7 DAY STORY WRITING CHALLENGE #8 WINNER

Prize: £500

Best in Genre:

Satire: Creshea Hilton.

Adventure: Nimisha Kantharia, Bobbie Allen.

Surrealist Fiction: Christine Light.

Psychological Fiction: Joanne Deluce.

Literary Fairy Tale: W.J Briden.

Gothic: Maria Dean.

Gangster: Tom Hollow, Lisa H. Owens.

Disaster Fiction: Nic Valyar.

Noir: Evan Davies.

Metafiction: Bryn Eliesse.

Mystery: Karen Darger.

Utopian Fiction: Carl Herstedt.

Finalists:

Satire: Caroline Ashley, Evan Gillespie.

Adventure: Jane Brydon.

Surrealist Fiction: Keiran Meeks, Scott Fisher, Felipe Orlans, Hazel Turner, Séimí Mac Aindreasa.

Psychological Fiction: Kim M. Russell.

Literary Fairy Tale: Zuzanna Rosinska, Melinda Pouncey, K.L. Vincent, Lin Whitehouse.

Gothic: C.A Davies, Emily Macdonald, Deb Bennett, Leanne Tidsey, Robert Burns, Raeesah Chandlay.

Gangster: Stephen Patmore.

Disaster Fiction: Karen Court, Zoé Roff.

Noir: Linda Flynn.

Metafiction: Lauren Wesley-Smith, Viktoria Dahill.

Mystery: Dave Hanson, David Haworth, Barlow Crassmont.

Utopian Fiction: Holly Brandon, Amalee Bowen.

Honourable Mentions

The following are writers who just missed out on being named a finalist!

Satire: Mollie B. Rodgers, Brian A Skinner, Florie Kong Win Chang, Deborah Thompson, Rebecca W. Ikeda, Maria Wickens, Sara Fanella.

Adventure: Kate Figurska, J.C. Lovero, V. S. K. Watanabe, Micaela Cabodi Wilkes, Ryan Fleming, Sandra James, Abagail Summers.

Surrealist Fiction: Lori Green, Amy McGillivray, Deryn Pittar, Lily Millington, Valerie Cutko, Amanda Hurley, Sam James, Tom Turner, Justin Tine, Mary Sheehan, Eugenie Jordan, Marie Martello Conway, Dirk Rasmussen.

Psychological Fiction: Tinamarie Cox, Sarah Haggett, Josiane Cellone, Patsy Collins, Pawan Keshao Thaokar, Malcolm Todd, Joelle Simpson, Cathy Eberle, Dawn Salois.

Literary Fairy Tale: Angel Whelan, Tânia Dias, Shaun David Crowdus, Rebekah Marriner, Emma J Myatt, Mairibeth MacMillan, Tisya Barman, Kayleigh Jones, Sama Bakht, Claire Lindsey, Julia Pollard.

Gothic: Sumitra Singam, August van Stralen, Joe Durham, Sylvia Telfer, Lisa Verdekal, Emily Wilcox, Bean Sawyer, Julia LaFond, Justine Harvey, Sally Curtis, Paul Nockolds, Manaly Talukdar, K. Antonio, Angela Johnson, Emily Van De Rostyne, Mary Cohen, Christina Kershaw, E.B. Duncan, Michelle Dickins.

Gangster: Finnian Burnett, Jay McKenzie, Jonathan Hood, Lou Holland, K.T Clark, Joan Bullion El Faghloumi, Ann Marie Struck, Athina Eleftheriadou, Red Morgan, Paulene Blazey.

Disaster Fiction: Marlene Pitcher, Paul Lewthwaite, Agaigbe Uhembansha, Val Roberts, Maria Sheehan, Marian Brewis, Dillon R Morgan, Peter V. Hilton.

Noir: Swati Ravi Nain, Pamela Gough, Kay Lesley Reeves, Hilary Ayshford, Steph Percival, Anupam Rajak, Heidi Mitchell, Rose Lux, Wendy Markel, Kerr Pelto, Audrey Ingram, Robert Smith, Kathleen Cranidge, Alison Eve.

Metafiction: Sue Wright, David Wright, Martha Brown, Jan Sargeant, Ruby A. Peralta, India Rose, Maggie Pavlik, Jasmine Arden-Brown, Glenda Warburton, L.M. Lydon, Debbie Wingate, Amanda Fox, Kim Clelland.

Mystery: Alan Gold, Wendy Hood, Judith Wilson, Mandy Whyman, Saahil Poonawala, Elizabeth Lyvers, Grace G Moran.

Utopian Fiction: Alwynn Snow, E.D Human, Lisa VanGalen, Dave Thrasher, Leona Smith, Andrew Shaughnessy.

and the winner is…

Christine Light

CRAWLER

(SURREALIST FICTION)

My father is an armchair. 

My mother tells me his cushions were once covered in purple crushed velvet. He’s been reupholstered many times, she whispers to me as she slinks along the baseboards. The current iteration of my father is red, high-tufted, gilded in (imitation) gold. My mother creeps beneath his clawed feet, flattening into a shape like a slug so that she can fit her full body underneath him without getting stuck. He stands, firm and unmoving, facing the pixelated wall of the televisory room. He absorbs into his fibers a blue-light special about cotton candy crafted from melted candy corn and maple syrup. It is not October.

When she emerges at my father’s back, my mother’s bones resize themselves within her goopy limbs, which, after one-hundred seconds, inflate back to their usual size. My mother now cannot, or will not, speak. She maintains the slug-crawl, lurching along the edges of the televisory room without lifting an arm or a leg, or even a head—of which she has two, one at either end. I wonder if I will become a crawler, or an armchair. I cannot see myself to discern if either is my destiny. No mirrors in the house, and when I look down all I see is the blue-and-white linoleum kitchen floor. Or the ornate (imitation) Turkish rug in the televisory room. Or my mother, inching forward, sodden-faced as a soft-shelled turtle. I am as a glass-bottomed boat, one that is also glass-sided and glass-topped and glass-everything.

I am eating cotton candy made from melted candy corn and maple syrup as I watch my mother spit goldfish into the air, from her top-head, or her left-head, as she never stands upright anymore. She is on her back now, her glutinous belly shimmering in the fluorescent light of the kitchen. A fountain of goldfish cascades out of and back into her, from a deep pool somewhere in her throat. The mouth of her right-head spits clear fluid; it could be water. I am suddenly alone in every moment. I believe this thought. It deposits into my blood a frisson of icy terror nestled within a fury that urges me to hover above my mother’s left-head mouth and (invisibly) grasp with fervor at the fish that leap from it.

I catch two fish, the slowest ones, the least slippery ones, and cannot decide what to do with them. A goldfish gulped down the gullet is as appealing as it is alliterative, for it is cruel, and in this moment I mean to make my mother pay for her persistent prowling across the floor. But I decide instead to fry the fish in saffron-dyed coconut oil marketed as “vegan ghee,” for we have no lard, which I would prefer and which we used to keep on the kitchen counter, before my mother dropped to the floor and forsook memory of her days upright.

The fish pucker their wide-O lips in bloated “pah…pah” circles as I toss them in a small copper-coated ceramic pan and turn the flame to medium. Their eyes bulge toward me as if they’d like to share a secret. I have no room for secrets, not if they are from my mother. The heat is too gentle; I turn the flame high and watch the fisheyes burst. Their secret evaporates along with their fiery fishy flesh and the oil it bathes in. 

I climb into the pan and wade through the rancid mush produced by the licking flames. My father is an armchair, and my mother is stuck on the floor, so I do not worry about being eaten. Now I wish the fish were living, so I would have company in the pan. I mustn’t stay here long, as I fear this is the way one becomes something one doesn’t want to be. This possibility is enough to make me leave the pan at once, as, if there’s anything I want to be, it is certainly not a hot copper pan with putrescent fish and murky oil congealing in its shallow basin.

I am out of the pan, and my mother is glaring at me. Since she will not (or cannot) speak, I can only surmise why her face contorts in such a way—her brow is darkened and lowered, and her nose, eyes, and lips pinch together in a scowl that looks rather like a puckered anus. She must be angry that I killed the fish I took from her mouth, that I didn’t listen to what they had to say, that I didn’t (couldn’t) care about their feelings before I slaughtered them in a flaming pit. Once, I might have acknowledged her point, conceded that she was right to be angry. But now she cannot have a point, as she is only on the ground and only spitting fish and only always quiet. She squirts at me from her right-face mouth. 

My knees buckle, and I am at once on the kitchen floor, face to the cool linoleum. I look right and see my mother grinning wildly. She has infected me, and she is proud of it. I part my lips to curse her, but I cannot (will not?), as goldfish gurgle from my mouth. I still cannot see myself, but I can see the never-ending stream of fish jumping out of and back into my beingness. My mother’s eyes laugh.

I hold it in my mind that I will stand up, but I cannot force it. I try to picture what I want to be in this life, but I cannot remember. Would I rather be a copper pan? With my gaze I outline the blue five-petaled flowers on the linoleum square just before me. I urge myself forward, sliding on a track of slime that must be coming from somewhere in or on my body. This won’t do, it just won’t. But what can be done?

I have now grown a second head, and a second mouth that spits water, just like my mother’s. I still cannot see myself, but I can feel that it is there. If I spit at my father, would he join us in creeping noiselessly across the floor? Would he rather be an armchair? I continue forward. I cannot see where I am going, it’s too much effort to lift my head. I can see my mother to the side, out of the corner of my eye, watching my movements with an expression at once grave and bemused. Perhaps this is because she never moved with purpose in all her time on the floor. Is that what this is? Purpose? I have no choice but to slurp forward faster, the faint idea that I might have a purpose now firing off pistons within me, bursting from someplace I have never touched. I thud into a mass of hard wood. Stairs. I move inch by inch, fastidiously, over the span of an hour or more, up the first step. I remember there are thirteen to climb. 

I can no longer see my mother. Nor can I see my father. My eyes, now shrouded in milky film, cannot gaze that far back. I climb, feeling somewhere in the pit of me that there is a reason to climb. There’s a thought, a wisp of cotton floating through my mind; I grab it tightly and read it. It says this: “If you allow yourself to become aimless now, you will never not be aimless.” I continue to climb. I do not stop. Though I cannot see myself, I also cannot be an armchair or a crawler or a copper pan. I climb.

Night has passed and turned to day, sun disappearing and reappearing through the first-floor bay windows, by the time I reach the landing at the top of the stairs. The engine within me wanes. My crawl is slow. The fish in my throat and mouth wriggle feebly rather than thrashing in fits. I am alone. I am only alone, and I have no help. I have nobody. There is nothing to lose, even if the goldfish within me die and rot and choke the air out of my lungs. I turn left toward the only bathroom in our house. It smells of urine and decaying fecal matter, having plummeted into dereliction as it has not been cleaned for months, or years. A centipede scatters as I lurch forward, splaying its hundred legs every which direction. Its speed motivates my motor, and I make it shortly to the bathtub, where I open my mouth by reflex, as if to vomit. A goldfish bursts from my mouth into the tub. A second follows. A third. A fourth. I purge one-hundred goldfish from the pool within me, into the tub. They will die here, as there is no water.

A gentle stirring in my body tells me I can move my limbs. With tender care, as one would nurture an un-casted arm that has just mended from a breaking, I prop my elbows on the side of the tub, gathering caked grime on my papery skin. I push myself to my feet. I am standing. I am walking. I move down the stairs, slipping on the slop I deposited on my fifteen-hour journey up them the night before. My mother waits for me at the bottom. She looks to me with one eye curiously cocked. She smiles, slowly. A warm tingling roots into my belly. I step over my mother and march toward the front door, a gateway to a world I’d forgotten existed. I turn to face my father. His red velvet has morphed to a russet-brown from his hours spent awash in the light of the pixelated panel of the televisory room. Who will reupholster him now?

I unbolt the door and creak it open. Saltwater mists onto my skin, into my lungs. Somewhere along the offing a gull screams, crying to me that it exists. As I move through the door and into the ocean, my body materializes. No longer can I only feel my beingness. I can see me. I sea me. sea.

I am sea.