Winning Short Story 2025
Winning Story
Seahorse Daddy by Sarah Clowes
Two months ago, I became a dad. It did not start the usual way. You see, I’m still a virgin.
No, it was not an immaculate conception; instead, a surreal chain of events partitioned my life into “Before” and “After.” A year ago, I was living with a friend in a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment, and now it’s me, my infant son, and forty-seven rats.
“After” is cake. Who knew spit rags and formula would be my happy place? Leif is wide open and trusting, and frankly, a genius. He’s only two months old and I could swear he said “hi” yesterday. I must admit, it does concern me that the rats are multiplying faster than I expected, but they are inspiring nurturers: they make nests in the shredded paper I got from my job at Kinko’s; the females nurse one another’s babies, and they lick the little ones all the time, which helps with circulation. The rats and I are in solidarity, all figuring out the nuts and bolts of parenthood. Unfortunately, between taking care of the rats and Leif, I haven’t been able to get to work. JoJo, my old roommate, forgot an expensive watch when he left. I pawned it, so we’ll be okay for a few months.
JoJo and I met in college when we were in the percussion section of the marching band. JoJo played the marimbas; I played the bass drum. The thing I admired about JoJo was his idealism. He was always thinking about the less fortunate, like when the band went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I remember JoJo talking to a homeless man for an hour and giving him $50. Anyway, after we graduated, JoJo tried to parlay his affinity for rhythm into meaningful work by teaching hip hop tap dance to underprivileged kids. He got a gig at the park district, but the intermittent schedule didn’t pay, so he had to dip into his trust fund. Still, I admired the fact that he followed his dream and tried to share beauty with those in need. Our downstairs neighbors didn’t love the late-night clacking when JoJo practiced his moves, but sometimes you just need to follow your bliss, and JoJo has always been good at that.
Following his bliss was what led JoJo to Rosemary last October. The night started off in a normal way, but as the hours passed, it felt more and more charged with otherworldliness. JoJo and I went to a Halloween party. Our friends had cooked up a backyard fire behind the house where they stayed, and they lit up the yard with fairy lights and luminaria. The moon was huge, dripping milky light. We did a drumming circle, like we usually do, and it went deep: a primordial soup of heartbeats melting the edges of the world. By the time we finished, we were in sort of a trance, and JoJo and I started wandering around the neighborhood. There were still a few teenage trick-or-treaters out and some people our age in costumes, stumbling to or from neighborhood bars, slurping up starlight. That night, JoJo, very uncharacteristically, wore a tux his mom had gotten him for some family event. He’s only 5’5”, but he showered before the party and slicked his cornsilk hair back into a semi-pompadour. The effect was dapper – a new look for him. Me, I did my usual Halloween trick where I put on my blue fur shirt and a jackal mask. Based on our costumes, it wasn’t surprising that Rosemary took to JoJo instead of me. JoJo can be attentive and charming. He does well with the ladies, and Rosemary took our breath away.
I still remember the way the moonlight reflected on her white lacy wedding dress and illumined her fine, chiseled features. When I first saw her, I did a double take because she looked so otherworldly, like a ghost bride – stunning, translucent, gorgeous, yet lost, fathomless sorrow in her eyes. JoJo stopped in his tracks and waited for her to approach, as if taming a feral animal. I froze too, caught in a wave of molasses-heavy fate. With slow, gliding steps, she moved ever closer so that we could see her blood red lips, her cheekbones, the ivory lacing swaying loosely against her narrow hips. JoJo knelt in the damp grass and held out his palm as if proposing marriage or genuflecting to a queen. Wordlessly, Rosemary slipped her fingers into JoJo’s, who kissed her palm gently and held it next to his cheek. Back in our apartment, through the wall separating our bedrooms, I heard JoJo playing his bongos for Rosemary in the wee hours of the morning.
I didn’t find out much about Rosemary until noon the next day, by which time she had disappeared. JoJo made us some black coffee and I whipped up some omelets.
“I guess you had quite a night,” I said, pouring a bag of shredded cheese over the eggs.
“It was a page out of a book,” said JoJo, pouting as he stared at the rusty Plymouth Reliant in the lot outside our kitchen window.
“Huh?”
“Rosemary,” said JoJo. “It felt like she walked out of a fairy tale.”
“Yeah.”
Before the Keurig finished brewing, JoJo placed his cup under the spout and collected coffee while spilled drops sizzled on the heating element, filling our kitchen with the smell of burnt coffee.
“You know what she was dressed as?” said JoJo.
“Bride o’ death?”
“Almost,” said JoJo. “La Llorona. A Mexican fairy tale ghost who wanders around looking for her dead kids after she’s stilted by her upper-class lover.”
“Ouch. Wow…She was hot.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I really don’t.”
JoJo patted me on the shoulder and started filling a second cup of coffee, burning more on the heating element. “Your day will come, brother Ephram. She was intrigued by your rats. I guess she loves animals.” This gave me a pang of jealousy. Not many people vibed with my rats.
At that point, I was only fostering four rats, and I had separated them into two different cages by sex. As it turned out, I hadn’t sexed them correctly, and the two boys, Fred and Ned, turned out to be Fred and Nedina. The next night, I heard a lot of noise coming from the rat cages, and I guess Fred and Nedina were really going at it. The animal rescue place I was working with told me that rats copulate between 60 and 100 times when they mate, and their litters produce between six and twelve baby rats.
That morning though, I didn’t know about Fred and Nedina. JoJo and I just drank our coffee and enjoyed the melted mozzarella, browned on top of our omelets. I dumped a wad of salsa on mine, but JoJo ate his plain. He said Rosemary was undocumented. She and her two brothers had hired a coyote to get them over the border, and she and her eldest brother wired money back to their family every week.
“She dug the song I’ve been working on. ‘Tempest.’” said JoJo. “But I never heard her leave. She didn’t say goodbye. I don’t have any way of getting ahold of her.”
“Mysterious,” I said.
“She said her brothers would kill her if they found her here.”
Over the next few months, the rats multiplied, and I realized that I was not sexing them correctly. Once, a baby rat got out of the cage, and JoJo caught it in his bare hands as the little guy was running up the wall in my room. I bought more cages and got more shredded paper from Kinko’s. The rats seemed happy enough, and for the most part got along, although there was a problem with Fred and Josephina (formerly known as Joe) because Josephina was not receptive to mating. Unfortunately, by the time I realized what was happening and separated them, Josephina was pregnant. Although it did not turn out the way I expected, I do feel proud of myself for building a clean and decent habitat for the rats and keeping them healthy.
I didn’t see Rosemary again until about nine months later when she rang our buzzer on a Saturday at noon. When she rolled through the door, I hardly recognized her: instead of a gaunt, pale ghost, she was round, blush-cheeked, and heavily pregnant. Still stunning, she had transformed from a wraith to the image of blooming life. The timing was bad. During the three months after Halloween, JoJo had pined for Rosemary, moping around the apartment, peering through the window wistfully, as if she might appear magically from behind a streetlamp; he played the Cure on an infuriating loop. For a while he stopped going out, and he lost his gig with the park district. Then, something shifted. There was a visit from his father, who took him to some kind of black-tie event. The next thing I knew, JoJo was spending all his time with a well-heeled, willowy, articulate influencer named Ainsley. They did a lot of raw, organic food preparation, juicing, and massages with Frankincense and Ylang Ylang oils. Ainsley taught JoJo all about skin care, and he said he felt better than ever. I had to admit, his skin did look good. Right before Rosemary showed up that Saturday morning, Ainsley bought a VW van in which she and JoJo planned to travel to California, documenting their adventures in nature for their adoring followers. It seemed like JoJo had hit a vein of gold.
As I said though, the timing was bad. That same morning when Rosemary arrived at our apartment, JoJo and Ainsley were packing up the van for their cross-country trip. In fact, JoJo and Ainsley’s VW van pulled around the corner of our street just as Rosemary was coming up the stairs.
“Ephram,” she said, flouncing onto our beat-up couch, eyes puffy and red, “I need help. I thought JoJo…”
Although Rosemary and I had only exchanged a few words on Halloween, sitting next to her on the couch and holding her hand felt very natural, as if we had known each other forever. Tears slid down her apple cheeks.
“I don’t know what to do. Some immigration agents took my brother, and I don’t know where he is.”
“Oh God. I’m so sorry.”
“My other brother is gone too. I don’t know what happened to him, and I’ve been staying on my friend’s couch. I just…” I handed her a tissue and she inhaled suddenly, surprised. Something was happening in her body.
I made Rosemary some tea and microwaved her a baked potato with butter and salt. It was underdone, but she didn’t mind. She even helped me feed the rats, of which there were 28 at that point.
“The babies are so cute,” said Rosemary. “But I guess the dads don’t really do much after they impregnate the females.”
I shrugged. It wasn’t something I had thought about.
“They’re like bumblebees. They’re just drones. Their only function is to get the females pregnant. Papá vagos.” Confused, I wrinkled my brow. “Deadbeat dads,” Rosemary translated. She focused intently on the rat cage on the floor, which had two paper nests. She turned and looked me in the eye. Despite my usual shyness, I let her brown eyes dive into mine.
“It’s the opposite for seahorse daddies,” Rosemary continued. “Those dads carry the eggs around in pouches until the babies are ready to swim on their own,” said Rosemary. “The seahorse daddies care for their young. Two kinds of dads.”
I would have been fine with Rosemary staying with me as long as she wanted to, but later that night she went into labor. I had no idea what to do, so I called our neighbor, Anthony, a certified nursing assistant. Pretty soon, he was out of his depth, so we drove her to the hospital. Rosemary was scared, but I was afraid that she or the baby would die if she tried to deliver in our apartment. Frankly, I thought I might have had a heart attack myself, but I tried to be strong for Rosemary. While Anthony drove his Honda Civic through traffic, I held Rosemary’s hand. “You’re incredibly strong,” I told her. “But why didn’t you come sooner?”
“I wanted to,” Rosemary said softly. “I tried to so many times, but something in my heart stopped me…until today. A one-night fling isn’t the best way to start to a life together.” Tears started flowing down her cheeks again, and I regretted asking the question. She had another contraction, then took a deep breath. “Ephram,” she said, meeting my eyes, “you need to take the baby if anything happens to me.”
“JoJo’s the dad,” I said, trying to hide my fear.
“JoJo’s a bumblebee,” said Rosemary. “You’re a seahorse. I can tell by the way you are with the rats. The baby and I, we need you. We don’t have anyone else.”
“I think if JoJo knew…” I started.
Rosemary looked up at the roof of the car and bit her lip. She spoke with her face turned away from me. “He knows,” she whispered. “When he was driving away today, he saw me. I watched his face register everything when his eyes landed on me. He could have stopped. He could have come out and said something, anything, but he drove away. He and that girl just drove away.”
Anthony left after a couple hours. He was great, but he had an early shift and needed to get some rest. I stayed. It took 36 hours, but eventually the nurses invited me in to see the baby. Rosemary told them I was the father. I didn’t argue; it was the best gift anyone had ever given me. She even let me name him: Leif Benitez Johnson. Leif was my grandfather’s name, and Benitez was Rosemary’s family name. Johnson was mine. Anthony pointed out later that Leif’s initials are L.B.J. and calls him “Little Baby Jesus” to tease me, but secretly, I like it.
My next two shifts at Kinko’s came and went, but I stayed at the hospital with Rosemary and Leif. Those were the best two days of my life. Becoming a dad was surreal and amazing. I felt so protective of Leif, our tiny treasure. He fell asleep on my chest while Rosemary recovered. I could feel his little heart beating, and his hands were so tiny, gently clutching at the hair on my chest. The nurse said babies like to snuggle, skin to skin, so that’s what we did. I breathed in his sweet, fresh bread smell, and for a few hours, everything else disappeared. My dreams rose up like hot air balloons with Leif, Rosemary and I together, laughing, but I awoke to a shock.
Rosemary was gone. Hospitals used to be safe for the undocumented, but now waiting rooms and other public areas have become fair game for immigration agents. I don’t know how they found Rosemary, but now it’s me who looks down the street every day, wondering when she’ll return, hoping she’ll pop out from behind a streetlight. I’ve made phone calls and even contacted a pro bono lawyer, but no one can tell me anything useful. I don’t know if I’ll see her again, but I’m pretty sure JoJo will be back. On some level, I know JoJo won’t take Leif from me. Rosemary was right: he’s a bumble bee, not a seahorse. Raising this child is my job. Later, when Leif is stronger, when he can swim on his own, we will look for his mother. Until then, I’ll keep my son, Little Baby Jesus, safe. I’ll raise him on stories of a beautiful ghost bride who wanders the earth searching for her lost children, who appears on Halloween night, like a page from a fairy tale, then disappears without a trace.
***
Second Place
Potemkin Station
by
Rebecca Tinsley
(Strong voice, compelling storytelling)
The mission was going well until I discovered the body. Lift off, first stage separation from the booster, Earth orbit acquisition, rendezvous with the space station and docking – all without a hitch.
This isn’t my first rodeo, so I wasn’t surprised by how bumpy the ascent from the launch pad was, shaking me like a paint mixer in a hardware store. NASA lore has it that Gordon Cooper, one of the original silver-suited Mercury astronauts, snoozed during countdown. I wasn’t that relaxed, but neither was I pondering the competitive tendering process that meant that the most cost-cutting contractors built my ride.
Max Preston, the Zeus-like boss of Maximum Corporation, had made a virtue of buying a Soviet era space station from the Russians for an undisclosed sum, rumoured to be $1. He promised to transform it into an orbiting research centre for the developing world, bristling with envelope-pushing technology. Max boasted that private enterprise could achieve what “bloated, bureaucratic” NASA failed to do. The Soviet station would be repurposed as Big Max, reflecting Max Preston’s generosity and vision.
I’m a thirty-eight-year-old astronaut-academic from Lichfield, an English city famed for its Gothic cathedral and not much else. I head an international team who will use the Big Max platform to monitor the deadly southward creep of the Sahara, smothering farmland one sand dune at a time. We will also oversee Maximum’s new network of satellites which can – in theory – provide free Internet access across Africa. As if those aren’t sufficiently Nobel-peace-prize-worthy goals for Max Preston, we’ll supercharge a geolocation programme which will hunt down warlords responsible for illegal mining in conflict zones.
In case you’re wondering, Big Max is funded by several universities, philanthropic foundations, African governments and international development NGOs. But the biggest slice is kicked in by the European Union; Brussels wants to plug the flood of migrants crossing the Mediterranean in boats as seaworthy as fruit baskets. Max offered them a solution: stop the wars and global warming, and make Africa more prosperous. My team of scientists, drawn from institutions around the globe, is understandably pumped at the prospect.
So, the body: it belonged to Chris Turner. Two days ago, Max called me from St Edmund, his private Caribbean island, explaining that Chris had a fever and was grounded. He expressed confidence I could handle the mission alone, setting up and testing the equipment, ready for the arrival of my team. I called Chris several times, leaving sympathetic messages, but no one answered. Now I know why.
In the capsule payload bay where I should have found the equipment, there was Chris, decomposing in his bulky white spacesuit. No gadgets, nothing for me to unload, set up and test. I locked poor Chris in his chilly prison, pondering the implications of my discovery, striving manfully to apply scientific reason rather than succumbing to blind panic.
For the last month or so, Chris had been bitching to anyone who would listen, including Max Preston himself. Never possessed of a diplomatic turn of phrase, Chris was dubious about Big Max. He thought its orbit might be unstable, and he suspected the old Soviet beast lacked the power generation capacity to support all the gear our team would be using to conduct our experiments.
Chris had no illusions about why Max had lured him out of retirement: he was a dime store astronaut. His previous mission, at NASA, had ended in disaster. It was an accident, but somehow the blame stuck, thanks to the psychopaths lurking in every rancid corner of social media. When Chris’s capsule had splashed down, the hatch sprang open prematurely. The Pacific flooded in, and Chris and his colleague scrambled out before the capsule sank. Exiting quickly was easier said than done, given that their muscles had wasted in zero gravity, despite their daily exercise regime. The contractor blamed human error, and then quietly fixed the faulty door bolt on subsequent capsules.
I took a tour of Big Max while I processed Chris’s abrupt demise. I’m not a lyrical type, so I wasn’t nurturing poetic observations about the view of Earth through my window or the novelty of weightlessness. Instead, I powered up my laptop computer, wondering who had zeroed Chris and why I had no equipment and therefore no mission. I knew I was being watched, HAL-style, by the folks at Maximum’s star base back in Texas. There were cameras in each double decker bus-size segment of the sausage-link chain of pods which formed the station. Whoever stuck Chris in the payload bay was probably watching me.
I left the computer to whir its way to consciousness, and I floated from one sausage segment to the next, trying to make sense of the situation. Perhaps Chris’s suspicions about Big Max were correct, and he had been silenced to protect Max Preston’s reputation, ego and stock value. Evidently, I had been set up to take the rap for killing Chris. How would I explain the dead body to my team when they arrived next week – if they arrived?
The station had been assembled over decades, first by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and more recently by stringing together orbiting labs put into space by various countries with peaceful and less peaceful galactic ambitions. Max Preston had promised his legions of socially inadequate fans and gung-ho investors that his recycled station would not be used for military purposes, but now I had my doubts.
When I reached the final segment of the station there was a hatch to a Russian Soyuz capsule that had docked there about six months ago. It had delivered three paying space tourists for a two-day jolly, something to tell their grandkids, no doubt. However, the Soyuz heat shield had been damaged during lift off, marooning the tourists on the station for the following eight weeks – eight weeks during which they ate sub optimal food, became odorous and hairy, and consulted their lawyers about suing the Russian travel company. Max Preston had saved the day by dispatching a capsule to fetch them home safely.
I opened the hatch and peered into the Soyuz. It looked as if the tourists had used it as a garbage receptacle. It crossed my mind that I could transfer Chris’s body to the Soyuz and then jettison the capsule, allowing it to burn up on re-entry. Yet, if I was being framed for Chris’s death, it wouldn’t advance my case to be filmed ferrying his corpse from one end of the station to the other. I locked the Soyuz hatch, feeling a little sorry for this unloved remnant of the once mighty Soviet space programme, now just a disposal unit for wet wipes, candy wrappers and smelly t-shirts.
All things must pass, as George Harrison had predicted, and that now included me. Max Preston was unlikely to relish my return to Earth. I’d been resident on Big Max for less than twenty minutes, and already I was confronting my own termination. I gulped deep breaths of the stale air, trying to calm myself, grasping at the most slender and irrational tendrils of hope while the dismal truth loomed like a zeppelin.
As I floated back to my laptop, I knew I should tell Chris’s wife that she was now a widow while assuring her that I wasn’t responsible for his death. I assumed the world – or those swivel-eyed obsessives following the mission – thought both Chris and I blasted off as usual. Maximum Broadcasting long ago ceased filming the astronauts squeezing into their capsules on top of the gantry tower. It didn’t make good TV because we were slotted into our seats well before countdown began. No one had the patience to watch a rocket steaming on the launch pad for hours, and commentators quickly ran out of things to say when there were delays. Blast off had become so routine that only the last ten minutes before they lit the candle were broadcast to an online audience of hardcore enthusiasts.
I had met Chris’s wife, Sally, at Max’s feelgood corporate picnic two months ago. It was a tense event at Max’s Texas ranch, brimming with forced jollity, meticulously framed to cast the workforce as giddy, evangelical worshippers of Maximum’s visionary, celebrity billionaire CEO. But you couldn’t fault the quality of the food, as Sally had acidly quipped. The more anarchistic staff and spouses – such as Sally – had rolled their eyes as Max mounted the stage, skipping about like someone with a snout full of Bolivian marching powder (Max’s rumoured stimulant of choice).
I found Sally’s email address easily – she’d been copied in to some of my pre-launch exchanges with Chris – but I hesitated before composing my message. The same people who killed Chris would be monitoring my communications. Then it struck me that no one from mission control had been talking to me since I arrived at the station. The capsule communicator, known as cap com, had been silent. The last I had heard from Maximum HQ in Texas was when I confirmed rendezvous and docking, twenty minutes ago.
I checked my Bluetooth earpiece: nothing, not even space static. Yet, the little red light on each camera confirmed they were recording me. I peered self-consciously at my laptop screen with unseeing eyes, my frazzled brain a kaleidoscope of questions.
Then I remembered the Ethiopian satellite: it had been put in orbit by our friends in Addis Ababa, using a European Space Agency Ariane rocket three weeks ago as a back-up system, separate from Maximum’s global network of satellites. My team used it as a kind of celestial WhatsApp group, connecting us as we worked in our separate academic outposts at Imperial College, London (me), South Africa, Addis Ababa, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Brazil. I turned off my computer’s link to the Maximum world and logged onto our Ethiopian bird, praying it would work. It took three attempts, but it eventually connected.
“Hi Sally, this is Paul, in orbit. I have some very bad news.”
Chris’s wife was an aeronautical engineer in her late forties, like Chris, and she taught at a prestigious college in Austin, Texas. It might be hours before she saw my message so I went to a chat room inhabited by conspiracy freaks who were united by their loathing of Max Preston. Some of their theories were run of the mill (“His missions never leave Earth. They film that stuff on a movie set in LA”), while others hinted at darker motives, usually linked to orbiting laser weapons or white elephants enabling US senators to direct pork spending to donors in their home states. One popular theory, I discovered, was that Max had bought the Soviet era station as a tax write off, knowing it would spin out of orbit.
Sally’s response flashed across the top of my screen and I toggled back to my chat with her. “I didn’t believe the fever story for a minute,” she wrote. “Tell me what’s happened.”
“I found his body in the payload bay,” I typed, adding, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t do this, Sally.”
There was a two-minute lapse, during which I guessed she was processing my devastating message. Then she responded, “I know you didn’t.” The cursor winked at me. What else could I offer her, I wondered, feeling helpless. But she was still typing. “You need to get out of there, Paul.”
“?” I responded.
“Chris worked the numbers. You’re in an unstable orbit. I reworked the numbers this morning, when I was wondering what happened to Chris. He was right. You should leave.”
I stared at the screen as she continued to type. “Maximum’s media folks are telling the world there’s ‘a sudden dramatic problem on the station’. They’re hinting Chris caused an accident when you docked. Reprising the sinking capsule saga.”
“OK, but what’s this about? There’s no equipment here.”
“Ponzi scheme,” Sally responded.
“?”
“M collected $ from universities, NGOs, foundations, governments. M keeps the money and none of the investors can make a claim against him when the station crashes back to Earth.”
“That was Chris’s theory?” I asked.
“Suspicion. No proof.”
I could feel my thoughts staggering about like drunk men descending stairs with leaden legs. I was interrupted by a loud, metallic clunking sound, and then a hiss. It took a second to realise what I was hearing. I pushed off the wall and sailed across the station to the window just as my capsule drifted away from the station. Mission control had remotely detached it. There was my only means of escape floating away, taking Chris to his cremation as the vehicle burned up on re-entry. I pushed off again, this time heading for the other end of the station where the Soyuz capsule was docked. If I was lucky, its technology was old enough that it could only be cut loose manually.
My heart was beating in my ears as I sailed down the long tube, praying to a deity I rarely acknowledged, let alone consulted. I was in luck: the Soyuz was firmly locked into place, its Twentieth Century technology untouched by the Internet of Things. The Russians were incompetent in many ways, but their space hardware was tough and uncomplicated, a virtue in this case. Except that the heat shield had been damaged during lift off from Kazakhstan. Panic coursing through my veins, I floated back to my laptop where I updated Sally on my situation.
“Potemkin Village,” she responded.
“?”
“Catherine the Gt of Russia was so scary that her servants created a fake village for her to sail past on one of her trips down the Volga, inspecting the provinces = a theatrical stage backdrop,” Sally explained. “It was called the Potemkin village.”
“Sounds about right.” I replied. “Or the Flying Dutchman = ghost ship in Wagner’s opera.”
“Impressed you know Wagner.”
“I have all Beethoven’s symphonies up here to keep me company,” I typed. Then I felt tears welling up as I acknowledged I would be stuck here, playing my Beethoven, until the station slipped into a death orbit or bounced off the Earth’s atmosphere and sailed into space. Would I prefer to starve to death or be incinerated?
Sally’s news bulletin pulled me back from my shadowy introspection. “Maximum now saying human error – they mean Chris, of course – has compromised the mission, and the station is in grave danger. I knew they’d blame Chris.”
As I read her words, my mind was crunching through my options: do I chance it by returning to Earth in the Soyuz, hoping the heat shield doesn’t fail? Do I hope I don’t splash down in an ocean and sink? The Soyuz was designed for landing on solid ground, not water. What if I land in Antarctica and freeze to death? Even if I survive, I’ll be framed for Chris’s murder and jeopardising Big Max.
Or do accept my fate with equilibrium and use the Soyuz for a higher purpose?
“Sally, can you work out the coordinates to use the Soyuz to nudge Big Max on a re-entry course that crash lands on St Edmund?”
“OK,” came her response. “How much fuel left on Soyuz?”
As I floated back to the Soyuz and powered it up, I noted that she wasn’t trying to talk me out of committing suicide. I suppose she had also been mentally auditing my options.
Ten minutes later I messaged her with the answer, providing the information she needed to estimate how many seconds of engine burn was required to place the vast Big Max station in an orbit that would re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere at precisely the right angle to bring it, and me, hurtling to the surface in a molten ball, smashing into Max Preston’s Caribbean island.
“On it,” she replied, business-like.
Forty minutes later she sent me the data. During the interval I emptied the Soyuz of garbage and acquainted myself with its archaic systems. Counter intuitively, the older the computers, the easier they were to understand, and the less scope I had for screwing up. With the help of a Russian to English translation app, I worked out the steps I needed to set the length of engine burn. Then I programmed the guidance system with Sally’s calculations.
“I’m not brave enough to defend your reputation when it’s over,” she messaged me before signing off. “Sorry. I’m scared.”
I didn’t blame her. Even if I managed to eliminate him, Max certainly wasn’t alone in his ponzi scheme. I bolted myself into the Soyuz and prepared to fire the engine to put me on the crash course for St Edmund. I briefly thought of saying goodbye to my ex-wife: our marriage hadn’t survived her move to California to lecture in anthropology. The commute was impractical, and we weren’t important enough to each other to make the effort. Thank goodness we hadn’t brought children into the world whose lives we would have messed up.
I could have dawdled around the station for a few days, I suppose, coming to terms with my mortality, wallowing in despair, quantifying my many regrets, pondering the morality of what I was about to do, but like I said, I’m not the lyrica
***
Third Place (joint)
One Rat, Three Mice and a Pumpkin”
By Denarii Peters
Yeah, all right. I’m a fairy. So what? Wanna make somethin’ of it, do you?
OK, let me put you straight. In a world where science can make anything fly, what price a pair of gauzy wings? They only cause comment when they stick out the back of your t-shirt. Besides, they get in the way more often than I’d like.
And in a time when an unexplained heap of shiny, gold coins can’t be paid into the bank without raising questions, what use is a Wealth spell?
Everlasting Coats are ten a penny and soon get thrown away in disgust because they don’t meet the latest fashion.
And there’ve been no takers for Seven League Boots since the days of Henry Ford. Those who prefer to travel without a motor are not only a minority, they’re an energetic one more dedicated to climbing hills and tramping through woods than they ought to be. Anything remotely strenuous is now a hobby and not a necessity.
Beauty spells held out for a while but now the plastic surgeons are getting all the work and putting us fairies out of a job.
So, tell me. What am I supposed to do all day? No idea? Well, I’ll tell you. The endless boredom is the main reason I took up ‘boarding.
Sometimes weeks go by without my ever hearing the words, “I wish…” and even then, if I do hear them, half the time it’s for things too big to alter or too stupid to be worth changing. Who cares if you’ve got the wrong version of the latest video game?
And where have all the noble quests gone? “Rescuing” over-cute “princesses” from pixilated dragons simply doesn’t count. Not to mention, if I should happen to hear, “I wish…” it almost never fulfils the requisite criteria, which get stricter and stricter every year. You can’t just throw wishes into the wind any more and there’s been quite a debate in recent years on whether or not fairy dust is a pollutant. After all, it’s mostly made from pollen (that’s what gives it the sparkly gold colour) and there are so many more people about in these times with hay fever or some other allergy.
In the old days it was enough for the recipient of a wish to be “pure of heart” or for them to do some silly, unnecessary, though kind, thing for a fairy disguised as a crone: pick up sticks for her fire, for example.
But all that changed when it dawned on us fairies how many humans were playing the system. I blame bedtime stories for that.
Things were nothing like as bad when I was an apprentice. I used to live in a tree in a nice, family-friendly park in the suburbs. But now I’m a fully-fledged fairy, I’ve been allocated these ugly urban streets with their decaying tower blocks, crisp packets and beer cans strewn everywhere. There’s not even a park; unless you count the broken swings and the square of stubby grass where the kids try to play. You know, over there by that piece of graffiti-covered wall.
So, I decided, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” would work best for me. I used my personal magic allocation to turn the aforementioned wings invisible and shrink ‘em a bit. Now they act as super stabilisers. I’ve become the best female ‘boarder in the county, maybe in the whole country.
I did give parkour a bit of a go once but I slipped, and hovering between two of the high-rise blocks was a bit of a giveaway. I had to use up almost my entire lifetime supply of Forget spells in one afternoon. And even that wasn’t entirely successful. My performance still turned up on TikTok and X so I had to change my appearance. Again!
So here I am, dressed in leather, hanging out with the Predators. I reckon I’ve impressed them with my skill as a rider, and they’re showing a certain amount of envy over my jet-black Harley. I’m not surprised because before I transformed him he was a racehorse, a true thoroughbred no less.
But even this isn’t enough. I’m restless, unfulfilled but at last there is some hope. Eric, the leader of the Predators (and part time DJ calling himself “Principal Offensive”) has a vacancy on his pillion since his last lady had the good sense to throw him over for a new life. She left him for a job in an office. He says he’s in no hurry to replace her, but even so he’s losing face. He’s planning to hold a rave on Saturday night, which might give me the opportunity to play fairy godmother. I’ve never given that a go before. Perhaps it’s time I did.
There’s this young woman, you see. She’s called Lisa, and Eric, who likes us to call him “PO”, has forgotten he ever met her. She was living her life in a sort of dream, so bored she might as well have been asleep, until the night he kissed her. It was halfway through his set. He was a little drunk and the kiss meant nothing to him. But I caught the look in her eye. It told me Lisa would never be able to get that night out of her head.
I want to help but first I have to trick her into doing a good deed for me. We fairies must keep to the rules, you know.
Here we are, standing at the bus stop, sheltering from the pouring rain, waiting for the number 405. It’s late (as usual!) and I’m not enjoying my pretence at struggling with heavy shopping. She hasn’t even looked at me yet, too busy gazing down at some nonsense on her phone. I’m beginning to worry. What if she just pushes past me and doesn’t come to my aid when I claim to be short on the fare? The fairy rules don’t allow for second chances. If I fail, I’ll have to abandon any idea of matchmaking altogether.
The bus pulls up in a tidal wave of spray. I just about resist the impulse to use a Dry spell on myself.
She utters a most unladylike word as she sets foot on the platform. Oh dear. It’s not going to happen, is it? I might as well…
Then she turns. “Can I help you with that, missus?”
“Thank you, dearie, but I’ve just realised I don’t have enough money with me. I’ll have to walk home instead.”
She tilts her head to one side and purses her lips. Then she grins at me. “Nice try, oldie. I bet you do this all the time, don’t you?” I don’t get chance to reply as she turns back to the driver. “I’ll pay for both of us. It’s too wet to walk.”
I want to punch the air; I’m so pleased she’s passed the test. Now I can make her dreams come true. At the moment she’s staring into her purse, no doubt a little bewildered as I’ve just added a few notes to the single one that was there already.
Once home and consulting my books, it’s clear I’m a bit rusty. I haven’t played the three dresses game for such a long time and know nobody else who has either.
I gather the ingredients together. Someone has been fly-tipping nearby and it’s overrun with vermin. No one will miss the odd rat and a few mice. I put them, with a nice, organic pumpkin into my bottomless bag. Now all that’s needed is to wait for the rave. Normally I don’t use technology but just about know how to send a text.
Done. She now has the date and time and it’s only two days away.
I can’t wait.
There are one or two niggles however, like how to appear before her. I don’t think a frilly dress and sparkly wand will cut it. She might just laugh at me and, besides, it’s all so old fashioned. Tight leather trousers are more my thing, which brings me to Lisa’s outfit. Tradition dictates three ball gowns in the order: gold as the sun, silver as the moon and bright as the stars.
The rave is in a disused warehouse. Dressed in a ball gown she’d stick out for all the wrong reasons. That’s always assuming she could get through the hole in the wall they’ve made to get round the bricked-up doorway. Besides, it’s only one rave, not three, and, what’s worse, it won’t get underway until around three in the morning. No one will see her at all if she has to leave at midnight.
I decide to tackle one problem at a time. The hour of her departure is the simplest one to fix. I’ll dress her after midnight. That’ll give her until the next midday to make her exit.
My phone buzzes. It’s one of the Predators. “Hey, Dawn.” (It’s really Aurora but who goes by such an old-fashioned name these days?) “PO has called a meeting to go over last-minute details. Can you make it?”
Try and stop me! “Be there in a flash.” Well, I could be, but it wouldn’t be a clever idea, so I ride over on my Harley instead.
On arrival, I sidle up to PO. “Tell me. What is it you look for in a woman?”
His answer is rather rude, and he’s got the wrong idea, so I have to spend the rest of the meeting avoiding him. He’s far too free with his kisses. I haven’t the slightest idea what my would-be Cinderella sees in him.
Still, I’m committed now. The pumpkin is looking forward to an outing as a luxury limousine, though the rat I acquired is a rather bad-tempered female, and I’m not at all certain she wants to wear the chauffeur’s livery. As for the mice, they ate their way out of my bottomless bag and I’ve no idea where they went.
My stumbling block is Lisa’s outfit. If I’m to produce only one, it will have to have elements of all three traditional dresses in it.
The first attempt looks like it could work if Lisa were Lady Gaga. The shoulders are wider than any ball gown would be, and as for the bodice… I’m sure I saw it once on Madonna.
I try again. This time it’s a cross between Dua Lipa and Miley Cyrus on a bad day, but with added gold braid and tassels.
Well, three times is the rule with charms. Oh yes! That’s it. In fact, it’s similar to what I like to wear: the same tight leathers but with touches of sparkling light and discrete gold initials. I can’t better it.
Now for the final part: introducing myself.
Lisa shares a pokey little flat with two other girls. I’ll have to change that, otherwise PO will want to shack up at his place and it’s in the worst part of town. He’s even been raided a couple of times. Hmm, there’s that little voice again telling me, “Lisa is worth so much more.”
I wait until the other girls go out. Now is the time to appear. No, not appear. I’ll knock. Don’t want to startle her yet. Better break it to her gently that she’s about to get her heart’s desire.
She opens the door dressed in the scruffiest pyjamas you ever saw. The girl has no idea of style. Then again, she thinks this is just another night in.
“Oh, hello. I didn’t think I’d see you again. What is it? More bus fare?”
“No, my dear, not this time.”
“Ah well, I suppose I could spare you a pound or two.” Of course she could. There have been coins and notes appearing in her purse ever since we met at the bus stop. But the fact she has offered makes it even more certain she deserves my help. However jealous they are, none of the other fairies will be able to say I invented an excuse for my spells after this.
“I don’t need any money. I’ve come for you, to get you ready for the rave.”
She laughs. “Why would I go there? Look, I’m sorry to be rude but I’m tired. Good night.”
The door is closed in my face. Oh, why are some people so difficult to help?
There’s nothing for it. I have to blow my cover, show her my real identity.
The living room is a mess. It’s untidy and there are three coffee cups on a table next to a face down book. Ah, how sweet. She reads Mills and Boon: a lovelorn lady indeed. She’s so lucky I’ve arrived.
She enters the room and her mouth falls open. “How did you get in here?”
“Don’t be afraid. I’m your fairy godmother, here to make your dreams come true.” Yes, it’s trite, but I fan out my wings and hover for a second or two, just so she gets the message.
She collapses onto the settee. “You’re not real. Susie put some of that stuff in my coffee, didn’t she? God, here I am talking to an hallucination.”
“No, you’re not drugged and I am real. Come on. You believe in romance. I know you do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading that.”
She frowns as I ruffle the pages of the book. “That’s my mother’s. She was here this afternoon. And I don’t believe in fairies.”
“You will after this. Now, we don’t have much time. You must get dressed on the stroke of midnight.” I explain about the spell, but she looks unconvinced, so has to be shown.
When the screaming stops and I’ve managed to calm her down, she at last listens.
“Now, you go to the rave. He won’t be able to take his eyes off you, though if I were you, I wouldn’t let him…” Stop! I’m her fairy godmother, not her mother, and she’s a modern girl with modern morals, not a shy maiden who’s never been out at a party on her own. How she deals with PO is her affair. Literally.
She looks good in the leathers, better than I would. She walks well too. Everything is set.
I wave my hand (wands only ever were for show) and we are outside on the street.
The door of the limo opens itself, which is as well as the rat/chauffeur is sitting on the bonnet glaring at us. She’s not even wearing the uniform. Instead, she’s put on the tasselled number paired with the Madonna top. I really should have cancelled that spell. Well, it’s too late to do anything about it now, so I scramble into the car beside Lisa.
We screech round the deserted streets, running two sets of red lights. I’m not sure where, or even if, the rat ever learned to drive. It’s not a skill much called for when you live on a rubbish tip.
There are a lot of people crowding through the hole into the warehouse. Leaving the rat to park the limo, we join them.
PO is on a raised platform at the front of the room, scouting the talent as it arrives. Soon he will begin his set. I must get Lisa into his sights before then.
As we press our way through the throng, I realise the rat is accompanying us. Has she dumped the limo? I told her to stay with it. Lisa and PO might need it afterwards.
“Oh, beautiful!” PO is leaning forward.
“Oh, magnificent!” Lisa is leaning forward.
“Give us a kiss, you beauty.” PO is puckering.
“Give me a go!” Lisa is leaping past him.
“I’m all yours, baby!” And as one “rat” embraces the other, a young woman in tight black leather sparkling like a starry sky tugs on headphones and gets ready to scratch.
How about that, eh?
Well, I told you I’d make her dreams come true.
***
Third Place (joint)
My Father the Contortionist
By Matt Thomas
My father was a contortionist, so my first job was contortionist’s assistant, passing him glasses of water that he drank from impossible angles. My only other role was to spread my arms towards the crowd in celebration of each new posture, prompting them to applaud in wonder. My devotion was genuine — I truly believed my father’s body was a miracle of nature.
My own children can’t believe that within living memory there were circuses that actually came to town, and that they had lions and a ringmaster and a Big Top. Ours had a fire-eating act, a married couple who dressed in sequins and called themselves the Flaming Zuccherinis. Every act had a stage name. My father was The India Rubber Man.
Our most popular performers were Ying and Yang, clowns who chased each other with buckets of what the audience was led to believe was slop until it was tipped over a child in the front row and found, to much hilarity, to be stars cut out of silver paper. I was the clowns’ confederate, standing behind a curtain and swapping the buckets as they ran past, skidding and teetering round the ring in oversize tailcoats. To my young mind, tricks like these, theatrical deceptions, were a thrilling part of circus life.
As the posters plastered around town put it: You won’t believe your eyes!
At the end of each evening the audience would stroll through the menagerie where the animals were housed when they weren’t performing. It was my favourite place — even now, the word sounds exotic, conjuring up a glorious stench of wild beasts and the damp sawdust that lined their cages. As well as lions, there was an elephant and a camel, a wallaby and several parrots.
My father would take me there most mornings to view the cleaning and feeding, holding my hand in his own warm paw. At other times the menagerie was deserted and I would sneak back to watch these docile captive creatures as they yawned and shuffled and stared back.
The Flaming Zuccherinis and my parents were friends, though they could hardly have been more different. Mrs Zuccherini was a fidgety figure with playful, popping eyes. She was relentlessly tactile, punctuating her conversation by laying a hand on your arm as if preparing you for a punchline. In contrast my mother was shy and watchful.
Signore Zuccherini was prim and mannered, constantly smoothing down the pencil moustache he believed made him look Italian, engaged in his own deception. My father was stocky with a double-jointed waddle.
We were neighbours in identical caravans, a washing rope strung between them where the Zuccherinis hung their sequined costumes beside my father’s leopard skin leotard.
Off duty evenings we spent around a folding table, laid with only a bottle of Martini and a paraffin lamp that had to be regularly relit from the flammable fluids that were part of the fire eater’s trade. Mrs Zuccherini was a hilarious presence, loud and physical, volatile, fiery. She was unlike any adult I knew.
“Mrs Zuccherini is my favourite person,” I announced one day and I saw my mother flinch.
My sleepwalking began on our final summer tour and it was treated by the adults in my life as not so much a deception as a game.
“Guess who!” my father would call out, holding his arms in front of him like a cartoon sleepwalker, and Mrs Zuccherini would join in the impersonation, prodding me and gurgling with laughter. Ying and Yang even added a somnambulist routine to their act. My children now can’t believe I wasn’t sent for a brain scan or some kind of therapy.
Yet even I doubted whether my sleepwalking was genuine. Emerging from a trance, finding myself somewhere unexpected, the voices and images around me slowly taking shape, I could see who was there and hear what was said. I felt stuck to the ground at the end of a dark tunnel, apart, unable to join in but indisputably aware.
“She’s like a ghost!” shrieked Mrs Zuccherini one night when I appeared abruptly at the door of her caravan. I heard her husband from what seemed a long way off, telling her, “I don’t like it, creeping around like she’s spying on us.”
“We’ll have to mind our p’s and q’s!” she agreed.
On another night my father had to guide me back from an unlit part of the waste ground where the circus had set up camp. Back in bed, I heard my mother whisper. “It’s lucky you were there.”
That season the circus played to packed houses everywhere we went. My father was a star attraction. The India Rubber Man now topped the bill, to the irritation of Ying and Yang. His new routine, in which he looped his legs over his head until his feet could rub his cheeks, was a crowd pleaser. When my children ask me what their grandfather looked like, this is the image I recall.
He even gave an interview to a local paper, in those days the peak of celebrity, and I kept it under my pillow. I loved that he called us a “circus family” — a seeming promise to me of a glamorous future. Yet my mother was upset by the photo they published, bare-chested, showing off his rippling physique.
“Who were you trying to impress?” I heard her ask one night after I had gone to bed.
I have no recollection of sleepwalking my way to the menagerie.
My nocturnal wandering had grown more adventurous and I had to be retrieved from ever more remote parts of the circus site. It was inevitable that the animal sounds and smells would draw me in.
That night I must have opened our caravan door unnoticed, crossed the waste ground in the direction of the Big Top and pushed aside the canvas drape at the menagerie entrance. I must have drifted past cages and enclosures and their oblivious occupants, dozing in the dim light. Who knows how many times I stopped and fiddled with the locks or poked my hands through the bars? There was no-one there to steer me from danger.
Some people snap out of a trance, perhaps literally with the click of someone’s fingers, but it wasn’t like that for me. My sense of smell returned first but it came merged with colour, yellow like straw, and a single musical note rising above my head, fading in and out before ending as a screech. I could hear the smell, I could touch it, I could feel it tugging at me and forcing my eyes to open. It was sour and insistent.
I don’t know how long this confusion of sensations lasted. A distorted, distant image of the menagerie was taking its place. I saw on the ground the iron bolts I must have removed from several cages. I heard the rustle of disturbed creatures and made out vague shadows moving and coming closer, rubbing and snorting. I watched as if through a fish eye, too heavy to turn away, too detached to feel fear.
Suddenly I was hoisted, floating, held aloft, flying towards the exit. The arms that carried me were familiar. My rescuer was my father. My children say I owe him my life – theirs too – and I say yes, I do.
I heard his voice as he ran through the dark across the uneven ground to our caravan. “I’ve got you! You’re safe.”
And later, laying me on my bed, “Get some rest now.”
Then I was falling, descending towards sleep, when it came to me. At the moment of rescue, lost in the menagerie, I had heard another voice.
“Do you think she saw us?” it said.
For the next few days I was confined to the caravan, not trusted to take a step outside. My mother sat with me, observing me anxiously without speaking. I was not allowed to take part in my father’s show — in my supposedly fragile state I might act irrationally. Ying and Yang dropped me from their routine. I was thought incapable of performing the bucket swap.
Other circus artists would call, eyeing me uncertainly and reminding me my father was a hero.
At night my parents’ whispered conversation sounded more like hissing.
When I did return to the circus ring, to my role as cheerleader for the India Rubber Man, our popularity was greater than ever. The queues to enter the Big Top snaked around the site. The interview in the local paper, with the muscular photo I had loved but my mother resented, had done the trick. It was rumoured that Billy Smart himself, the television ringmaster, would be there.
My father had never performed better and the response was rapturous. He careered around the arena on his elbows, and bounced like a ball in the circus sand before settling on to a stool, feigning surprise to find his feet dangling above him.
I spread my arms to the crowd and fixed my smile. But all I could think was: “It was a woman’s voice.”
My father was signalling urgently with his eyebrows towards the glass of water: get on with it. I picked up the slop bucket that Ying and Yang had left at the ringside and tossed its contents over his protruding head. But I had forgotten the switch. A cloud of silver stars dispersed and settled over him. The crowd hooted and clapped.
I looked again at his tangled limbs, his body crudely out of shape and in disguise, guilty of another type of deceit. I threw the water in his face and pushed him over in a contorted heap.
I raced back to the caravans and pulled the costumes from the rope stretched between them, placing them in a pile under the Zuccherinis’ circus home, pouring the flammable liquid from the paraffin lamp on top. I struck a match. The sequins crackled in the flames. I fetched from my bedside the newspaper, the one with my father’s photo, to keep the fire alive.
The adults had rushed to the scene but by the time they arrived, our neighbours’ caravan was alight, the flames rising and twisting above its roof, its walls blackened and crumpled out of shape, its plastic windows melting. Flakes of charred newsprint swirled around us. I looked at the astonished face of Mrs Zuccherini and saw my father pushing her arm away.
My children ask if I will write it all down, the story of my circus life, the grandfather they have never seen. I say no, it’s too long ago, though I don’t believe that. What I mean is I could never bring myself to tell the truth.
Competition Judge : Corinne LaBalme
