishes while the woman methodically moved from flower to flower, careful and precise with her agile hands.
After a while, Claire felt some reason return to her and marched back out to confront the unwanted gardener.
“I’m sorry, I’m sure you mean no harm, but you really need to move along now. This is my garden, my home”.
The woman stood up. “Is the staircase still wooden, or have you covered it in some garish carpet?”
A confused moment, then a piece slotted into place for Claire.
“You used to live here?”, she asked, and the woman seemed to give a small nod.
“How amazing!”. Claire felt herself ease up with this small revelation.
“So”, Claire continued, “how old were you?”
“From there”, the woman said, ignoring the question and pointing up at Claire’s bedroom, “you can see the trees coming into leaf now, correct? And the lake with the little boats?”
“The trees, yes. But the lake? No, no we can’t see that from the bedroom. We do love it there though. We used to take the kids when they were younger”.
“No, you’re wrong”, the woman replied. There was something hard in her voice that took Claire aback. “You can see the lake, and the boats. Even the boathouse that was once painted red.”
“No, I’m sorry, it’s you who are wrong” said Claire. “I’ve lived here for years. Not the lake, trust me”.
“Why not take a look for yourself?”.
A thread of annoyance wound itself inside Claire. She was irritated by this attack on her very senses. She turned and paced back to the house and climbed the staircase, wondering why she was entertaining this farce. In her bedroom she parted the curtains and looked out, half expecting the woman to be gone, the last half hour a fever dream. The woman was there, staring back at Claire, her breath pluming in the cold air.
Claire looked out to the distance and took in the familiar view, but what she saw made her gasp. There were the distant trees, as always, spotted with young green leaves. But behind these, almost invisible but undeniable in its silver gleam, was the lake. She felt suddenly unmoored, detached from reality. The lake was there, as though for the first time, like a sudden mirage.
Claire returned to the garden, dumbstruck.
“You’re right, I can see it. The lake, the boats, the waves glittering. How could I have only seen it now?”
The woman gazed at her.
“I don’t know how to feel”, said Claire.
“It’s a terrible, terrible thing”, the woman said, gently nodding.
Claire wanted to ask what was so terrible, but the woman suddenly turned and was making her way back to the street, though the side gate. The next day she did not return, and Claire stood at her bedroom window looking out at the flowering trees, and the lake with the little boats, and at her garden with the beds of roses in yellow, pink and red.
DANCING WITH STRANGERS
It happened every night in Via Nicolò Mascardi. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she would go down to her street. There was always a table and two chairs in front of her house, where she would sit and chat with a friend while the outdoor dining tables of the neighbouring restaurants filled up. At a certain moment only known to her, she would start the music on an old-fashioned CD player. The restaurant customers would look at each other, at the woman and the restaurant staff, only to see the waiters nod and smile at this familiar scene.
She always started off dancing by herself, getting into the moves. She was probably in her mid-seventies, and rather corpulent, so that no stranger would ever have expected the true extent of her elegance and skill.
At the end of the ‘overture’ she asked every male passer-by to dance with her. Some neighbours or acquaintances would stop for a joke and a few rounds with her, knowing her personal history. But her real challenge was dancing with strangers. Sometimes it took several attempts to get them on the dance floor. Most of them reacted by blushing, pretending they had an urgent appointment or that they didn’t know how to dance, that they had never danced before. She reassured them she would lead.
She was very confident about herself and her dancing skills. She told everyone that she had been a professional, that she had danced at La Scala in Milan... The strangers could not know whether this story was true or whether she made it up, every night anew. But her graceful movements and the way she took the lead with any man she had managed to convince, might have been taken as a sure proof of her story.
The first one tonight was a customer in a restaurant who was dining there with his wife; they had just been served the antipasto. She danced around their table, swaying her hips, looking only at the man who kept trying to ignore her by immersing himself in the delicacies on his plate. The prosciutto was exceptionally good. As her swinging hips came closer and closer, the man became uncomfortable and she asked him to dance with her. He smiled and shook his head. His wife tried to make a joke about him being a terrible dancer, but the woman didn’t even notice her.
He proved to be a tough nut to crack. When not even telling her life story could make a difference, she usually admitted defeat. She turned round on the spot as gracefully as she had come and didn’t look back.
Next came a group of four young men who giggled at the sight of her; she grabbed one by the arm and swung him around against his protest. His mates stood there transfixed, staring in amazement, and when she finally let go of him, they cheered and greeted him like a star, patting him on the back. These were the moments she loved most. Seeing the initial questioning, embarrassed, and even disparaging looks turn into admiration was like a drug. And more men were to follow. Once she got going, there was no stopping her.
And when she had exhausted many a man of a night in Via Nicolò Mascardi, when she began to feel dizzy from all this swinging round and round and round, she felt happy. The medieval walls of the houses seemed to swing with her, the whole street was her stage and the tourists in the restaurants her audience.
When she was lying in bed later, still half dizzy, she knew it had been a good night. Once again, she felt the gratitude and satisfaction of a successful evening’s performance, of having pleased her audience. The applause of a Scala filled with thousands of people resonated within her until she finally fell asleep.
Tomorrow, she was sure, would bring more strangers along her way.
Wow! My health isn't great at the moment, so finding this in my inbox was a very welcome surprise.
Thanks for selecting my story. Delighted to be in such illustrious company!
Really gripping beautifully crafted stories ❤️