Dear all,
The long-list for the Flash 500 short story competition has been
announced so I am now free to post my entry. You can find out details about the
competition here:
&
You can find my entry below but to repeat
myself (which I do often) I will post this ‘disclaimer’ whenever I post a short
story entry: I decided that 2016 would
be the year I enter competitions and at present I have around four or five a
month on my list. Every time I enter one I will copy the story as a blog post
ready to go and share it with you. Let me put my hands up in surrender now, I
do not expect to be shortlisted or win any of them. That’s not an easy excuse,
it’s just being honest. I don’t think these will be my best work and I have a
lot of years ahead of me in which to improve my writing but this is my
reasoning… it’s more of a compromise. I have two main objectives this year, to
grow my company (a little bit) and complete the first draft of my novel. They
are ongoing projects that occupy my mind night and day, however, I have a lot
of scraps of ideas that I have set aside (as I won’t be spending time
developing any short stories to self publish this year) and I felt bad at just
leaving them to rot. They are playing on my mind so why not use them to enter
short story competitions? The ones I self publish are always a minimum of 10k
words (up to around 20k) and take me weeks to work on but the competitions can
be as short as 500 words. I think that by allowing myself to spend a few hours
(at most) on these entries I will firstly feel better than I am keeping myself
busy when not working on the novel (which again, is often), secondly improve
and test out new ideas or techniques (that may come in handy later) and thirdly
reach out to new people and new content which is naturally a frightening thing
because you are exposing yourself to people who are better than you. That’s the
only way to learn though and I have never shied away from that. The only
negative is that I know I won’t be spending enough time on the stories to show
off the best I can do, but that’s the compromise isn’t it? I get a lot out of
it without spending huge chunks of time. You can’t have both. So, is that a
good enough excuse for you?
Beautiful Reflection
I
had beautiful wavy blond hair. Some days it glowed, like it was alive, not
literally of course, I’m not strange, but that’s how I used to think. Alive, because it did what it wanted; there
was no controlling the thing. I felt that with all parts of my body. I
repeat, I’m not strange, but back then I believed I had such a forceful
vitality that every little bit of me was its own being, talking back and forth
with my brain as if the whole body had to agree before doing anything. I’m saying
it now like it was a good thing but it’s simply the extra thick,
Melchizedek-bottle-sized rose-tinted goggles I wear these days. To level with
you, I was always anxious about my appearance. I hated that hair. Thought I
looked like a girl. It’s upsetting because no one ever said that. I knew that
no one was criticizing me. No one. Everyone loved me… and they loved my hair,
always saying how good it looked, so where I got my paranoia from I wish I
could tell you. I wasn’t soft, I’ll tell you that much. I was… maybe a touch
sensitive. I was twelve years old and I felt like a tough guy. A tough guy with
wavy blond hair who looked like a girl. I looked really young too. So there you
go, girly and young. I can see it now. Silly obvious. I mean, joking, ridiculous,
blatant, in your face, obvious. I look at old photos and it’s hard to
understand why I was so pent up all the time. I can’t drag up any trauma to
tell you about, to explain it. I liked myself. I really remember liking myself
(like, maybe too much). I barely looked old enough to be at secondary school,
soft luminous peachy skin, no hint of spots, a roundness – not chubbiness –
around my mouth and cheeks that made you think I’d never wrinkle... those
photos I swear, you’d say it'd be
impossible to imagine that child as an adult. That damn hair though. I’ll tell
you something that I know doesn’t explain everything but I’ll tell you anyway…
I wanted it to be thick and sleek, metal, you know, I wanted to look metal. No
chance. My hair rose up and fell down in curled - powerfully held - waves, a
firmness that would make any adult cry. People spend their life trying to get
that bounce: creams, sprays, mousses… buy all you like, nothing could give you
that shiny thick beast I had, every cell as fresh as a North Sea January
morning, yet I hated it, I was consumed by detesting it, what can I say? It was
far too boy band. I wanted Satan’s fingers, covered face, straight-down-the-back metal
hair, and all I saw was this fake teenage ballad crooning make-girls-cry shallow
poster-on-wall heartthrob. I got it all wrong. I messed my time up like it was
a competition. Can you imagine the fun if I had gone with it?
It
was the boys from my street I wanted. No, not in that way. It wasn’t romance,
it was heroism. I wanted to be the action movie hero. A star. Legend. Force.
See, I know this is making excuses after the fact, but if I had just been
presented with one opportunity to prove myself, one
rolled-red-carpet-spotlighted-event… then maybe I would have stopped worrying
and just got on with letting the girls paw me. What a waste.
First,
it was the pink milkshake. The boys had emptied a carton over my front door. It
wasn’t liquid and it wasn’t solid but this sort of disgusting… sludge. Like the
dirty thick foam you get on seafront waves. Full of crap you don’t want to
think about, never mind touch. That day, pink milkshake day, I turned into the
little paved path that led to my door and I swear, I saw them do it, but
without actually seeing it… do you know what I mean? I could replay it in my
head like I was a security camera. I saw them huddle together, I saw them push
and shove each other, goading each other, taunting and teasing each other until
finally one of the bastards found the courage to step to the front and do it. I
felt like our house had been marked. Not the way you’re taught in religious
class where the marked are the blessed and will be saved… no, it looked like we
were the plague, the stricken: cheap pink milkshake for diseased blood. All our
neighbours would see it. Look,
here’s the poor, here’s the unworthy. Those damn boys.
There
were a few other occasions on top of that but it was all the same sort of stuff
- eggs one day, silly string the next. You should have seen how I worked myself
up preparing to catch them, to confront them. I would think about it before the
final bell of the day had rung. I would start thinking about it at lunch
sometimes. I would see the journey home in my mind hours before it came.
Grey
road…
Grey
pavement…
Count
the chewing gum stains…
Grey
houses…
Face
down, eyes up…
Low
wooden fences…
Grey
parked cars…
Count
the cracks between the paving stones…
The
old grey metal shutters…
Mum’s
friend’s house I’d rush past…
Scratched
swear words in grey lampposts…
Slap
the top of the wooden bollards crossing the road…
Half
full skip of greyness…
One
hundred paces to go… count them…
Scowl…
Fifty
paces to go… count them…
See
the corner…
Nearly
there…
Clench
fists…
Face
sweating…
Back
and shoulders tighten…
Faster…
Turn
the corner…
Faster…
Look
straight ahead…
Don’t
blink…
Don’t
turn…
Don’t
slow…
Clench
jaw…
Stomach
convulses…
See
my house…
…
No
one there…
Relief…
Self
disgust…
Cowardice…
Hatred…
Long
for revenge…
I told you before how everyone liked me. It’s true. They did. I had
loads of friends. Loads. But I never told anyone about the boys. Not my closest
mates. Not the school, not my cousins, not my mum… nobody. It was me alone, all
about me and all up to me. Which is why saying I wanted to be a hero is so
messed up. Shows a bit of psychological damage or something, don’t you think? I
don’t know. It’s hard to admit but it wasn’t about being seen to be the hero, I wanted to be the hero to myself, in my own
story, in my own universe… and I have no clue why. I would shuffle the keys out
of my pocket and into my hand, open the front door and run upstairs. The first
thing I would do is check how I looked. I would find myself staring at this red
faced little angel, full of bitterness and restlessness for a fight. It’s
remarkable. I didn’t know who this heavy-breathing, excessively salivating,
frightening devil-angel looking back at me was. There had been no
confrontation, yet I imagined myself with black eyes and a bruised forehead, with red lumps
from the impact of bullies' knuckles.
I would force this psychotic square smile and picture what I would look like
toothless. Then after a short period, just two or three minutes is all it was,
I would be calm. The redness from my own induced pressure would dissipate and
the devil-angel would be the boy band heartthrob
again. Then I would rush back downstairs and clean up the mess. I’d get my
mum’s mop and her cardboard box of cleaning stuff from under the stairs - I had
no idea what all the bottles were – and wash away whatever the boys had done.
By the time my mum got back home from work and I’d hear her familiar shout from
the door, the mess would have been long gone and any water I’d used in the
cleaning dried up. As the saying goes, she’d be none the wiser. Then, like
countless nights before and countless nights yet to come, I’d be her little
angel, her blond haired cherub, always a good boy and always the popular lad.
Kind regards,
R.G Rankine