Fish Anthology 2026
SELECTED BY:
Sean Lusk ~ Short Story
Tania Hershman ~ Flash Fiction
Mary-Jane Holmes ~ Haiku
Elspeth Beard ~ Short Memoir
Billy Collins ~ Poetry
Photos of the books launch will be posted shortly.
Read an excerpt from winning short story – Nothing Becomes a Man Like His Fall by Bar Reddin
Read winning flash story – Impasto by Lourdes Mackey
Read an excerpt from winning memoir – Frogspawn by Stephanie O’Connor
Read winning poem – A Letter to Neruda by Robin Schwarz
Introductory Note
Dear Readers,
Welcome to this hatch of new writers. Some had already left the nest and begun their public writing journey, reaching a new milestone with their inclusion in this Anthology, while for others here, it’s their maiden flight. And oh boy, have they all flown high!
Publication in the Fish Anthology is an acknowledgement of a level of writing that deserves an audience. And, dear readers, do you have a feast in store.
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. (Maya Angelou) There is something for everyone in this anthology that will strike that unforgettable chord.
I leave you to delve into this book with a morsel from the poetry section. A morsel that struck a chord for me. This is the final stanza of Houman Qavidel’s poem After the Horse. Elegantly simple. For me it sang.
Nothing moved
except time,
which had always planned
to go on alone.
Jula Walton
June 2025
Contents
SHORT STORIES |
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Nothing Becomes a Man Like His Fall |
Bar Reddin |
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Visitation Rights |
Cindy Dale |
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Revenants |
Emily Bullock |
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Cycle of Fireflies |
Jillian Grant Shoichet |
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The God of Lost Things |
Gauri Davies |
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The Music Room |
Judith Wilson |
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Breathing Space |
Sally Bramley |
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The Deer |
Peter Rose |
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Old Growth |
Alexander Weinstein |
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The Missing |
Megan Baxter |
FLASH FICTION |
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Impasto |
Lourdes Mackey |
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Within The Rain (drop) Community |
Jess Richards |
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More than half your body is not human, say scientists |
Jack Morris |
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The Algorithm Under the Hill |
Gerard Byrne |
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A series of decisions you must make when your hall light fitting needs replaced |
Catherine Ogston |
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Sea Reckoning |
Léonie Gregson |
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Meeting the Devil |
Jacques Denault |
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Freshly Afraid |
Alison Woodhouse |
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Sometimes, folding is the wisest course of action |
Jeannie Mackenzie |
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Animal |
Gráinne Patterson |
HAIKU |
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Dawn / On the Road |
Susan Richardson |
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Chough |
Alan Bleakley |
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Pinprick scars |
Emma Dandy |
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Day Case |
Caroline Clark |
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Seal Pod, Ostend |
C P Nield |
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The Blue Rigi |
C P Nield |
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Life Cycle |
C P Nield |
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For Nana Watanabe Shrimp Earrings |
Ayla Gard |
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Hares |
Richard Godden |
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Dead gull on the road |
Michael Henry |
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Moonlight Intuition |
Seth Rhoades |
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Offering |
Lois Woestman |
SHORT MEMOIRS |
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Frogspawn |
Stephanie O’Connor |
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A Sense of Belonging |
Nuala O’Farrell |
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The Wide Arms of the Sea |
Anil Classen |
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Fires of the Valley |
Robin Yocum |
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At a Funeral |
Kathryn Phelan |
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Remains |
Julian Bentley-Edelman |
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Flickers |
Mary Holley |
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Dark Tourism |
Todd Diamond |
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The J Curve |
Roger Vickery |
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My father was the weather of our house |
Gordon Hayes |
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POETRY |
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A Letter to Neruda |
Robin Schwarz |
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A Destiny We Welcomed |
Maria McLeod |
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After the Horse |
Houman Qavidel |
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Experimental |
Diana Cant |
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Playing Bowls with Virginia Woolf |
Alan Coombe |
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In the Coffee Shop Thinking about Churches |
Jan Norton |
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Chinese Prints |
Allen Shadow |
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Hamburg |
Ross Gillett |
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My mother |
Jody Hartkopp |
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Confined by you I count myself a king |
Isi Unikowski |
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Field of Distance |
Houman Qavidel |
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BIOGRAPHIES |
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Nothing Becomes a Man Like His Fall
(an excerpt)
by
Bar Reddin
Jay McKenzie
The lilies have begun to rot. He can smell them now, a curdled sweetness rising from the vase on the mantel. He told the porter to fetch them yesterday afternoon, and they had arrived, ostentatious and white as powdered wigs. One of them has bent its neck, bowed in surrender. He supposes he ought to take that as a sign.
Oscar fingers the envelope again. The corner is frayed from his thumb. The letter inside – Queensberry’s scrawl, blood-colored ink – has long since been read, re-read, committed to a private theatre of memory. It no longer shocks him. Nothing does, not even his own folly.
He sits in a heavy chair by the window, one leg crossed over the other, ankle trembling. He wears a dressing gown of quilted silk, plum-dark and slightly frayed at the cuffs – though only a keen eye would notice, and he counts on no keen eyes this evening. Beneath it, a velvet smoking jacket, navy touched with time, its lapels soft as old secrets. His trousers are ash-grey, creased with deliberation, not neglect. The shirt – ivory lawn, mother-of-pearl buttons – clings too close at the collar now, as if reproaching the neck it once adorned so willingly. A cravat, twisted just so, the colour of overripe cherries, gives the final note of defiance; it says I am not undone, I am dressed for the occasion. There is no flower in his lapel today. He had considered it – something pale, unbothered – but the lilies on the mantel seemed enough, too much even. Let them wilt for him.
The window is half-open and the April air brings in the smell of coal smoke and bread carts and early evening. The street hums, indifferent. The Empire continues, and in it, he is now a ghost, not a subject.
Impasto by Lourdes Mackey
She drops him at the door and when she returns to the old church that now acts as an arts venue he’s in animated conversation with a young woman and so she makes her way to the back and stands in the corner, an affable woman, attentive, a woman who watches and listens and she watches as he takes the mic, and she listens as he talks expressionism across his canvases, telling his audience about the in-between energetic spaces of their lives that they never notice but he always sees, and then he is pointing to his life study of her with its oozing features and exaggerated limbs, and she looks at her distorted blue face and listens as he reveals a secret she had trusted him to keep and she ignores the covert glances and focusses instead above his head on the gargoyle sculpted there, on its grotesque open mouth and she considers the gargoyle’s original purpose and she doesn’t flinch but stands and maintains her benign amiable countenance. She stays in her corner as he positions himself near the drinks, and she watches as he swallows glass after glass and she listens as his voice becomes loud and jarring. He tumbles into the passenger seat and says a fucking fiasco nobody came, but the place was packed she says and she drives home to the house they have shared for twenty years and as he stumbles from the car he mutters, no one that fucking matters, and she doesn’t follow him inside but stays in the car, sitting in the driver’s seat and she looks at their house and she contemplates the crack in the gable wall, the crack that has been there from the beginning.
Frogspawn by Stephanie O’Connor
(an excerpt)
Certain memories from childhood never lie quiet for long. They sink into the heart like silt settled after a flood, invisible until some stray thought stirs the water, and then they rise, soft, weightless, swirling, before settling again in the stillness that follows.
I have spent most of my life in Boston, Dublin, and, in later years, among the soft hills of Wicklow, the garden of Ireland. But I grew up in Northern Ireland, in the seaside town of Bangor on the eastern edge of Co. Down, in the 1970s, when the fresh Atlantic air carried not only sea salt and the shriek of seagulls, but also the steady unease of The Troubles, constant, present, often loud, and never far away. Yet, for all the violence that claimed thousands of lives during those terrible years, Bangor, by chance rather than by design, was spared the worst of it.
Back then, Bangor, the now designated city, was a brisk, popular, predominantly Protestant seaside town built on Edwardian respectability, its prim crescents overlooking Belfast Lough, and its yacht club flag snapping in the wind.
Geographically peripheral, it lay at the end of a single road, off the main arteries of travel and trade, offering less obvious strategic or symbolic value to those who might have brought violence. Its isolation made it inconvenient for armed groups to reach and, later, escape, so while towns not far off endured grief that reached the world headlines, Bangor was mostly, relatively, safe. But not untouched altogether. I remember the significant bombs that did explode there, shattering streets and leaving behind a silence that lingered long after the blast.
A Letter to Neruda by Robin Schwarz
You took the soap and the scissors and the box of tea.
You took the apples and bread and my most favorite thing—
you took the spoon.
But there are some things you did not take.
You did not take the garlic. The sharp perfume still burns the air,
satiates some sexual craving only a tongue has,
scorched and delicious and too much—odd you left that.
And then there are the ice cubes. I still have the ice cubes and the blueberries,
and parsley and radishes and chives. You did not take these things
or things that belonged to my own melancholy,
my past, all things New England. Those were not yours to take.
You did not take the fireflies and crickets,
the laundry lines and porch swings,
but you did take the cat,
which was as sad for me as the spoon—
You left me leaves, lakes and stones, you left me silver and tin,
and you left me the moon.
You overlooked the weathervanes and heat lightning,
and inexplicable throw aways you would never throw away,
as I would never throw away—a rusty key that once wound a music box,
red marbles found among the seaweed
and flimsy fistfuls of shiny junk jewelry.
Even though you left these things behind, left them out somehow,
I will keep them for you because I know you would want them.
I will keep them in boxes and bowls, glass jars and candy tins,
inside my pocket and under the brim of my hat.
I will carry them around for you as a way of keeping you,
holding on,
to these things you loved or might have loved.
I will make an altar for you, to you, an altar of all things you.
Like carnations the color of fire, burnt wood, love sonnets, salt.
And I will hide them everywhere.
Put them in secret places throughout the house, just for you.
In the mailbox, the breadbox.
I’ll hide the eagle feather in a book between two mountains,
a gold ring in the icetray, a pressed flower against the cellar window.
You will find your piano keys in my shoes—It’s how I learned to dance.
You will find African violets on the window sill,
sapphires in the onion bin, church bells in the attic.
But about your leaving, I cannot find a place for that.
You know I laid down in your bed when I was in Santiago, I did.
I have a picture.
I touched the paper you wrote on, the poncho hanging in your closet,
the chair you sat in, the same chair you came back to
after your things were destroyed—all your beautiful things, betrayed.
I walked around your house, the same house where you died,
eleven days later,
I swear
from a broken heart.
But I was there and I can tell you it’s much better now,
all scrubbed down and right again.
And upstairs, your fabled desk remains. I ran my hand over it,
the same desk you touched and in that way
my hand touched your hand
in some strange and accidental universe
of uncommon things.
And for a split syllable of a second
we poured into each other
like Absinthe,
only stronger.
