Dear all,
The shortlist for the 2016 Writers’ & Artists’
competition has been announced:
Which means I am now free to post my entry. You can find it
below.
To repeat myself (which I do often) I will post this
‘disclaimer’ whenever I post a short story entry: I decided that 2016 would be
the year I enter competitions and at present I have around four or five a month
on my list. Every time I enter one I will copy the story as a blog post ready
to go and share it with you. Let me put my hands up in surrender now, I do not
expect to be shortlisted or win any of them. That’s not an easy excuse, it’s
just being honest. I don’t think these will be my best work and I have a lot of
years ahead of me in which to improve my writing but this is my reasoning… it’s
more of a compromise. I have two main objectives this year, to grow my company
(a little bit) and complete the first draft of my novel. They are ongoing
projects that occupy my mind night and day, however, I have a lot of scraps of
ideas that I have set aside (as I won’t be spending time developing any short
stories to self publish this year) and I felt bad at just leaving them to rot.
They are playing on my mind so why not use them to enter short story competitions? The ones I self publish are always a minimum of 10k words (up to around 20k)
and take me weeks to work on but the competitions can be as short as 500 words.
I think that by allowing myself to spend a few hours (at most) on these entries
I will firstly feel better than I am keeping myself busy when not working on
the novel (which again, is often), secondly improve and test out new ideas or
techniques (that may come in handy later) and thirdly reach out to new people
and new content which is naturally a frightening thing because you are exposing
yourself to people who are better than you. That’s the only way to learn though
and I have never shied away from that. The only negative is that I know I won’t
be spending enough time on the stories to show off the best I can do, but that’s
the compromise isn’t it? I get a lot out of it without spending huge chunks of
time. You can’t have both. So, is that a good enough excuse for you? Anyway, when each competition closes I'll post my entry in between my normal rambling blog posts or news announcements, some will have themes (the one below was on 'ageing') and some don't but I'll always leave the link so you can visit the website and check out the shortlists and winners... and maybe take note so you can enter yourselves next year?
Focus
‘Well,
would you look at that!’
Flo places
the tip of her finger on a worn photograph and caresses the face of the young
girl looking back. The creases and torn edges are invisible, and despite being
blurred and grey she sees the red glow on the cheeks of the worn out
twelve-year-old who Flo remembers would be fresh from skipping across the
heath. Flo’s fingertip hovers on the brown mole prominent on the flushed and
surprised gaze. The birthmark, a small round bump the size of the girl’s
contracted pupil, sits above the left corner of her mouth, halfway between her
top lip and the bottom of her nose. Flo’s touch is gentle, as if pressing too
hard will damage more than the delicate film.
As Flo
spreads out more photographs, the beauty spot repeats and repeats. Her dining
room table, rustic and rugged but well polished with a rosewood hint,
transforms into a page from an artist’s notebook. Images from a lifetime of
recorded moments shine. 1950’s greys mix with more vivacious modern tones;
spring greens from birthday picnics in the park, deep chocolate browns in thick
spirals that spread-in-bloom across oversized poet collars, and dazzling white
from a wedding in a church courtyard where rain has collected into silver
puddles forming a children’s game of mirror-like stepping stones.
Flo leans
close to the table, her nose an inch above the photos, and lets her squinting
eyes scan freely. She picks up the scent of beeswax from her daily chores but
the musty aged photographs overpower the present and she moves from year to
year with each framed still of her life; there is the garden with the perfect
grass that they never managed to grow again; there’s teenage Peter and Billy,
when tight corduroys and band t-shirts were pleaded for. Flo stops when her
inspection meets John.
‘Why do
some leave and others stay?’
Flo stands
and walks to the mantelpiece. She presses a razor-thin cream-hued button on her
new radio; a recent gift. It is a sleek, cutting-edge digital radio designed to
appear like a utilitarian yet post-war domestic luxury appliance of yesteryear.
Flo breaks her own rule and looks at herself in the mirror above the fireplace
before sitting back down at the table and shuffling the photographs together.
She wraps tissue paper around the neat pile, slowly and carefully, making sure
to align the edges with the beveled folds dug from decades of protection and
isolation. Flo doesn’t put the pile away immediately; she fears she will take
one more look later, perhaps after soup and tea.
Flo’s
fingertip circles her mole. It hasn’t changed. They say all of your cells
replace, that you aren’t the person - physically speaking - you were decades
ago; except those buried deep in the brain or deep in the something-or-other of
your bones. Yet, this mole hasn’t changed. It is ageless; perfection
embarrassing decay. This mole is still the ruddy-faced tomboy racing the next
door neighbour’s stick-in-the-mud little boy that died of tuberculosis. This
mole is still the shocked smile of saying ‘yes’ to Gerald when asked for her
first dance. This mole is still the beautiful young woman who had everything.
This mole is that woman in the mirror who is still beautiful and wants
everything all over again.
R.G Rankine
