Three Minutes, a short story by Emma J Myatt

Inside these three minutes a life is suspended. The plastic stick sits on the windowsill and I sit on the other side of the room. I’m superstitious; if I sit next to it there’ll only be one line. If I don’t sit next to it, two lines will appear. I fight with myself to sit still.

It’s a risk, all of this. Andy doesn’t know. There’s no limit to what he doesn’t know, at the moment. But my feelings of remorse are pushed down by the much more burning desire inside me: to have a baby. If there are two lines, I’ll deal with all of it then. If there’s one line, nobody gets hurt, nobody needs to know.

I think of all the ethical codes I’ve broken, that my friend Kelly has broken. She’s the one who told me the results first, she’s the one who will sit with us tomorrow in the clinic, and lie, saying that Andy’s sperm count was fine. We’re doing him a favour, I keep telling myself. Knowing he’s infertile would devastate him because all he wants is to be a father. The plan was mine and I’m helping him. I’m preventing his depression getting any worse. If he knew the truth, it could kill him, I tell myself.

This way, if there are two lines, he gets to be a dad. If there’s one line, we need to wait a little longer but he’ll still get to be a dad, I’ll just need to make another plan. It’s a win-win. A no-brainer.

It took a while to find someone who looked like him. Kelly covered for me; the nights out were about her celebrating a promotion, her birthday, a random girls’ night just because. And all the while, I was hunting. Hunting for an Andy lookalike.  When I found one, it was a cinch. I know my cycle well, the timing was just right and let’s face it, men are easy. When I said I wanted a no strings attached one night stand, he practically fell at my feet. And that was that, done and dusted, the seed planted, just like that song.

Three minutes is up. I walk towards the windowsill as slowly as I can bear.

There are two lines.

My tears are of pure joy. I jump in the air, dance around the flat, whoop aloud my success. I dash to the phone to call Andy, to tell him what he’s been waiting to hear for the past year.

As I reach it, it rings. I answer, the happiness in my heart cut short by Kelly’s tone.

‘I’m sorry,’ she’s saying. ‘They sent a letter. It’s this new, automated system. It began yesterday. Supposed to save appointments. He’ll receive it this morning. I’m so sorry. You better get to him, quick. He’ll be in pieces.’

I hang up. Immediately, it rings. I see from the caller ID that it’s Andy. I take a deep breath, and pick it up.

Carousel - a short story by Katharine Orton

There’s blood in my mouth. A metallic twang on my tongue from the split lip you gave me. You’re wearing the hood pulled up on your raincoat and my damp dress slaps against my shivering knees. I hug myself tight. For warmth, yes – and for courage. Because I’m not taking you back this time.

‘I’ll stay with Mum tonight,’ I say. ‘When I get back I want you gone.’ Our bodies are turned tactfully outwards, away from one another. There’s a fair at the seaside, today, and a carousel. Painted horses loom out of it. They bare wooden teeth; glare with manic eyes. It’s mesmerising.

We fled the house earlier like it was a crime scene. ‘To get some air,’ I’d said. I run my tongue over my lip again, reliving the pain. ‘Alice, please,’ you say. There’s a quiver in your voice.

‘Please, what?’ The wind makes me shiver – or maybe it’s adrenalin. I’m formidable now you’re weak. Now your rage has burned out and your fists have turned inwards again. I could be up high with the seagulls, watching us both, watching the carousel – buoyed on balmy foreign breezes.

I savour this feeling. It’s not often I get to be powerful.

‘Don’t do this,’ you beg. ‘I swear. I’ll never lay another finger on you.’

‘The problem isn’t your fingers,’ I say. ‘It’s your fists.’ The goad tastes delicious. The carousel thunders round, screaming.

You prize my arm away from my body. You have to wrench it. You hold my palm between both of yours, as if praying. ‘I’ll do anything, my love,’ you say. ‘Anything.’ A rush of sympathy floods me like anaesthesia. I struggle to resist. On the ride, children grip their slippery charges, faces fearful. Knuckles white.       

My father wasn’t like you – though he had other passions. He’d stalk into the room where my brothers and I played and slip his hand up Mum’s skirt, and she’d just stand there, frozen against the wall. As if her stillness meant we wouldn’t notice.

My own knuckles are the colour of chicken bones popped from their sockets.

I smell candy floss through the rain. What is it that made you this way, I wonder? Bruised, inside? Is it the ancient strap marks from your dead dad’s belt? The lashes from your mother’s tongue? I’ve seen the power of those.

You’re shaking now, as you grip my hand. Beside us, the carousel slows to a standstill. You sink to your knees. I could walk away. Leave you crumpled on the floor.

But something’s changed. I’m not your mother, after all. I’m not you. I can’t stomach hurting you for long. It’s the thing that makes me different that makes me stay.

I try to pull you to your feet and when you won’t rise, I crouch too. I kiss your tears with my bloody mouth. It hurts. When we get to our feet, the carousel has started again. New passengers. New fares. The same old ride.


Winner of Flash 500 First Quarter 2015.

Comparing Notes by Susanna Clayson

My dear wife, (left on the fridge door)

You know it’s true I value you

but now I fear you’ve aged my dear   

You’re fifty-four and can no more

Excite desire or light my fire

I’ve needs and must indulge my lust

I’ll spend tonight if it’s alright

Naked, in bed with a young redhead

Here’s hoping she’ll satisfy me

She fancies me apparently.

If plied with drink, I’m led to think

She’s eighteen, fit and up for ‘it’

Don’t be upset and don’t forget

I’ll be home late…

… so please don’t wait.

    

My Dear husband, (found on the kitchen table)

You’ll understand I too have planned

To go away today to stay

With young Matt Roach, my fitness coach

He’s eighteen too and six foot two

You are far more than fifty-four

And so before I shut the door

I felt I ought to leave this thought

Same boat we’re in but for one thing…  

…simple maths shows that 18 goes

in fifty-four so many more

times than fifty-four (or a few more)         

goes in eighteen. Know what I mean?!

Therefore we’ll speak…

…sometime next week.

Winner of Flash 500 Humour Verse Competition

Blood Bond by Marie Gethins

She wore red shoes to his funeral. The last to arrive, she strode to the empty first pew. Tap, tap, tap, heels striking slate. We watched – a cardinal streak, each step a pulse. Red against black tights, scarlet on grey stone. Glossy and bright. We saw the shoes, smouldering in the muted light. Neck encircled in black fur, eyes dry, face static, crimson lips still. Our whispers sparked, echoing off the hallowed walls.

“Shameful.”

“Sucking away at his savings already.”

“If he were alive, he’d have put her in her place.”

The priest held out his arms, waving us into silence. A congregation of eyes focused on her stiff back. She didn’t flinch. During the eulogy, her foot began to swing. Forward, back, forward, back. “A pillar of the community,” the priest said. “His deep bond with his daughter evident to all.” We heard her exhale with a hiss. A vein throbbed in her neck.

Sitting in the front row throughout primary school, we watched her neck tense during art class. She drew the same picture: a little girl with large eyes, no mouth. A man stood behind her, gripping the girl’s shoulder. The sky a solid grey. The rest of us created children playing in sunshine: fluffy clouds, bright smiles, stick arms waving “hello.”  Miss pinned up our pictures on the classroom wall, but hers went into a locked desk drawer.

Now she stood as her father’s coffin coasted by; a clatter of rollers and it slid into the obsidian hearse. Her limousine followed to the graveyard. Sole occupant, he would’ve roared at the expense. She led us across the dewy grass. Red crushing green, heels piercing the sward. Crows circled and cawed overhead.

The priest nodded. She pulled off her tight black glove, crimson nails against pale skin. A fistful of dirt and gravel hit the mahogany box; stones denting and scraping polished wood. Scarred it descended, darkness swallowing it whole, soon to be covered by a muddy mound. We watched her brush the dirt off her palm and smile. She turned. Her red shoes glowed, becoming blood spots on the horizon.

Winner of Flash 500 Competition

Bit by Bit, a short story by Pauline Brown

I hate pyjamas because they eat you. No really, they do. While you’re alive. Jake’s pyjamas started eating him last year. Tiny bit by teeny bite.

At first I didn’t know it was the pyjamas. I thought Jake was just pretending – even acting like he couldn’t play football anymore, just so’s he could get off going to school. That was till Dad sat me down one day and started going on about the bad things that sometimes happen, and about love and keeping brave and stuff.

I asked Aunty Helen to be straight with me.

“It’s as if something horrid is eating Jake up,” she said. And even though she never said it was his pyjamas, I began to see they must be what she meant. Underneath I knew they were gnawing away at him, sucking the juice out from under his skin, leaving it all tight and grubby-white like the tops of Dad’s drums. I thought if we all stayed very still, we might just hear them nibbling and slurping away, but I could never get anyone to stay quiet for long enough.

“Take your pyjamas off, Jake,” I told him. “They’re eating you up.”

“Don’t be stupid, Stupid,” Jake said, and went back to Minecraft world.

“I don’t want to wear pyjamas any more. Please tell Dad to get me a nightie like Cassie’s instead.”

“Silly Billy,” Aunty Helen said. “You’re a boy. Pyjamas are what all boys wear in bed.”

Boys like Jake, I thought.

It was when Jake got moved to the yellow house with rainbows on the ceilings that I knew for deffo I was right. The place was full of kids whose pyjamas were eating them too. Even the kids that wore plain ones with no monsters or insects on them. Even the ones that pushed trolleys around with plastic bottles and tubes to pump the goo back into their skin.

***

I think Dad is a bit sad that I’ve stopped wanting his bedtime stories, and that I always say I can turn my light out for myself. But, you see, he mustn’t know how I’ve cut my pyjamas into shreds, or how every night I eat another bit of them. Tiny bit, by teeny bite.

First prize in third quarter’s competition 2014

Cedric - A Cautionary Tale for Poets by Donald Nixon

He claimed to be the national bard

and leader of the avant garde.

He wore a wide poetic hat,

wrote obscure verse and kept a cat.

All rhyming verses made him sneer,

gave pain to his poetic rear.

He grimaced, his expression stoic,

when faced with couplets called heroic.

Only sonnets could be worse

for he despised all formal verse.

He boasts of knowing all the great;

claims Carol Ann to be a mate,

and when he’s high on half a shandy,

calls Sir Andrew Motion  - Andy.

One day in search of something new,

he sought a subject at the zoo.

He  mused and heard a lion’s roar,

he thought a potent metaphor.

‘Be careful, sir,’ the keeper said,

‘The lions have not yet been fed.’

But  Cedric paid no heed at all

and wandered through the lions’ hall.

His mind full of his opening lines,

he just ignored all warning signs.

A beast called Laurie shook his mane

when Cedric poked him with his cane.

The lion tried a practice munch,

then swallowed Cedric for his lunch.

The Zoo Board took a PR line

and by the lions put a sign.

It states in fancy copperplate,

CEDRIC, THE POET LAURIE ATE

First prize for the third quarter of the humour verse competition 2014

The Butterfly Effect - a short story by Pauline Brown

Leopold Lojka rests gloved hands on the steering wheel. In his abdomen, a shiver of butterfly wings. This day is to be his proudest yet.

As the visiting archduke and duchess descend the town hall steps, Leopold questions the wisdom of the car’s folded-down hood. But greater minds than his exist to take decisions on such matters. Besides which, the sun is smiling bright on Sarajevo today.

The car rocks on its springs as the imperial couple take their seats behind him, prompting his butterfly to flutter its fragile wings again. A professional chauffeur from Vienna, it is assumed he will know how to handle this car, any car. This is not the moment to ask if he might take her away; just for a few moments alone with her, to get to know her steering, gears, brakes.

They’re off, a river running to their left. Crowds fill the broad pavements. The archduke and his wife will be smiling, he thinks. Waving too. Though perhaps, like him, a little uneasy to see so few soldiers. Again, Leopold dismisses the qualm, reminding himself of those wiser heads. Like that of General Potiorek, governor of the city and mastermind of this royal visit, who sits in the rear-facing seat behind his shoulder.

Unfamiliar with the streets, Leopold stayed up till dawn to study the route. But, following an attempted bombing earlier, changes have been made, and an hour ago a man in a hurry reeled off a new list of unpronounceable road names and turnings. Apparently Potiorek himself made those changes. Surely he will flag them as they approach, save each of them the shame of a wrong turn?

Beneath the tight band of his cap, an irritation of sweat. They are nearing the first turning of the original route. He slows the car and risks a backward glance, but Potiorek is waving to the crowd. Holding back until the last available moment, Leopold must finally commit. One way, or the other. Leaving the wide promenade, he swings the car into the gloom of a high-sided alley.

“No, idiot. Straight on,” the general hisses in his ear. Leopold’s foot hits the brake. “Back up, now!”

A youth stands up from a pavement café, and takes a step towards the car, raising his arm. A flash of sunlight on metal. Potiorek  has turned in his seat, is on his knees, screaming in Leopold’s ear, peppering it with spittle. Mercifully the gears engage and the car heaves backwards, but only to jolt to a sickening stop as the engine cuts out.

Splitting the silence that follows: two staccato explosions. And, as the youth turns and runs, Leopold Lojka, royal chauffeur for a day, feels the warm blood of his passengers on the back of his neck.

Leopold’s butterfly has taken flight into the Sarajevo sky. Now the hurricane that will engulf a continent begins to stir.

Winner of Flash 500 Second Quarter 2014.

The iPhone and the Clock - a poem by Darrell Barnes

A Clokke there was, a handsome piece withal

which struck ye houres and eke ye quarter chimes.

It stood against ye staircase in ye hal.

Its Trendye Owner, moving with ye times,

bought every new applyance when in stocke.

An iPhone 5 (encrypted using primes)

lay on a table near this ancient Clokke

much like, I trow, a pygmy next a giante.

The one kept stille, the other went ticke-tocke

and warned “takke care!  I fear you’re too reliant

on artificialle batteryes.”  “What crappe!

Can’t you rede?  They’re FCC compliante!

All you can do is ticke: no single app

to humour or amuse.  Effe of!  Goode nighte!”

At that its power failed (a thunder clappe).

“If I ran downe,” the Clokke said, “I’d looke brighte,

for twysse a daye I’d be exactly righte.”

Winner of Flash 500 Humour Verse Second Quarter 2014.

Lessons in Horticulture by Rachael Dunlop

Don’t plant things in the wrong place. For example:

Don’t plant a Japanese maple tree just outside the back door where you can see its heart-red, flame-red, blood-red leaves in the low autumn light, just because he said he loves maple trees. One day he’ll leave you, and you’ll grow to hate that tree in its heedless insistence on being beautiful.

And when he does leave, don’t cut down the maple tree with a rusty saw that tears its juicy flesh, heaping fallen branches on the overgrown lawn, the red and the green, complementary colours singing to each other until you bundle it all into a black bag.

Don’t think that just because you’ve cut the tree down, just because all that remains is a small stump, its spongy surface hardening to a callous even as you watch, that the tree is dead. It is not.

Don’t be surprised when you see tiny clones of the felled tree appearing in the grass, and when you dig and pull you find a rope-like root, suckers thrown up along its length, all the way back to the stump. You’ll start to dream about that tree pressing against your bedroom window, tap, tap, let me in. You’ll scan the garden every morning for new suckers, pulling them up, pinching them out, for weeks, before you realise the error of your ways. Hydra-like, the stump pumps out three new suckers for every one you pull.

Don’t panic when the first sucker, a soft, fleshy stem with lime-green spiked palmate leaves, appears through one of the cracks in the kitchen floor, followed by another, and another, a new one every day. You’ll soon find out you’ve bought a house with no foundations, just brick on mud, and underneath the kitchen lino the earth is dark and damp. There is nothing under your feet.

Learn from your mistakes. Pack his things into boxes and send them back to him. Call the insurance company and get the house - the sagging, bulging house - pinned, strapped and stitched back together, after new foundations have been poured and pumped under it. Buy a box of poison from the garden centre and paint it carefully onto the stump of the tree on a cool, still day and cover it with a clear plastic bag, secured with a red-rubber band. Watch as the stump breathes and bleeds moisture into the bag until the wood is cracked and yellow and the suckers in the grass flop and retreat.

Consider the consequences before you plant another tree.

Winner of Flash 500 First Quarter 2014.

Necromancer by Rob Mooney

High in his tower on a haunted strand

A wizard with a serpent wand

Gazed over his ensorcelled land

And upturned in a bony hand

An hourglass filled with night black sand

Beneath a mystical penumbra

To claps of cabalistic thunder

A people frozen chill as tundra

Began at last to peel asunder

Enchantments they’d been living under

Captives of theurgic rage

Enthralled in bondage to their mage

For one brief hour of every age

The wizard frees them from his cage

To let their fiendish bonds assuage

Chthonic sigils then unspell

A brief respite for those who dwell

Within the warlock’s eldritch hell

Until his occult tocsin’s knell

Begins again their hearts to quell

The wizard does this necromancy

Though its probity be chancy

To mire his subjects in a fancy

And thus impress the sorceress Nancy

To be his succuba fiancée

Winner of Flash 500 Humour Verse Competition for the First Quarter 2014

On Watching a Re-run of Taggart, a poem by Jane Seabourne

…no, no, no: the killer was the dark-haired man,

the one with shifty eyes and massive hands,

who came back from the oil-rigs where he worked

and found out that his wife was knocking off

the hypnotherapist we first saw in Part One –

the one who kept a parrot in his lounge,

and somehow knew the drummer with the limp.

And it was him – the one with shifty eyes –

and not the parrot-loving hypnotherapist –

who killed the drummer in the nightclub’s loo

because the woman from the butcher’s shop

had given his description to Blythe Duff

(a very young PC when this was made)

and the po-lis made a photo-fit which

the drummer knew would give the game away

because she must have seen him – not Blythe Duff,

the gormless woman from the butcher’s shop

– when she went round to the haggis-boiler’s house –

the one she met at work and took a fancy to.

We saw him in the opening scene, sawing up

the missing teacher in a bath

before distributing the body parts round Glasgow.

And it was she – the missing teacher not

the love-struck woman from the butcher’s shop –

who sold the drugs that killed the daughter of

the dark-haired, shifty, oil-rig man, whose wife

was knocking off the hypnotherapist

we first saw in Part One.

I might have skipped a bit,

but I think that’s about the gist of it,

now, whose turn is it to put the kettle on…

Flash 500 Humour Verse Winning Poem Fourth Quarter 2013

For information on Flash 500 competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com 

Pauline's Peculiar Predicament, a short story by Anthony Farmer

Pauline, perched primly at a table in Pandora’s Pantry perusing the menu with her secret paramour Peregrine Pargetter. She didn’t love him though she liked the odd glass of Pinot but she was no potomaniac. Pauline loved presents of pearls and put up with the well-practiced performance in the back seat of Peregrine’s pretentious Peugeot parked in a puddled parking place somewhere in Peckham. He pursued her in private and was particularly persuasive. She, in public particularly prudish, but in private a passionate Pussycat with a propensity for peculiar. Peregrine prattled on about his parents plan for a pre-retirement party at their pretentious pad in Portugal.

‘Please place your order, madam,’ proposed a waiter like a policeman on point duty, pen poised, pad in palm.

‘Perhaps the pate, then,’ she paused, ‘pullet or pork? No, partridge please,’ adding, ‘perhaps a Pinot Grigio and Perrier with my partridge?’

Peregrine, a partner in pensions, was more positive. ‘Mine’s prawns,’ he pronounced, ‘in the parcel of pastry, then pork and Provencal Palette.’

He passed the menu to the patient waiter.

Peregrine placed his palm on her pale wrist. She pursed her perfect lips and blew him a kiss. He wasn’t in love with her. Peregrine, too parsimonious to pursue a permanent partnership, played his part with prudence.

She had a husbandly partner with a pad in Putney. Pauline, with a pretty face and penetrating eyes, had a penchant for pearls. She dressed in pencil thin skirts, tailored pastel or paisley jackets and patent leather heels from Prada; all put together properly. She preferred the possibility of a more permanent prospect and at present played hard to get. After all, her partner Peter Piper is a prospective Parliamentary prospect for Pease Pottage.

The waiter appeared and placed the prawn and the pate in position on the placemats. Pauline pecked at her pate while Peregrine pursued his prey around his plate and was near to finishing when he noticed his paramour’s paralysis and unusually pale complexion. Following her piercing gaze, he picked up her peculiar predicament.

Pandering to a pair of pensioners, the waiter noticed Peregrine’s precipitous pitch. Peregrine had begun to slide down his chair with the precise actions of someone plunging down a precipice until he disappeared under the table. Pauline was unperturbed and continued to peck her partridge like a pigeon. In a pair of purposeful paces the puzzled waiter was at her table.

‘Please, madam, permit me to point out that your husband has plunged from his perch and now lies prone beneath the table.’

She looked up and pronounced: ‘Young man, I applaud your perspicacity and professional propriety. This is not my husband,’ she pauses and points under the table and pauses again. ‘My husband has just walked in.’

Flash 500 Winning Story Fourth Quarter 2013

For information on Flash 500 competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com 

Sartor Resartus, a poem by Lynn Roberts

First Quarter 2013 Flash 500 Humour Verse Winner

When - couth and kempt from head to toe - I climb on board the morning train

the state of dress I find thereon inclines me to leap off again...

instead I sit and sulk, and start reordering the sumptuary laws,

by noting who to hang and flay (and who should simply stay indoors).

No boxers hoving into view, or crotch that dangles round the shin;

no naked rolls of midriff dough, or knees composed of pleated skin;

no jeans that measure round the thigh a lot more than the leg is long;

no public bra straps, backs (or fronts); no peeking G-strings (really wrong);

no trainers built like dodgem cars; no hoods or sunnies worn inside;

no denim over thirty-eight, or blouson tops – have you no pride?

no clots of fascination stuck grotesquely just above the ear;

no clingy lycra, shapeless fleece, or unseductive sporty gear...

But much the strongest of my ire’s reserved for that disaster

which we should exile straightaway, or (preferably) much faster:

that ghastly adult babygro, in which our youth are strutting;

the onesie - prophylactic for desire and lust and rutting...

So if you’re found within my realm thus hideously bepantled,

you’ll be defrocked -

debagged -

uncapped -

divested –

and

dismantled.

For information on Flash 500 competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com 

When No One Is Looking by Karen Jones

Mrs Mclean disappeared when I was the only one watching.

At first she just got smaller and smaller. Never a tall woman to begin with, her clothes hung on her, as though borrowed from an older, big-boned sister. Even her head looked shrunken, hair too full and candy-floss fluffy for the skull it adorned. I remember trying to tell people.

“Dad, Mrs McLean is tiny.”

“Wheesht, Siobhan, I’m listening to the radio.” He didn’t even look at me when he spoke.

“Mum, Mrs McLean is teeny, tiny, toaty now.”

“Away back to reading your book, Siobhan, I’m busy with the cooking.” She didn’t even take her eyes off the dough she was kneading on the board.

“I’ve finished my book. But Mrs McLean, she’s…”

“You’ve finished another book? Jesus, that librarian must be sick looking at the pair of us. Well go and play then, but leave poor Mrs Mclean alone, do you hear? She’s had enough to deal with.”

And so she had. I’d heard them talk about all the things she’d lost: her son in a war somewhere far away that Dad said wasn’t even our fight; her daughter to a sickness they only ever called the big C; her husband to one of the special hospitals – there were three surrounding our group of villages, so I always thought she’d find him one day if she just looked in the right one – and her sisters and brothers to the four corners of the world. I knew the world was round, but never argued when I ear-wigged on the adults. Then we were all losing Mrs McLean but no one would listen.

One morning I stood at my bedroom window and watched her walk down her garden path. With every step she shrivelled until her clothes dragged along, her head lost inside her cardigan, just the fuzzy hair sticking out of the hole. Then the wind rose and her hair scattered across the grass, like dandelion fluff when I blew it to tell the time, and her shoes stopped walking as her skirt and top crumpled onto them.

Mrs McLean disappeared because I was the only one watching.

Flash 500 Winning Story First Quarter 2013

For information on Flash 500 competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com 

Veiled Shadows, a short story by Barb Hunt

Second Quarter 2013 Flash 500 Winner

Snakes invaded her dreams the night after Mr Chesley took her into his shed to show her the puppy ‒ the puppy that wasn't there.

It was the echo of screams in her head that woke her and she sat up when Mama came running. "Whatever's the matter, child?"

She stared in a dazed, foggy haze.

"Snakes ... I dreamed of snakes ... slithery, slimy, sticky ... dirty ... snakes."

She wanted to tell about Mr Chesley and she was searching for the proper words, when Mama pulled the blanket from her chin.

"Look, silly ... 'tis the fringe of the blanket ... that's all. Go back to sleep."

In the weeks that passed, the dreams about snakes wouldn't go away and she started to hate the night-time, with its veiled shadows lurking in corners making the air heavy and hard to breathe. She would huddle in the space between her wardrobe and the wall, blankets tucked around her ears, and there she would stay until the sun came peeking through the mango tree outside her window to chase the shadows away.

One morning, hissing and popping woke her and she could smell bacon. Her stomach rumbled and she could taste its crispiness. Mama hardly ever cooked it any more since Dadda left.

Maybe now was the time to tell her about the man next door, but Mama spoke first.

"Mr Chesley's coming over for breakfast. I don't know what I'd do without him doing odd jobs around the garden for me. He's been my saviour since that lazy, good-for-nothin' father of yours disappeared."

Her stomach somersaulted and she felt a knife twisting in her belly."Can I eat  breakfast in my room ... please?"

"No, indeed not. Mr Chesley's been kind to us and I won't tolerate rudeness."

The man sat at the table, in her Dadda's chair. He smirked and raised his bushy eyebrows. "And how's the young lassie?"

Mama was too busy fussing and arranging food on Mr Chesley's plate and didn't notice when there was no answer.

She made a feeble attempt to pick at the bacon, all the time avoiding the man's narrowed eyes, instead, staring out of the window at the sky which started to change.

Shadowy clouds moved fast across the horizon, covering the sun. A grey gloominess filled the room, but Mama, in her ignorance, only had eyes for the man.

Flash 500 runs three competitions. We have an open-themed category for fiction up to 500 words. There is also a humour verse section, asking for any form of funny poetry, from a limerick to a poem of 32 lines.

Both of the above are quarterly competitions with closing dates of 31st March, 30th June, 30th September and 31st December.

The Novel Opening Chapter & Synopsis Competition is a new annual competition, opening for entries on 1st May and closing on 31st October.

For information on all three competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com 

Sound Advice to a Young Poet or The Birth of the Literary Critic, a poem by Trevor Hughes

Second Quarter 2013 Flash 500 Humour Verse Winner

The young man knocked upon the door as the light began to fade.

“‘ello,” he said, I’ve heard Sam’s ‘ere,” to the pretty country maid.

“Come in,” she said, with a winning smile, and led him up the stair:

she opened the guest room door and said, “There’s a visitor for you, sir.”

At a desk sat a man scribbling furiously, oblivious to his guest.

Who crossed the room, took off his hat, and tapped him on the chest.

“Another new poem? Let me look.” For a moment or two he read.

Then he sat down heavily on the couch and tiredly shook his head.

“Sam, I’ve tried me best to explain to you, but you seem to pay no heed.

You ought to be writing the kind of poems the public wants to read.

It’s seventeen-ninety-seven now, Sam; it’s not the Middles Ages

and folks want to read some modern stuff.” Sadly, he turned the pages.

“Kubla Khan and Xanadu? Sacred rivers and a sunless sea?

And for God’s sake, Sam, can you please explain, what’s an ‘incense-bearing tree’?

And ‘twice five miles of fertile ground’? Why can’t you just say ten?

If I were you I’d rip it up and start all over again.”

“Now I’m sure that you’ve got some talent, Sam, but frankly this is crap.

I’ve had a really good idea that could put you on the map.

There’s like this sailor and this old boat and like this ghostly floating wreck,

and this albatross comes flying down and wraps itself round his neck.”

“Now it needs some thought and a storyline, but come on, Sam, let’s be fair,

it beats some ancient geezer with flashing eyes and floating hair.

It isn’t just the river, is it, old mate, that’s meandering in a maze?

And let’s be frank, Sam, who the hell plays a dulcimer these days?”

“If you ask me, Sam, where you’ve gone wrong and I know you don’t want it said,

but it’s all that bloody opium; you should knock it on the head.”

And on that note the young man stood and gravely tugged his forelock.

“I’d love to stay and talk poems, Sam, but it’s a long walk back to Porlock.”

Flash 500 runs three competitions. We have an open-themed category for fiction up to 500 words. There is also a humour verse section, asking for any form of funny poetry, from a limerick to a poem of 32 lines.

Both of the above are quarterly competitions with closing dates of 31st March, 30th June, 30th September and 31st December.

The Novel Opening Chapter & Synopsis Competition is a new annual competition, opening for entries on 1st May and closing on 31st October.

For information on all three competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com 

Literally Minded, a poem by Melanie Branton

Third Quarter 2013 Flash 500 Humour Verse Winner

I’m a bit of a “literally” pedant,

So I literally screamed when I heard

That the dictionary-makers had added

An alternative gloss to this word.

It used to mean “really and truly”,

But the rules have been altered and, hence,

Now you’re entitled to use it

In a non-literal sense.

So I’ll have to stop loudly correcting

Any strangers I hear in the street

Announcing they’re “literally knackered”

Or  they “literally have two left feet.”

Only last Wednesday or Thursday

I was forced to explain to some goon

That he’d have to be Neil bloody Armstrong

To be “literally over the moon”.

I’ll soon be arrested for murder -

You’ll see me on Crimewatch one day -

As I’ll literally kill the next person

Who uses the word in this way.

(Though maybe I’ll end up in Broadmoor

When my diligent lawyers explain

That the widespread misuse of this adverb

Has literally sent me insane).

“How must the victim have felt?”

They may ask, when my plea is rebutted.

Then I’ll say, “Well, I cut out his entrails,

So I’d guess he felt literally gutted.”

If it wasn’t a word, but a person

It would surely be battered and bruised.

Let us act, while we can, to protect it –

It’s literally being abused!

Flash 500 runs three competitions. We have an open-themed category for fiction up to 500 words. There is also a humour verse section, asking for any form of funny poetry, from a limerick to a poem of 32 lines.

Both of the above are quarterly competitions with closing dates of 31st March, 30th June, 30th September and 31st December.

The Novel Opening Chapter & Synopsis Competition is a new annual competition, opening for entries on 1st May and closing on 31st October.

For information on all three competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com 

Animals That Live Amongst Us by Ceri Lowe-Petraske

Third Quarter 2013 Flash 500 Winner

She sits cross-legged as the tourists pass; hair scraped back framing the latest slate-grey bruise. She has stolen the vagrant’s patch and, although they both believe they are entitled to it, only one of them has pissed on it as a declaration of that. It’s right by the square, a popular slot. She glugs at a bottle of vodka, folding pleats into pages she rips from the book at her side. She does this for hours, there are hundreds of pages. Rip. Fold.

Each tiny origami animal she makes is different. This skill, this behaviour – like many others – was learned from her mother when she was young. They would sit together after the beatings and make them. She remembers to fold and she folds to forget. A curious crowd are watching her arrange the fragile paper animals she makes. They gather around her in a semi-circle. These are the same people as you or I, the same people on the television, the same people that watch as she comes into work with a broken arm one week, leave the pub with a splintered nose the next. Smack. Crunch

They watch and they ooh-aah as she places a lion, a dog, a bear all in a row. These are different to the ooh-aahs the neighbours heard, ears pressed to the walls. They heard nothing officer as she fled the house with just a bottle of vodka and the bible her husband battered her with. Her mother left the same species of animal a decade before. Except she left in an ambulance. A woman captures the clever folding on her phone from three different angles. She considers a panoramic – there’s a good backdrop of lobelia on the wall behind. A blushing purple, the bruise of a good summer. A man scatters a handful coins like breadcrumbs near the bottle. Clink. Clunk.

She gently places the last paper animal down. It lands perfectly, one paw balancing on the next wing on the tail of another and, delicately, she spills the last of the vodka over the animals. With one match they catch fire like dominos and flare out one word in the street: Arsehole. No–one really understands what is happening or why but they think it is art and after a few seconds the words have disappeared into white curls of puff. The spectators cheer for no reason and give her whatever change they have left. After all, art is what separates us from animals, isn’t it? Clap. Hurrah.

She watches the arms and the legs of the Arsehole word which means nothing turn to ashes and blow away like cobwebs. The cobwebs disappear like a three day old bruise will. She knows there will always be more animals, but for now she sits with her bruise and her empty bottle, holding tight to the still-warm coins and the mistimed interest of strangers.

Flash 500 runs three competitions. We have an open-themed category for fiction up to 500 words. There is also a humour verse section, asking for any form of funny poetry, from a limerick to a poem of 32 lines.

Both of the above are quarterly competitions with closing dates of 31st March, 30th June, 30th September and 31st December.

The Novel Opening Chapter & Synopsis Competition is a new annual competition, opening for entries on 1st May and closing on 31st October.

For information on all three competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com 

A Plea to Seamus Heaney by Melanie Branton

Last Quarter's Humour Verse Winner 

I may sound like a meanie,
but, hey! Seamus Heaney!
Isn’t it time you retired?
I wish that you would:
you’re just too bloody good
and you make me feel cowed, not inspired.

You’ve won the Nobel
and the Whitbread, as well,
awards of all shapes and all sizes.
Bugger this for a lark!
How can I make my mark
when some Irish bloke hogs all the prizes?

When you keep writing verse,
I just holler and curse,
‘til I work myself into a tizzy.
Since you’re so fond of digging,
can’t you just get a frigging
allotment to keep yourself busy?

Or perhaps you could try
taking up DIY?
Plumbing might suit you the best:
you could keep your own log
of stuff found in the bog,
since it’s something with which you’re obsessed.

If you lay down your pen
and don’t use it again,
I’ll be much more calm and less huffy.
when I’m feeling less vexed,
I can concentrate next

on taking out Carol-Ann Duffy…

Flash 500 runs three competitions. We have an open-themed category for fiction up to 500 words. There is also a humour verse section, asking for any form of funny poetry, from a limerick to a poem of 32 lines.

Both of the above are quarterly competitions with closing dates of 31st March, 30th June, 30th September and 31st December.

The Novel Opening Chapter & Synopsis Competition is a new annual competition, opening for entries on 1st May and closing on 31st October.

For information on all three competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com 

There Are More Tears Shed … by Lynne Voyce

Last Quarter's Flash 500 Winner

Imagine the scene…

... a woman in her forties, smartly dressed in navy skirt suit and court shoes, lies, belly down on the grass, head and shoulders over the cliff edge. One hand grips a gnarled, emerging tree root. Splay legged, she gains purchase in the mud with the heels of her shoes. The friction of the turf has ripped her tights. Her face is a mask of pain and concentration. Her other arm reaches down, the strain on the sleeve belying the strain on the flesh and bone underneath.

We travel down to the hand, on it is a tired, gold band. It has been on the third finger of her left hand for twenty six years. The skin of her hand is painfully pale but for the redness of the points where the other hand, gripping so tightly has contact with the skin. The other hand is smaller: a child’s hands.

Today, as the woman sat at the bank taking bags of ten pences from fat market traders, she had longed for adventure. In the toilet cubicle at lunch time she had sat and prayed for excitement, eyes closed, face to heaven, palm to palm. “Please God send me something to break the boredom.” She’d wanted a stolen kiss by the water cooler from Eric in personal finance or for her numbers to come up on the bingo.

Below the small hand is a sun tinged arm, then a shoulder, then a terrified face. A knot of fear and exhaustion. The girl cannot speak, she can barely breath or swallow. She wants to cry out for her mother, even though she is nine and three quarters. She wants to wail to the lady above: “Please don’t let go. I am so scared. How will this be OK? Why doesn’t the help come quicker?”

The girl had been pushed, the woman had seen it happen. A silly fight between siblings taking the short, dangerous way home. The girl had tumbled over the lip of the cliff, finding her feet resting on a soil outcrop. Though in a moment the shelf had crumbled beneath her, crashing to the beach, to be washed away by high tide.

Somehow, already, there was a hand holding hers. A passer by: the woman.

But it is too hard to hold on any longer. In a film there would be a last scrap of strength, a redoubling of effort just as the police arrive. But it is not a film. The drizzle starts; tiny beads of wet slip between their palms. Slowly, slowly the small hands slides down the bigger one, until the grip cannot be sustained. The bond is broken.

The girl falls. The thud, the rattle of shingle can be heard for a mile. There she lies a pink frocked swastika, a blot of deepest red spreading beneath her.

I no longer use my hands to pray for excitement because one of those hands was mine and I let go.

Flash 500 runs three competitions. We have an open-themed category for fiction up to 500 words. There is also a humour verse section, asking for any form of funny poetry, from a limerick to a poem of 32 lines.

Both of the above are quarterly competitions with closing dates of 31st March, 30th June, 30th September and 31st December.

The Novel Opening Chapter & Synopsis Competition is a new annual competition, opening for entries on 1st May and closing on 31st October.

For information on all three competitions, visit the Flash 500 website: www.flash500.com