Author Archives: Jude

Emily Rinkema June 2024 Second Prize

Driving my Seven-Year Old Nephew to Visit His Mother at Rehab

by Emily Rinkema

It’s his turn, and from the back seat he tosses out an easy one. “Would you rather eat a mile of garbage or a mile of worms?” I make eye contact through the mirror, ask some follow-ups: how fat are the worms? Fat. Are they alive? Yes. Would I have to eat everything in the garbage, or just the food-ish things? Everything, he says.

“Easy,” I say. “Worms.”

It’s a game we’ve been playing together since he could talk, since he started spending nights at my apartment, since he learned about worst case scenarios that didn’t involve choice.

I give him one I’ve been saving: “Would you rather drink a cup of your own pee, or half a cup of a stranger’s pee?”

He squeals. “My pee,” he says, and then, “Gross!”

We are a few minutes away now. I slow the car and turn onto an unmarked road. The first few times here we drove right past. When we get there, I’ll wait outside while he sits on a couch across from my sister, supervised, and she’ll cry and ask him questions that all end with the word me. He’ll spend the two-hour drive home silent and I will hate her for it, then hate myself for hating her, unsure which is worse.

“My turn,” he says, his voice low. “Would you rather have me live with you forever or have your arm chopped off with an axe?”

“Another easy one,” I say. I wink at him in the mirror, but he’s looking out the window. He looks just like her. I wonder which would hurt more, the blade severing the limb, or the moment just after, when you realize what’s been done.

About the Author

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont. Her stories have appeared in The Sun Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Phoebe Journal, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Bath Flash and Oxford Flash anthologies. You can read her work on her website (https://emilyrinkema.wixsite.com/my-site) or follow her on X or IG (@emilyrinkema).

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Catherine Ogston, June 2024 Third Prize

On Friday Nights in May I Sit Quietly with a Friend

by Catherine Ogston

The faerie man is sitting next to me, just like last Friday and the one before that, while forest insects buzz and flit and the evening sunlight touches the nodding bluebell heads. So many dogs he mutters, as yet another runs past the signs telling their owners to keep them on a leash. A man walks on the path, a tripod and Cyclops-eyed camera tucked under one arm, followed by another. How about one of them, the faerie asks and I wrinkle my nose. The faerie hands me a bluebell and tells me that turning it inside out will win me the heart of my true love and so I try peeling the soft trumpet-headed petals but they tear like damp paper and fall groundward. Better keep practising, he tells me although we both know the heavy-scented flowers are about to sink down into the forest floor for another year. Last week the man versus bear debate came up and before I had completed my explanation the faerie man told me, with unsettling adamance, to always choose the bear. In his nimble fingers the delicate petals bend and fold obediently. Your sweetheart’s name starts with M he says and I sigh, ask him to do another one because I’ve had it with Marks and Mikes and Martins. No do-overs he tells me and we go back to sitting in silence, only the whisper of the leaves and ferns in our ears. One of the photographers strides past and the faerie says, maybe he is M and I reply that maybe he is a worse option than the bear. How can you tell asks the faerie and I agree, how can you ever, ever tell?

About the Author

Catherine Ogston lives in Scotland. Flash pieces have appeared in anthologies by Bath Flash Fiction Award, National Flash Fiction Day, Reflex Press plus others. She placed first in TD;LR Press 2022, Flash 500 in Nov 2023 and won the Scottish Association of Writers Flash Fiction trophy in March 2024. Catherine has been shortlisted twice at the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize and received a Pushcart Prize nomination. She also writes short stories and longer YA fiction. On X @CatherineOgston

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Ronald Jones, June 2024 Highly Commended

The Bee

by Ronald Jones

The bee that will kill John Smith rises from a flower. To this flower and the next, the bee is an angel, a miracle.

Had today been a Friday, John Smith would have stayed in, poured a small sherry, listened to Radio Four. He might have thought about various chores, admin, accounts…

But today is magnificent, and so will be John’s death. But John does not know this or understand. He does not hear angels or that distant buzz, for he is but a man, and when angels speak, man is deaf and blind.

Once, when John was barely twenty-one he dreamed of Alice, the girl then who is now the woman of the house. Alice sits inside, vaguely hearing the radio, the hum of the sun.

Through their engagement, they pretended they would never tire of each other, and that almost came to pass, even if both strayed the once, each pausing on a petal that seemed so lovely. In hindsight, two mistakes.

Hindsight says, “I told you so”, but hindsight lies. It is not hindsight that John lacked or Alice lacks, but vision, understanding a larger picture.

John’s son languishes in Maidstone Prison and this tiny prick will release him. And John and Alice have a daughter, Jennifer, a thin girl with certain difficulties who thinks of naked clowns and weeps constantly, but this insect kiss, the bee’s soft touch, will change every thing, the clowns will leave her and Jennifer will come home.

To the flower the bee is impossible, a droning 747, carrying a kiss of love. Now comes its greatest happy, auspicious moment.

Alice drifts; light glints on the Harveys. John opens the shed, the lawnmower gleams, the bee enters the garden.

About the Author

Born Wales, Irish-Welsh, RV Jones wrote full time from 1992 to 2015, edited judged and ran an on-line writing group. He published six books and “far too many” creative writing articles and stories – then spent eight years caring for asylum-seeing refugees, fighting Long Covid and burning out. He recently returned to writing. He lives in southern England, ten minutes from Salisbury Cathedral and twenty-five miles from Stonehenge.

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