Fish Anthology 2024
ISBN: 978-0-9956200-7-0
SELECTED BY:
Sarah Hall ~ Short Story
Michelle Elvy ~ Flash Fiction
Sean Lusk ~ Short Memoir
Billy Collins ~ Poetry
Photos of the books launch will be posted shortly.
Read an excerpt from winning short story – Second Sight by Alison Fields
Read winning flash story – Messiah by Kate O’Grady
Read an excerpt from winning memoir – Chess With the Wehrmacht by Rand Richards Cooper
Read winning poem – No, I Am Not a Robot (An Ekphrastic Poem of Sorts) by Brooke Herter James
Introductory Note
New writers are popping up all over the place. Self-publishing enables a host of voices and styles to be out there. It’s a jungle of too much and too dense, so that the good wood is hard to find. It’s a jungle so tangled that even a prince, sword in hand, thrashing his way through, could not make headway. Where to find the good stuff? The sleeping princess to kiss? That is the job of the Fish Anthology.
Sarah Hall, Sean Lusk, Michelle Elvy and Billy Collins had their work cut out selecting the exceptional from the good. It is, at times, a fine line. And now that real talent is finding it hard for their work to reach the light and be noticed, the tough selection process to get into the Fish Anthologyensures that these writers deserve to be here. It’s a read that will enthral, enlighten, entertain.
– Jula Walton (Fish Publishing)
Contents
SHORT STORIES |
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Second Sight |
Alison Fields |
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The Other Life |
Eve Thomson |
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Continuity Error |
Ewan Gault |
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Cargo |
Cath Sampson |
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The Liberating Death of Freedom |
Joshua Davis |
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The Nail House |
Amanda Hildebrandt |
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My da’s a Hero |
Laura Kyle |
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The Púca’s Share |
Monica Corish |
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Polishing the Silence |
Rowland Cooke |
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Derry Blue |
Garret Dwyer Joyce |
|
FLASH FICTION |
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Messiah |
Kate O’Grady |
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Starship Borders General |
Susan Shepherd |
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Blue Moon Memory |
P S Duffy |
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Coming of Age |
Jo Nestor |
|
A Story in 300 Words |
alfie lee |
|
The Interrogation of Lauren Lundgren |
Alan Falkingham |
|
Pivot Point |
Judith Brown |
|
The Importance of Firm Upholstery |
Fionnula Simpson |
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I Follow |
Seamus Scanlon |
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Things That Hurt |
Nicole Love |
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Blue Light |
R J Dwyer |
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SHORT MEMOIRS |
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Chess With the Wehrmacht |
Rand Richards Cooper |
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I Should Have Held Him |
David Longstaff |
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Before the Sun |
Daisy O’Clee |
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Train to Nowhere |
Sara Green |
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The Mortal Shift |
Sylvia Torti |
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The Lone Ranger |
Kirsty Cockburn |
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Sketches of Spain |
Arthur Wright |
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These Shoes |
Gemma Green |
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Alfie Plum, The Unspoken Words |
Brian Jones |
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Bubbles |
Stephen Bridger |
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POETRY |
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No, I Am Not a Robot |
Brooke Herter James |
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Writing About the Invisible |
Mary K O’Melveny |
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Early Tintoretto at the Accademia |
Rosalind Brackenbury |
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A Clarification |
Toby Litt |
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This poem asks where violence begins |
Heidi Williamson |
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Small White Sphere |
Philip Rösel Baker |
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Uncle Tony Fishing, Muckross Lake |
Josh Geffin |
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Two Hours Before Lone Ranger |
Kathy Clayden |
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Hearsay |
Marion Quednau |
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June Wedding in the West of Ireland: North of Connemara, East of the Ocean’s Waves |
Linda Nemec Foster |
Second Sight
(an excerpt)
by Alison Fields
Bill doesn’t sleep much anymore. He goes to bed at ten. He goes to bed at eleven. He goes to bed at one. He listens, at two, to limbs crackling outside and feels his own aching in response. At three, an owl enters the conversation. Bill adjusts his pillow and resumes the staring contest with the knots in the pine ceiling that look most like Lynn’s eyes. Eyes up here, Bill. A website promises he can fall asleep in two minutes by picturing himself in a black velvet canoe, the current lapping at the soft hull to the tune of don’t think. Four minutes. Six minutes. Forty minutes.
The phone rings at 3:49. He is relieved at having reason to abandon attempts at sleep. Mac, the sheriff, coughs out an apology. It sounds like a death rattle. Sunday is supposed to be Mac’s day off. He would have spent last night tying flies with the Holloway boys and a handle of bourbon. He clanks over the line, belt buckles, car keys. Bill makes out something about a 911 call up the forest road. Hysterical girl. Missing boys. Something ugly with a camper by Whistle Rock Falls.
Bill sits up. He asks if someone went over the falls. Mac doesn’t know for sure but figures probably. There are a lot of reasons why there are no campsites up there, risk of drowning being the most obvious, risk of drowning due to hubris being the most truthful.
Bill asks how soon he’s needed.
“Soon,” says Mac.
In the bathroom, he faces his reflection, white-out pale under the overhead. He is not a vain man but he notices the hollows, folds, brittle cracks of burst blood vessels. He shaves quickly and notes the new beat of rain on the roof, what that augurs for searching at the base of the falls.
Mac calls again before he finishes dressing. A rubbernecker with a smartphone wandered in from a campsite when he saw the lights. Bill reiterates that there are no legal campsites for him to wander in from on that side of things.
“You’re the ranger, hoss. I’ll let you cite him when you get here,” says Mac. “But you might want to hustle before we get media. They say it’s not a drowning. Something messier.” Bill lets the pause sit, and when Mac speaks again, his voice sounds different. Shaky. He says eaten. He says wolves.
It’s not the first time Bill’s heard about wolves this week. He says the same as he said last time: “It’s not wolves, Mac. Wolves have been extinct in the wild here for more than a hundred years.” But this time he feels the ghost of a shiver.
He glances out the kitchen window. Nothing to see out there but dark, the furry outline of forest surrounding the house. He tells Mac he’s on his way and fills a glass from the tap. The water tastes like pennies, like blood.
Messiah
by Kate O’Grady
We were hysterical with laughter when, at twelve, you acted out all the Stations of the Cross at the Good Friday mass. We watched, mes-merised, as you circled the church, standing beneath each image of a suffering Christ, your face a mask of sorrow. When you whispered, “Jesus falls for the second time,” and then, stumbling forward, sent the votive stand clattering to the floor, the remembrance candles flying, we could barely contain ourselves.
We egged you on when you insisted you could perform miracles and then, when they failed to materialise, when the water didn’t turn into beer, when you couldn’t still that storm the night we all went camping, we roared and jeered and sent you off in the pouring rain to get us some real alcohol.
It is these remembered teenage cruelties that drive us out in the night to look for you when your mother, pale and frantic, comes to our doors saying you have gone missing again. We will search for you in the streets and hills, bring you back, endure the bug-eyed ramblings about sin and crucifixion. We willtake you sandwiches and flasks of tea and wool blankets to keep you warm on the nights when you won’t come home. When you set up camp in the woods, taking with you an army duffle bag filled with all your nan’s kitchen appliances, anddragging your childhood sled behind you, we will call the authorities.
Word of your death reaches us one late April morning. We imagine you standing on that bridge in your greatcoat and Docs, your arms spread wide, a beatific smile on your face as you lean forwards. These images will haunt us always.
Chess With the Wehrmacht
(an excerpt)
by Rand Richards Cooper
Back at the apartment each evening I would share the day’s impressions with my girlfriend. She couldn’t help noticing that my insights about Germans tended to coalesce around certain ominous themes. “Americans have such a narrow view of Germany,” she complained. “The only thing you really know about us is the Nazis.”
It was true. My views of Germany had been shaped by war movies and TV shows, and by the stories of my father’s best friend, Joe, who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Before moving to Germany I’d read journalist William L. Shirer’s massive chronicle, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with its vivid first-person account of Nazi thugs running amok in the streets of Berlin. I was enormously curious about WWII, Hitler and the Holocaust. And now these were no longer merely theoretical realities. Our flat was two blocks from the site of Mainz’s Hauptsynagogue, a lavish neoclassical structure that had been destroyed in the rampages of Kristallnachtin 1938; all that remained were three crumbling pillars fashioned into a memorial. I would stand on our balcony, looking over rooftops toward the Hindenburgstrasse and the ruins of the synagogue, trying to imagine the terrors that had been unleashed on these very streets. Soon it would be fifty years since the start of the war, and a time was coming when the living reality of eyewitness testimony would yield to the impersonal collective narrative of history. Sometimes it was as if I could feel it happening, the slow shift of eras, like a glacier massively but perceptibly moving. Yet people were still alive – right now, and here! – who had been present at terrible events. I wanted to get their stories before it was too late.
Eventually the chance arose. For my lunch break I sometimes took a sandwich to the park at the end of the block. Turkish women pushed strollers through the rose garden, a pergola sheltered a klatsch of winos who sat around drinking and cackling in mirth. Next to the pergola stood a long table where a group of retired men gathered daily to play chess. They all looked to be around 70, which meant that they would have been teenagers when Hitler came to power and in their 20s during the war – soldiers all, certainly. These old men, I decided, would be my eyewitnesses; they would be my way in. They were the grandfathers that younger Germans shuddered over in dread. What had Opa done during the war?
I knew enough about German reserve – especially among older people – to know that I should proceed slowly. For a week or so I simply watched them play. Eventually I gathered up my courage and asked if I might join in.
Aber sicher!one man said. He made a welcoming gesture, like a maître d’, beckoning me to a chessboard. Sie sind Amerikaner, nicht?
Thus did I end up playing an hour of chess every day, five days a week, with a group of men who had once goosestepped in Hitler’s army.
No, I Am Not a Robot (An Ekphrastic Poem of Sorts The Scene
by Brooke Herter James
And, yes, I am happy to check all the frames
in which the man on the motorcycle appears.
But what of all else?
The upper left, for instance—
the generous branch of an oak,
its leaves robust, verdant,
draping late afternoon shade
over the sidewalk etched with chalk—
the game of hopscotch, perhaps
just abandoned as somewhere
a bell chimed and sent children
scattering home to dinner and baths.
And the mailbox (bottom right)—
its door left open to reveal nothing,
and (bottom left) the Styrofoam coffee cup
in the gutter, lipstick on its rim,
dropped from the window of a passing car
in a gesture of summer’s ennui.
And why would the man on the motorcycle
have that slicker on, collar turned up,
if not for the fish-scaled clouds (upper right)
that surely must smell of rain?
Perhaps he is hurrying to get ahead
of the water-colored sky,
away from the empty mailbox,
away from what’s not his
(the children, the lipstick kiss).
I am suddenly sorry for him,
the man on the motorcycle,
stuck at the traffic light, waiting
for me to click on him and let him go.
