Fish Anthology 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9956200-5-6
SELECTED BY:
Sarah Hall ~ Short Story
Tracey Slaughter ~ Flash Fiction
Qian Julie Wang ~ Short Memoir
Billy Collins ~ Poetry
Read an excerpt from winning short story – The Days by Shannon Savvas
Read winning flash story – The Stone Cottage by Partridge Boswell
Read an excerpt from winning memoir – Thirteen Ways of Interrogating an Incident by Wally Suphap
Read winning poem – The Life Galleries, Kelvingrove by Susan Shepherd
Introductory Note
by Clem Cairns
Quotes from Leonard Cohen
Is there natural, innate artistic talent? Does hard work get you there? Look at the artistic process of the successful and the answer is yes to both. Leonard Cohen was meticulous with every word and he said much of every song was discarded. He wrote 80 verses for Hallelujah. In the end, he used only four.
If I knew where the good songs came from,
I’d go there more often
No matter how much natural talent a writer has, stories and poems are teased through and tweaked again and again for them to shine. A dedication to the craft is evident in this Anthology and I am honoured that Fish can be the showcase for so much brilliant work.
The cutting of the gem has to be finished
before you can see whether it shines
There are 10 short stories, 10 flash fiction stories, 10 short memoirs and 10 poems in this Anthology. The work was selected from the thousands of entries into Fish Publishing’s 2021/22 writing competitions by a dedicated team of Fish editors. The final selection was done by this year’s judges, Sarah Hall, Tracey Slaughter, Qian Julie Wang and Billy Collins, who have uncovered a cluster – cut and polished.
Contents
SHORT STORIES |
|
|
The Days |
Shannon Savvas |
|
The Japanese Gardener |
Helena Frith Powell |
|
Among the Crows |
Karen Stevens |
|
Repossession |
Geoff Lillis |
|
Swim |
Anna Round |
|
The Gypsy Gambler |
DB MacInnes |
|
Skyline |
Anna Round |
|
The Visitor |
Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry |
|
Still Life with Coyote |
Martha Catherine Brenckle |
|
Predictions |
Abi Curtis |
|
FLASH FICTION |
|
|
The Stone Cottage |
Partridge Boswell |
|
On the Other Side of the World |
Linda Nemec Foster |
|
Millstone |
Z Aaron Young |
|
Crabwalk |
J P Walshe |
|
Beauty Curse |
Seamus Scanlon |
|
Firelight |
Kathryn Henion |
|
Kabul, August 2021 |
Marie Altzinger |
|
Taking Revenge on Gustav Klimt |
David X Lewis |
|
A Mother Knows |
Russell Reader |
|
While the Planet Still Remains |
Fiona J Mackintosh |
|
SHORT MEMOIRS |
|
|
Thirteen Ways of Interrogating an Incident |
Wally Suphap |
|
Saddo |
Sheena Wilkinson |
|
Two Bastards |
David Ralph |
|
For Chantal Akerman, and our mothers |
Francesca Humphreys |
|
Blame the Milkman |
Diane Vonglis Parnell |
|
Forgetting |
Anna Whyatt |
|
In the Summer Before Third Grade |
Jaclyn Maria Fowler |
|
A Cold Night in January |
Jupiter Jones |
|
The Mole |
Ruth Rosengarten |
|
The Ten Stages of Reproduction |
Beverly J Orth |
|
POETRY |
|
|
The Life Galleries, Kelvingrove |
Susan Shepherd |
|
Love’s Latitudes |
Judy Brackett Crowe |
|
Retreat |
Katie Griffiths |
|
Blue Jeans |
Doreena Jennings |
|
Gourds |
Caroline R Freeman |
|
tell me i’m pretty |
Nicole Adabunu |
|
Invisible Sisterhood |
Julia Forster |
|
Stick ball cemetery |
Joshua Sauvageau |
|
The Perfect Dad |
Jonathan Greenhause |
|
For Leonard |
Cynthia Snow |
The Days (an excerpt)
by Shannon Savvas
Kitty loiters by the nurses’ station. She hears the flirty-flirty back and forth of Alma’s titters and Liam’s laughing in the back-office. The coffee maker is almost empty and only crumbs are left of the tray of donuts the consultant brings in the hope some of his patients might be tempted. He’s so clueless. He has no idea how much the sickly-sweet lumps of dough and sugar make their hungry stomachs heave. The doctors’ rounds are over. Stewed coffee dregs scorch her nostrils, ramping up her nausea but with Alma and Liam falling over each other behind the closed door and the smokers outside for a quickie, there won’t be a better chance. Kitty has timed the morning lull to perfection. No one around to ask stupid questions.
She squints at the year planner peeling off the wall above the printer and counts. The numbers tumble, trapeze artists in her head. She marvels at the result. Beautiful. The coincidence fizzes through her skulking body and tired brain. One hundred and twenty-four days.
Exactly.
One hundred and twenty-fourdays since Kitty’s incarceration is by some spooky alignment the one hundred and twenty-fourth day of the year.
May fourth.
Her birthday.
Actually, if she thinks about it, none of it is spooky. Logical really. But fuck-a-doodle, she likes spooky better.
The Stone Cottage
by Partridge Boswell
The stone cottage sits tacit as a tomb, quieter than noise-cancelling headphones on a windless pandemic afternoon that can only think of itself, and so opts not to think. The owners are away but left a note. Walk in, latch the door, and you’ve stoppered time. Nothing gets in or out, save smoke from a basket of black turf by the hearth. From that refurbished famine farm perched too cliff-high to hear rollers roar below, you can see Fastnet tacked to the horizon and Cape Clear where once birders sighted a vagrant bobolink blown clear across the pond. As a rule, stones will sing, though these lie silent as the she-hare we spied our first morning crouched like a doorstop nibbling dew grass under the hedge, so still she disappears when you blink. Stone mute as devoted oath keepers sworn to archive windward sighs of luck and loss, joy and woe—stone thick as hay bales quarried from another time before ignorance and thought-light engulfed the barren land with furze yellow and rueful as Athenry, benign and lovely to look at until you slipped and fell into a copse of it crossing the moor. Then, you found other names for it.
That day we fell into a new rhythm old as a fulacht fiadh, resisting an urge to leap up and run outside every time sun’s face appeared like a neighbor at the window—begging sugar, offering jam, expecting tea. No urgency. She’d be back in a moment, and again tomorrow. Come morning, a pale horse grazing the slope across the road, horizon in every direction. We folded our secrets and left them beside a spray of hawthorn on the kitchen table. On cool wet days, a thin braid of peat smoke threading the sea mist. But only if you live in those parts.
Thirteen Ways of Interrogating an Incident (an excerpt)
by Wally Suphap
(III)
QUESTIONS as Confession
This is a story I’ve not told before. By that I mean I’ve not told a single version of it to anyone apart from myself.
The story begins in an office. At least this telling of it. The beige law offices inside an imposing corporate high-rise tower. We’re in Bangkok during the peak of summer, with its draining humidity and heat. It’s nighttime, past regular office hours, late even for a law office. All is silent except for the whooshing sounds of the central air-conditioning running overtime.
An intern in thick glasses, eager to prove something to himself and the world, has been assigned a time-sensitive research project for a bankruptcy litigation. The stakes are high. He and the other three interns are vying for the coveted offers of full-time associate positions. His mantra for that summer, and in fact, for his entire life to date, is this: to stand out from the crowd while innocuously fitting in. He’s determined to the bone to live by it.
Years later he will have forgotten the exact parameters of the research project but he will remember other details. He will remember well the assault of questions fired at him by the only other person left in the office that night: a soft-spoken senior litigator.
How’s the research going?
How much more do you have?
Why don’t you come into my office and take a rest?
It’s a nice office, don’t you think?
Why don’t you come over and make yourself comfortable?
What’s the matter, you don’t like the sofa?
What’s the problem, you don’t want to sit?
Do me a favor, take off your glasses.
You have nice eyes, you know that?
Can you come closer?
Do you want a shoulder rub?
There, how does that feel?
Does it feel good?
Shall I continue?
The Life Galleries, Kelvingrove
by Susan Shepherd
I’m face to face with a wildebeest and my daughter is on the phone
screaming her hatred for men who let her down starting with her father
the card says the wildebeest was shot in 1910 in the Masai Mara
and my daughter says something I can’t repeat, then says it again
I stare the creature in the eye, think of it crossing the Mara River
before it wound up in Glasgow looking frankly shocked, unless
I’m projecting, thanks to this deluge in my ears which is now a roaring
and now nothing because she’s hung up and it’s just me and the wildebeest
standing here for a hundred years. So I leave the gallery and go outside
where small, stressed families falter and laugh, the rink lights purple then pink.
Contents
… delightful, lively send-up … A vivid imagination is at play here, and a fine frenzy is the result. – Billy Collins … laying frames of scenic detail to compose a lyric collage … enticing … resonates compellingly. … explosive off-screen drama arises through subtly-selected detail. Sharp, clever, economical, tongue-in-cheek. – Tracey Slaughter
