Author: Molly

By Michael Hopkins

THIRD PLACE in April Competition

“Number twenty-three,” said the loudspeaker.

Nobody moved.

In the silence, Kev leaned towards Trish and whispered, “That’s the third twenty-three.”

Trish kept her eyes on the shut consulting room door.  “No, that was twenty-two repeated with less confidence.”

“I’m sure she said twenty-three.”

“She did, but she didn’t mean it.”

Kev nodded, as if this confirmed everything he believed about the decline of the nation.  “I got here at eight forty.”

Trish turned at last.  “Luxury.  I was here at eight ten.  There was already a man in front of me coughing like a Victorian orphan.”

Kev glanced at the posters.

CHECK YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE.

TRY THE NHS APP.

BE KIND TO RECEPTION STAFF.

“You tried the app?”

“It told me to contact my GP.”

“This is your GP.”

“Yes.  Welcome to the future.”

Across the room, a child was licking the arm of a plastic chair.  His mother was watching a video about air fryers at full volume.

Kev lowered his voice.  “What are you in for?”

Trish sniffed.  “I don’t discuss my organs with strangers.”

“Fair enough.  Mine’s a rash.”

She looked him up and down.  “Where?”

“I’m not showing you in a waiting room.”

“That’s a pity.  It would improve morale.”

The loudspeaker crackled again, as though the signal was coming from much further away than Reception.  “Number seventeen.”

Kev frowned.  “We’ve gone backwards.”

“That’s the system resetting itself,” said Trish.  “Like the government.”

At Reception, Sandra was typing with the resigned fury of a woman under siege.  Somewhere behind the frosted glass, a printer screamed.

Then every light in the room flickered blue.  The doors slid open.  Three tall aliens stepped into Reception.  Sandra looked up from her screen.

“You’ll need to ring tomorrow at eight,” she said.  “We don’t take walk-ins.”

By Maggie Farran

SECOND PLACE in April Competition

I was watching TV with my Mum, curled up on our lumpy, grey Dralon sofa, my head against the Saphire blue cushion, the only bit of colour in the room.

‘Mum, I’d like to go to the youth club tomorrow night, the one at the church hall.’

My Mum looked at me with a shrewd look, her eyebrows raised and her lips thin.

‘There’s no way you’re going to the youth club, young lady. You’re far too young. Another couple of years and I’ll think about it.’

‘But, Mum, all my friends are going. I’ll be the only one stuck at home on a Saturday night.’

‘Well, too bad, you’re not going and that’s the end of it.’

I was quiet. I knew my Mum well enough to give her time to reconsider. She got out her knitting and began to clatter away in her annoying fashion.

Neither of us was concentrating on the television, until there was a newsflash

John Kennedy, the American President, has been shot in Dallas

We both sat bolt upright. I liked John Kennedy. He was handsome and had a beautiful wife and two little children.

‘How could that happen in America, Mum? I thought they had all kinds of cameras and security.’

Mum looked shocked. ‘I don’t know, love. Just let’s pray he’ll be alright.’

We watched in silence, as the television reporter picked up the phone at his desk. I shall never forget his words.

We regret to announce, that President Kennedy is dead.

I moved over to Mum and cuddled up to her. I didn’t feel thirteen anymore. I felt like a child.

Mum squeezed my shoulder gently and I could see tears trickling down her pink cheeks.

By Francesco Sarti

FIRST PLACE in April Competition

‘I’ll have the waffle, thank you.’

‘No he won’t.’

Margaret quickly scans today’s specials.

‘Black coffee for him. Tea for me.’ She reaches for the sugar bags and hands them over to the waiter together with the menu.

‘Jesus,’ Paul says. ‘I thought the point of the checks was to make me live longer, not make me wish I was dead.’

‘When will you take your health seriously?’

‘Mental health is health.’

She ignores him. Behind her back, a 5-year-old is not touching his waffles.

‘Look at that. I can smell the whipped cream from here.’

‘You’re not a child, and we’re not celebrating.’

‘My score was pretty high.’

‘You’re talking about your fucking cholesterol.’

Margaret never swears. That’s enough to make Paul freeze.

She sighs, looking out the window, far into the city.

‘You think I want to see a tiny paramedic struggle to load your limp body into an ambulance again?’

Paul’s cheeks and ears burn. His wedding ring is stuck in place, buried under decades of bad diet. He doesn’t ask where Margaret’s ring is.

‘Maggie,’ he says, but then stops. She’s weeping.

‘It doesn’t mean I forgive you,’ she says. ‘But listen carefully because I’m not going to repeat myself.’

A blinding flash wipes away her words, and squint at the horizon. Where the city was just a moment ago, they see a gigantic mushroom cloud.

The families around them scream and run in all directions, but they’re too old and tired and shocked to move.

Paul gasps. Margaret doesn’t. Slowly, deliberately, she grabs the waffles from the table behind her, now deserted, and shoves them under Paul’s chin.

‘To be fair, your score was pretty high,’ she says, and they both laugh.

Judges Comments: I chose this as the winner because I thought the dialogue between the two characters was believable and fun. The unexpected ending certainly was about as unexpected as it gets, and I liked how twisted their reaction was to it.

By M J White

HIGHLY COMMENDED in March Competition

I’m forty years old and hiding in a cupboard. I must be mad…What am I doing?

Ever since I was a child, I’ve believed in the tooth fairy. Even as an adult, I still place a lost tooth under my pillow to find it has vanished in the morning, and I believe now more than ever—the tooth fairy is real.

My daughter lost her first tooth today, and through the crack in the cupboard door, I can see her bedsheets slowly rising and falling. The light in the hallway casts a long shadow across the room, slicing it in half. Then I hear a tapping sound. A clink, clink, like the chattering of teeth coming up the stairs, and then the sound of something scraping along the wooden floor. I freeze. The room suddenly feels cold, and a stench crawls in, like the rotten breath of a rabid animal. Something is the room now. It stays in the shadowed half, dragging its weight slumbenly towards my daughter’s bed.

The figure is humanoid, its body glistens white. It enters the light, a body made of human teeth. I feel sick. Every inch is an enamel nightmare. It’s hideous. I fling open the door, and the creature turns on me. It has no eyes, no nose, and a huge tongue made up of more teeth that flicks out from a mouth hole. ‘God, what are you?’ It holds up a teeth-studded hand, and an invisible power pulls me forward. I try to resist, but it’s too strong. A toothy arm wraps around my waist. His hand of tiny, white shields hovers over my face. I can feel my teeth being sucked out from my gums, one by one they go, pop, pop, pop.

Judge’s Comments: Visceral descriptions and a truly chilling image. The choice of subject and approach felt like an innovative choice.

Please click the link to view the piece of art that inspired the piece –

A life sized sculpture made entirely of human teeth : r/pics

By Eleanor Marsden

HIGHLY COMMENDED in March Competition

The Pasha’s  price for me was a mere telescope, a brassy contraption that promised the gift of seeing through the heavens. That was the moment in which everyone stopped seeing me.  

I had fully lost my sight by the time I was sold for a trinket. I often wonder if I did it to myself, looked inwards a little too often until my best visions were merely those in my mind. I couldn’t watch my body age and decay, see the pity and contempt in the eyes of those who had been my devotees when I glowed like ripe wheat. No, it was easier to turn inwards, re-treading my memories like the temple mosaics – deliberate, full of colour, the stories revealed step-by-step.

Perhaps it was a blessing that I couldn’t see the Englishman. I certainly couldn’t tell you what the he saw in me that made him wish to buy me from the Pasha. Perhaps it was still the myth of me: even then, I was a legend reduced to a curiosity. The once-fabled Dimitra! Perhaps the Englishman had to find out for himself if the whispers of my past were true. Perhaps he wanted to show me off. Or save me; it helps me, to cling on to that hope.

The Englishman left me here. I don’t believe he ever returned once he had placed me in my mausoleum.  The museum is quiet, full of shadows and dreams. I haven’t looked upon a field or the sky for centuries. Nobody wanted to look at me as the Englishman thought they might, not even as a curiosity – I don’t need eyes to know that they all walk blankly by.  I am invisible, petrified in my body with a thousand memories.  It doesn’t take a telescope to see that.

Judge’s Comments: Felt like Dimitra had such a fully realised inner voice and real strength of character. Some lovely turns of phrase.

Please click on the link to view the piece of art that inspired the piece –

https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explore-our-collection/highlights/GR11865

By Michael Hopkins

THIRD PLACE in March Competition

It was raining steadily, and the parking in Chaldon was dreadful.  He had come for a committee meeting, his shoes already wet, but he was grateful for the promise of tea in a building that looked too small for eternity.  Before the kettle boiled, someone suggested they see the Doom painting.

The church was colder than he expected.  The stone held the chill of centuries.  To see the painting properly, he had to stand on the pew.  The image rose above him, narrow and crowded, its dark red and yellow ochres still vivid against the plaster.  Figures climbed a ladder toward light; others were pulled downward, limbs twisted, mouths open.  Judgement was not gentle.  It was decisive.

He had not known it had once been hidden.  Whitewashed over, its terrors erased, some figures hacked away beyond recovery.  Devils lost.  Human forms broken.  Only later had colour re-emerged from beneath the lime, stubborn as a bruise beneath skin, the red returning where it had no right to remain.  Even then, it had needed cleaning, conserving, hands patient enough to save what remained from damp and neglect.

He stayed longer than he meant to, aware of his breath clouding faintly in the air.  The lines had softened with time.  Faces blurred.  The certainty the painting once proclaimed had thinned, yet the image endured.  Eight hundred years earlier, someone had stood where he now stood, close enough to the plaster to touch it, grinding pigment and fixing this vision of consequence onto a west wall.  Others, centuries later, had believed enough to uncover it again.

When he stepped down from the pew, the meeting would begin as planned: welcome, prayer, business.  The rain still tapped at the windows.  But beneath the faded ladder of souls, judgement felt less like threat and more like memory; and survival, quietly, like grace.

Judge’s Comments: Great specificity. The writing felt self-assured and conveyed a sense of place, as well as capturing the process of making art and conservation.

Inspired by Doom painting mural, Church of St Peter and St Paul, Chaldon, Surrey

By Viv Smith

SECOND PLACE in March Competition

Titian 1510

My Mum loved you.

You caught her eye as we sat in the gallery. She’d only come in to escape the rain and bustle of Trafalgar Square and have a sit. I was allowed to wander in the large room and look at the huge pictures, and you were just nestled, quietly in the corner. Not very big, but you had presence. Your beautiful blue quilted sleeve hangs over the shelf, your arm casually draped. You’ve half turned to look at us, to make sure we’ve noticed you and your posh sleeve. You have style, confidence, a bit of swagger and you know it. You’re a poser. You know your value whether it’s the boys’ eyes you’re out to catch or the ladies. You’ve certainly hooked my Mum. She came in just to soak up the calm vibe of the place whilst taking the weight off her London weary feet for free. But you made her get up, go closer, read your label.

“I like him. Bit of a lad that one, those eyes follow you, and look at that sleeve, beautiful bit of silk.”

She seemed to have recovered slightly, no longer just building up to the crowded underground battle home.

“Come on, let’s go”.

She led me off meaningfully towards the busy gallery shop. Didn’t expect that. My Mum didn’t waste money, every penny was accounted for, but that day she bought an A4 reproduction of our “Man in a Quilted Sleeve”.

“Dad’ll have a frame for that somewhere”. He did. We had it on the sitting room wall for years, and now our Man is here again, staring straight at me from the cardboard box full of her effects.

Judge’s Comments: Simple, but surprisingly moving. A measured, poignant pay off, brilliantly underplayed.