The fantastic Hampshire’s own Judith Heneghan came along to discuss her new ‘Birdeye’, inspiring HWS members to consider tolerance and the importance of what they ask of others, bringing to life her incredibly ‘chari-table’ experiences. The competition brief for this month was:
Imagine people gathering around a table. It might be to eat, play a game, hold a meeting…. anything. Write a self-contained scene or a short story of no more than 400 words set around a table. Make sure your characters interact. How they interact is up to you! Any genre.
And the winners were…
First place: ‘You are in a clearing…’ by Frank Carver
Dave is the last to sit down at the table in the Student Union. He avoids eye contact with the others and makes a show of leafing through the dog-eared, handwritten pages of his character back-story. Beside him, Ellie sighs. her character exists only as neat columns of numbers printed on a single sheet. Statistics for her growing collection of weapons. At the head of the table, Andy glares over a cardboard partition adorned with dragons and wizards and clears his throat.
“Are we all ready? You are standing in a clearing in…”
Andy’s exposition is interrupted by a hiss and a yelp as Colin, seated on Ellie’s other side, opens a bottle of coke which fizzes over his hand onto the table.
Dave grabs his precious character papers and leaps backwards, collapsing in a tangle of chair legs. Next round the table from Colin, Steve laughs as he pulls out a grimy handkerchief and dabs at the spill. Ellie wrinkles her face in disgust.
Andy reaches into the wheely suitcase he brings to all these sessions and silently hands a roll of kitchen paper to Steve, who passes it to Colin, who wipes up the remaining liquid. Dave sits back in his place and Andy starts again.
“Right. You are standing in…”
Colin raises his hand.
“Um. what do I do with this?”
He nods towards the soggy ball of caffeinated paper in his other hand.
Andy waves in the direction of the bar.
“Find a bin somewhere. I don’t know.”
Colin gets up and leaves. Steve stands up a moment later.
“Actually. I need a piss break anyway.”
With two players away from the table, Dave turns to Andy. Words tumble from his mouth.
“Are we anywhere near the city of Elara? Thorfinn’s maternal grandmother came from there. There might be clues to the mystery of Thorfinn’s birthmark.”
Andy shakes his head.
“No. You are in the wilderness, standing in…”
Colin and Steve return, grinning. Steve has a pint of beer in a plastic glass. Colin has crisps. When they have sat down again, Andy holds up a hand for attention.
“No more interruptions! You are in a clearing in a forest. In the distance, a plume of smoke rises from a settlement to the east. Gathered in the clearing are a huddle of refugees from the destruction.”
Ellie rolls a handful of dice.
“I kill them.”
Second Place: ‘Fine Times and Tide Lines’ by Honey Stavonhagen
‘It’s fine.’ My eyes sweep across the watermelon belly my sister’s brought back from her gap year to the bare lips Mother is using to whisper these foreign words.
Fine? Fine, does not belong at our table; fine is the thin, white cardboard bread left to die in the toast rack. Fine does not punish. Fine’s tail has no sting. Our family words are golden fried dumplings, oval platters of sunshine ackee and painstakingly flaked saltfish. No one has ever set a place for fine on our clear plastic tablecloth: no fines, no fails, no fuck-ups and yet here sits a fine, as though it belongs.
‘We will be just fine.’ Grandpa murmurs, flitting his cataracts between the cricket and his emptying plate; his optimism as unusual as the water in his glass.
We, who are colourful, we are not fine. We excel and exceed and expand. We are too much if I’m honest, from the overfilled bras spilling onto the aunties’ laps, to the colourful cusses tumbling from the uncles’ rum-soaked lips. Neither the laundry Grandma presses for pennies, nor the refrigerator’s clean, sparse shelves are fine. I try to swallow the fine down, but it burns like chilli, beads my forehead with sweat before exploding into the bowl of devilled kidneys nesting by the napkins.
‘That mongoose in her belly is as far from fine as a foetus within a foetus can be!’ My words rip the plastic cloth like broken china and the accusation on my fingertip spears my sister right between the eyes and they smart. The Foetus, she with the brain a whole school year ahead of itself, she the emblem in our badge of honour, she who in ten days’ time should be the first of us to escape to university. She with the belly now fit to burst.
‘Don’t you worry, honey.’ The long slow smile Grandma spreads over the Foetus jars with the sharp glare she jabs at me. Honey belongs in jars, not jaws, she’d told me once-upon-a-long-ago, when I’d dared to butter her up.
‘Go study your books, child. Things are fine here.’ The words prickle my cheeks. My belly may be flat and still and empty, but already my shoulders are heavy and my back aches. I scrape up the hope from the table and fold it in my arms. Grandma is right: feeling – imperfect – never – ends.
Third Place: ‘Body of Knowledge’ by Johnathan Reid
Only an arm was visible as we surrounded our assigned table in formalin-laden silence. Its skin was thin and crinkled, like waxed paper without the crackle, and liver spots peppered it from stiff hand to chicken-skinned elbow. We’d drawn straws on who would uncover more. With a deep breath, Alex tugged once on the white plastic sheet, a young conjurer eyeing a potential upset. Her hesitancy revealed only a dimpled thigh, its weight beached on the table’s stainless surface from months of leaden gravity.
More tugs exposed a side of ribs, the chest mercifully still. From it a tumescence of flesh sagged sideways, its sunken nipple puckered and purple. Amar regarded this with a fixed gaze, abstaining from meeting the eyes of the living. We’d met only last week, with few taboos preventing the jostle to find new friendships for our long endeavours. Now, with empty notebooks and stomachs filled with steak and kidney pie – the canteen staff’s annual jest – we hesitated at this ancient human threshold, barely two decades of life within each of us.
From curiosity or trepidation, Charlie yanked the remaining cover away like a bull-baiting matador. Alex gasped as there she lay, the heart of our curriculum exposed, immodest yet deserving our immense respect. The sky-blue flannel which covered her face echoed its contours and her grey hair was brushed with care. Any instruction filling our heads evaporated in the unquestioned sanctity that enveloped the scene.
The woman laid out on our table had postponed her final departure to seed knowledge inside our curious minds. But uncovering the heart of a curriculum meant teasing her deceased body apart in utter ignorance of her long life. We would never know where her bunion’d feet had trod, what music had entertained her ears or sights had saddened her eyes. We would never know whose breath had filled her lungs, if love had swelled her heart, or if children had suckled her breasts. But, from this moment, we knew our table was hers.
I untied the green bow of my dissection kit and unrolled it at her pale feet, its pockets full of sharp, virgin steel. As Alex stroked her hair, Charlie pulled an empty plastic bucket from the shelf below. It was labelled with her table’s number, but no name. We could never know her name, even though my memory of her cut deeper than any student scalpel.
And a huge well down to our highly commended entries:
‘Unstable Table’ by Viv Smith
‘The Vice Chancellor’ by Sam Christie
‘The Birthday Party in the Orchard’ by Wendy Falla
