Prize: £2,000

Top-Tier Finalists:

Laura Besley, Rachel Preece, Jay McKenzie, Wendy Markel, Katrina Moinet, Séimí Mac Aindreasa, Sally Curtis, Poornima Manco, Josephine Queen, Chuck Vandenberg, Melanie Mulrooney, Alexia Ramirez, Shea West, Helen Catt, John Ryland, Tia Shehab, Chrissy Hicks.

Finalists:

Jamie Campbell, Jonah Bateson, Julie Peters, Eugenia Holland, Elizabeth Pearson, Laura Cox, Aidan James Hurren, Arianna Denning, Elliot Marc Smith, Cindy Strube, Martini Lynne, Melissa O, Leanne Tidsey, David Klotzkin, Kelli Johnson, Stephanie Dunlop, Alice Shaw, Mandy Zhou, John H. Knight, Nicholas Watts, Nemes Annamária, Jennifer Steil, Lydia Mocerino, Karen Darger, Armand Diab, Jane Thomas, David Thoenen, Rose Lux, Lisa Cortez, Michael Crouch, Cecilia Maddison, Maddie Logemann, Deidra Whitt Lovegren, R.J.Ursell, Deryn Pittar, DLC Hanson, Ben Wakefield, Ali Miremadi, AJ Wilcox, Madeleine Pelletier, Elysia Rourke, Martin Tulton, Terrye Turpin, Chloe Hor, Simon Clarke, Debbi Voisey, G Stainsby, Nelly Shulman, Kevin Sandefur.

and the winner is…

Charlotte Maidment

And You Whistle in the Dark

  I. 

You are six when you find your way into the attic for the first time. A bare bulb wobbles above your head. Unlit. You couldn’t reach the light switch even if you wanted to. Don’t need it. Half-light reflects on rusted scissors. Mere moments until your mother’s arms scoop you up. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Look at the moth-bitten beige curtains. At the spider crawling across your foot. It is missing a leg. You wonder why. You wonder how. You have not yet learned to be afraid of the dark.

II. 

Like an adventurer on the high seas, you create your map. Left at the box of origami crows. Right at the old, muddy trainers. Under the rocking chair with the broken spindles. Across the sea of yellow-tipped polaroids. You snatch at fistfuls of people you’ll never know; grandmothers and great-cousins and the ill-tempered fishermen that your great-grandfather took portraits of one crisp Christmas morning, centuries before you were born. You dig up a bundle of handwritten letters tied together with red string. Some of the words are smudged. Water, or grease, or age – you can’t tell the truth from the fiction. 

You shine a flashlight into the abyss above your head and bring an eclipse of moths to life– ow! Mum sweeps in. Tweezers and ointment on the dimly lit bathroom counter. A splinter the size of your little finger. You wail, and wail, and wail. Like the world is ending. Because it feels like it is.

III. 

You won’t go back up there again. Not for many years. But you will think about it all the time. That hatch in the ceiling. A portal to another world – one where your mother won’t smother you with lilac kisses, where things can hurt. Maybe to hurt is to live. Your mother tries to take you back up there, amongst the moths and the spider’s webs, to show you just how safe it is when you are in her arms. The floorboards creak beneath her weight. Your feet itch. You wail to be let down.

IV. 

Six weeks pass. Time dilutes the fear. You beg to be let up, at first quietly, then a little louder. Please, mummy, please, please, please– victory tastes sweet for a seven-year-old who suddenly cannot remember why she was ever afraid. You wear shoes this time, determined to be determined, even as the dust snakes twist and slip around your white-laced trainers. Five minutes, Mum says, just five minutes, okay?

Five minutes is an infinity for a seven-year-old.

Clouds of dust gives way to your grandmother’s dresser; you only know her through the picture that sits on the mantle, the one that makes your mother sad, and the sound of her voice that reverberates through the CD player in the kitchen every Christmas.

An apple is wedged behind her dresser. You poke at it. Maggots spew across the floorboards; great big thick ones, slick with apple-gunk and a terrible smell that makes you gag. That smell will haunt the pores of your fingers for weeks. But it won’t dissuade you. You are learning that the consequences of some actions are worth the price of their sting. And their smell.

V. 

The morning of your tenth birthday, a bird flies into your window. The sound sends you screeching into your parents’ bed, but the broken and bloodless corpse you find on the grass beneath your window feels far worse. Dad looks over your shoulder and says well, quick death. Poor bugger. You cry for weeks.

VI. 

“Sleepwalking again, kid?” Dad asks. He’s found you curled up on the broken rocking chair in the attic. Cobwebs fluttering in your lungs. You nod. He makes you a big mug of malted milk. It burns your lips as you drink it.

Mum doesn’t like you spending so much time in the attic. Got to come down and face the real world some time, kiddo. She’s right, of course, but she doesn’t get it. Home, the building, is a boring fortress in a backwater suburbia, but home, the feeling, is right here, contained within the slanted walls of this attic.

VII. 

Christmas carols blast from the kitchen stereo. Your mother is pinning paper chains to the Victorian coving.  A car crashes through the living room, spilling rotten-apple flesh from behind the steering wheel. Mum makes pork for dinner. Later that month, you decide to become a vegetarian.

VIII. 

Prom arrives. Dad gifts you an old timepiece, saying make it back on time, kid. He grins. You wish you could take a piece of his excitement and lock it up forever in the dusty attic. For emergency use only. You hop into the car of a wild-eyed boy who won’t ever know what love is and listen to him talk about the future as though it is a certain, solid thing to believe in. 

He smells like rum and bacon grease. You think you might be falling in love.

You’re three hours late. Dad is furious. Of course he is. Your parents are watching, so you won’t kiss that boy at the door. Instead, you’ll fall asleep thinking of his green-brown eyes, and you’ll dream of white picket fences and a fat ginger tom cat sat on the welcome mat. It won’t be enough. It will never be enough.

The next morning, the toast is burning. Your mother, white-faced, points at the living room television. You knock over her glass of orange juice and the fleshy pulp sinks into the white rug. Those wild green-brown eyes are plastered over the television screen. Breaking news, breaking news, breaking news– he won’t drive that car again.

You’ll visit his grave later that year and you’ll sink through heavy, greasy layers of grief like a lead balloon. Empty-handed with paper-thin promises and moth-bitten regrets. That’s life, kid. That’s what Dad says to everything.

IX. 

Three years pass, then another three. You are presented with a shiny ring from a boy who loves you too much, or loves the illusion of you, at least. It will last six months. You stare at the pile of pinecones on your dresser as he tries his best to explain that it isn’t quite working out. Your neighbours are gossiping about you; you hear it loud and clear over the droning sounds of their lawnmowers. The shiny ring will join the orchestra of your failures as they gather dust in the attic.

X. 

Your parents move out. They say they’re downsizing, but you get the impression they just can’t stand the heavy grey skies of your infectious pessimism for any longer. So, you stay behind. Just like home alone, you think, then realise you are thirty. Just life. Council tax bills pile up on the doormat. Water bills. Electricity bills. You think about burning it all down. You call your therapist. Pills arrive on your doorstep the next morning. They taste bitter and stick in your throat. You sit in the rocking chair and think about rotten apples.

XI.

You find a grey hair. Then another. Then another. You start to think life might be over. Nevertheless, it perseveres. Jagerbombs in dirty glasses turned into discarded half-used tubes of anti-inflammatories, all without you even really noticing. Your neighbours don’t talk about you anymore. If they did, they would whisper recluse.

XII.

 “We haven’t heard from you in a couple of months, pet. We’re worried. Your mum and me. Give us a call back, yeah?”

XIII.

It is dark in the attic. There is dust in your lungs. Moths in your eyes and ears and– well, how easy it would be– how simple– to shed your skin in the night– to reclaim the paper-thin wings that have always been yours, waiting to burst forth– fly towards the light, even if it kills you– and it almost certainly will– fragments of curtains and dusty prom dresses winding and spooling, catching between your teeth–

Do you remember who you are, the night asks.

You want to. More than anything. You want to remember– 

but the light– oh, the light–

you whistle in the dark.