Spring Flash Memoir Competition: The winning stories...
In the Spring I announced my Spring Memoir Flash competition and had so many good flash pieces of CNF come my way it was difficult to decide on the winners...
As a way of saying thank you to all my generous readers who have supported me through the exciting and relentless task of writing a memoir in five months, I launched a flash memoir competition to encourage these same readers to write a year of their life in 1,000 words. The memoir I had been writing was made up of 64 such years / tiles, to be added as a grid for the next iteration of the collective memoir project, The Universal Turing Machine, the brainchild of writer Richard Beard.
I had a lot of submissions for the Spring Flash Memoir Competition, and the standard was very high. I had stories of illness, holidays, a year of childhood, or events that happened only months ago. The pieces that grabbed my attention the most were those that had identified their theme, and run with the theme, allowing the narrative to open up - giving it a reflective and curious stance, that left us reader wanting to know more. Most of the entries did this in some form.
The year also had to feel self contained as if the limitation of 1,000 words was essential in the telling. This can be really challenging, and it takes confidence to allow the blank spaces and pauses to speak as loudly as the text.
Below I share the winning entries. There was one winner and two runners up. And because I had such a high standard all round, I chose three commended pieces as well. I will be publishing those three commended titles on Wednesday.
Congratulations to Katherine LeRoy, Every Blue Jewel for her winning story, ‘Baby blue (1966)’.
And also congratulations to the two runners up: Rachel Massey for ‘The Year I Watched the Sky’, and Helena Palsson Individu Kate for ‘Blue Dildo’.
I chose ‘Baby blue’ as the winner because it is fluid and full of beautiful imagery, but also because the first year is perhaps one of the most challenging, because in many ways it is before memory. Katherine has brought us her story via prompts, but also through senses and feeling. When you have limited memory, you need to lean more into your imagination, which I think is what gives Baby blue its power. It is metaphoric and sensory writing, but it also is committed to digging deeper, asking questions that go beneath the surface.
‘The Year I Watched the Sky’ by Rachel Massey was equally illuminating in how it showed the illness experience from the inside, in all its complexity. It was the view of illness we all know, but also one that we don’t see so much - how private and intimate it can be. I got the feeling reading this of Rachel’s immersion in the experience, which also opened the experience up to me.
‘Blue Dildo’ I loved for its boldness, and characterisation. It really captured the wonder and awe of an exciting new relationship and how certain people have an ability to free us from our vulnerability. I imagine we have all had this kind of intense physical attraction, and we have also stood puzzled and slightly broken when the person we thought we had known is not quite who we thought they were. I was impressed by how much ground Helena covered in such a short word count.
Here are the stories. I hope you enjoy them.
Oh, and by the way. My memoir was selected for the next UTM and will be published on 1st December. Thank you all for reading excerpts of it and for your feedback. It really meant a lot.
Baby blue (1966), by Katherine LeRoy
My very first memory is made of celluloid, a string of moments preserved on grainy 8mm film. Soundless, in black and white, I am wrapped in a blanket in my mother’s arms as a nurse wheels us out through the hospital doors.
My mom squints in the bright sunlight, trying to find my father who is behind the camera, capturing it all in real time. She sees him, smiles as her eyes come to rest on the oversized Chevy Impala parked at the curb in front of her.
Just forty-eight hours previously, my mom drove a baby blue Mustang convertible, sleek and windswept, a gift from her parents on her 21st birthday when she was impossibly young and not-yet-a-mother. Her eyebrows furrow as she readjusts my small body to her other arm. There is a large pink bow balancing on the hood of the wagon.
Her mouth begins to move, the camera recording the voiceless scene, semi-blurred, time stretched thin. For a brief moment, my mom smiles again, throws her head back in laughter. This must be one of the practical jokes my father delights in setting up, the gags and punch lines he’s famous for.
But then her face goes flat, mask-like, a slow recognition. This isn’t one of his stunts. It’s a surprise, the news he can’t wait to share, to record on 8mm film forever. The Mustang is gone and this nondescript wagon is now hers.
He has personally picked out this lumbering, dull-brown vehicle just for her, a vision of carpools and candy smears and rows of hatchback grocery bags. As if the unbridled blue of the coupe had never been, its contours and curved lines, its promise of open road.
She holds me tighter as the nurse wheels us towards the car, so close now she can lean over and touch the front passenger door. Barely detectable, her face moves from slack to frozen smile, eyes dulled just a bit.
The last few moments captured by the camera’s wide-angle lens. The nurse picking me up, my mom alone in the wheelchair, my father opening the door while still holding the camera, helping her into the passenger seat, pushing the door closed with the solid lock of metal-on-metal.
What is inherited before memory? This first year takes root under the skin, in the bones and the blood. And beneath language, I begin to understand impermanence. The pulse of what it means to be held close, sheltered, for just a moment.
Each sensation startling in its novelty, in its inability to be described. The sing-song murmur of the radio, the smooth-sweet tart of applesauce, the musty sour of my own stink. I discover my voice as my mother loses her own.
Can you inherit what is yet to come? Because in just seven years my parents will separate and then divorce. So in this first year, I feel for the edges, finding sounds for my hunger, and in my cries my mom can hear her own need.
But in the quieter moments, from the crib in the small room at the end of the hallway, I am animal-like, sensing. The faint sound of traffic, like water, slipping past the picture window and the plush-pink softness of the blanket beneath me.
Or just the two of us alone in the orange velvet armchair, the whispered hush of 3am. She holds me in the stillness of this dark-paneled room with the broad pane, limbs of the thick oak tapping glass. The squat dust-colored wagon idle in the driveway.
Her voice is neither song nor lullaby. It is skin on skin, a deeper more primitive language, muscle and tissue and nerves. With each month, I shed her flesh to grow my own, far from liquid memories. The comforting pattern of repetition, a haze of texture, terrycloth bibs and towels and tiny jars of blended fruit. I reach and grab and grip, every day a threshold, possibility pressing up against invisible walls.
And over that first year, I ride in the beige wagon, a makeshift car seat hooked over the passenger side. My mom sits in the driver’s seat, AM/FM dials beneath the dash, a Marlboro Red coiling smoke in the ashtray. Broad bench seats oatmeal-striped, the wide disk of the steering wheel in her two hands. The car smells of cigarettes and the tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror.
She drives us up and down familiar streets, the driveways and constant lawns and sharp blue of a boundaried sky. Does emptiness have a shape? The maternal ache that carves caverns within the heart. Comfort must be something more than simply being held.
The Year I Watched the Sky (2021), Rachel Massey
When my children were young, I used to fantasise about hitting a pause button and freezing them, so I could get on top of the laundry pile, batch cook healthy meals and have a bath in peace. Now, something has hit my pause button, while the rest of the world goes on without me. Something has made me lie down and stay there.
It is nine months since vertigo knocked me off my feet. During that time, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched, the Taliban seized control of Kabul, Russia invaded Ukraine and British scientist Bethany Lodge broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest 100metre forward rolls (42.64 seconds). In the same time period, between lying down, I had five phone consultations with my GP, three in-person appointments, three different types of (ineffective) medication and one MRI brain scan. Today I received my p45, having resigned from a job I could no longer manage because of head lurching dizziness. I am 52 and my life has stopped.
Each morning, I get up and go into the spare room where I lie until bedtime, when I return to my room. It feels important to enact this pitiable version of a daily routine, separating night from day and one day from the next. From my bed, the sky is reduced to a flat screen of abstract colours and shapes. Just now it took less than fifty seconds for the intense blue to turn white, then grey. The translucent fringes of cloud that drifted in from the top left corner were hesitant at first. I silently willed them on. They were followed by curling white strands, spiralling downwards, pulling a curtain of pearl air-glow. The window briefly filled with dense white, before blue holes tore through and sped in billowing swirls out of the frame. They left a film of the softest feathery grey. Flat and impassive.
Sometimes my mind fills in the blanks. When I see blue, I know that the sun is bouncing off the garden pond and fat bees are lazily investigating the acid yellow Himalayan poppies. I can see the stuttering flight of a peacock butterfly on the buddleia, its impossibly bright colours glimmering in the light. Each flap of its wings comes just in time to stop it tumbling out of the sky. On dark days I can smell the rain in the air as the sky turns charcoal and I know the leaves of the mint and sage will look brave and refreshed after the dousing.
I am grateful I paid so much attention to this garden, taking it inside myself, as if I knew I was going to need it. I turn the pillow over to the fresh side and watch the sky-screen, as a shining edge of light puffs white meringues over a grey veil. In the beginning I fought against the symptoms, somehow carrying baskets of washing down a staircase that dipped and swelled beneath my feet like a rollercoaster. Now I have surrendered. A hundred luminous greys glow and dissolve.
I am sensitised to the sound of the house downstairs, a place I no longer visit. The clatter of pans, pinging microwave and chugging dishwasher are a comforting routine accompanied by smell of hot food wafting up the stair before my husband, Pete arrives with a plate of food. My daughter and her boyfriend hustle in and out of the house all day long, shouting greetings through the open bedroom door if they are in a hurry, or plonking themselves messily on the floor to talk to me.
“What’s been happening? Tell me everything”
Tilly starts, “Everything? We can’t tell you everything, we haven’t got time! We’re going climbing, but I forgot my climbing shoes” only to be cut off by Tobias, “I bet they are in her really, really messy car and she hasn’t even looked, OW! Ow! Tilly that hurt!”
I’m smiling now, “Toby, she poked you with one finger. Sorry, but no sympathy from me this time. You might be right about the shoes though.” Tilly pulls an injured face and flounces out, throwing a smile over her shoulder.
It is my secret wish that whenever someone rings the doorbell, Pete would run immediately upstairs to bring news of the outside world: The postie delivered a parcel to us for one of the neighbours. The window cleaner came for his money and said that he’s going to Torremolinos next week. I hate the just-out-of-earshot interactions that happen downstairs. They speak to the parts of my life that no longer include me.
One summer morning I make it outside to lie on the grass. A silky blue canopy opens over the whole world. Lying on my back, staring into infinity, I think about the fragility of life and wonder how any of us tolerate such uncertainty about our future. The heat of the sunlight on my skin is magnificent. The vast blue sky wraps itself around me, my garden, all the houses, fields, trees, cars, people, on and on across the world, a steady constant presence from birth until death. I catch a feeling of clear, brilliant lightness from the vastness of the sky. My brain expands and contracts and I steady myself by focussing on the feeling of being grounded and held by the earth.
The memory of this carries me through the winter. It has rained for days. Watching the raindrops dribble down the windows I feel melancholy. My mind keeps revisiting my childhood, when my dad was confined to bed for weeks at a time by chronic illness. I was scared of him being vulnerable, so I crept past his door, avoiding the tense shadow that spilled out of his darkened room. I wonder now, with shame, if he was lonely. As darkness falls and the last raindrops slobber down the glass, the clouds part and the sky is exultant. I decide not to close the curtains and let the sky into the room.
Blue Dildo (2017. I am 25), by Helena Pálsson
I’m lying on my back on his bed, which he has built from wooden crates. I see the top of his head, a fuzz of turquoise hair, the rise of his bum, brown skin. He places the palm of his hand to the sole of my foot. This is the most loving touch my body has received. He sits up, wipes his mouth and holds my gaze. We have sex during the day. The room is always light.
I get flashbacks. A tight mouth forming an ‘O.’ The bathroom I was locked in. A hand on my head pushing down. But now, his touch seems to wash it all away, everything I wished had not happened to me.
The landmarks of his room become familiar; the ladder, which he uses as a shelf for his jeans. The snake plant. The plastic bottle on his windowsill; holy water from his mother.
In the morning he pulls on a pair of shorts without boxers. It takes me a while to locate my knickers, which I find in the bed, curled up in a ball. The Australian baristas greet him by his name. Outside, we sit on stools that barely lift us off the ground with our coffees; a double espresso for him and an americano for me. In the silences I take him in. He wears shorts and sandals and hangs a heavy bunch of keys around his neck on a shoe lace with a special knot. I like his style which I cannot place.
‘Why are you so much better in bed than most men?’ I ask.
‘Oh yeah, I was told that before,’ he says.
I look at his small hoop earring.
‘How come?’
‘When I was younger I didn’t want my girlfriend going to another man. It wasn’t a good motivation to learn but’ -
When he talks, he leans in and briefly touches my knee. His English is near perfect. The only giveaway that German is his mother tongue is that he says noodles instead of pasta and sensible when he means sensitive.
We spend days cycling around Hasenheide park and nights dancing in his room, waltzing to slow RnB jams naked. I didn’t know a man could feel so soft, so safe. I put my neon orange wig on him and he smears glitter on my cheeks. After a club night he’ll appear the next day with two or three fingernails painted white. We wake up in the same arrangement we fall asleep in. Sometimes it feels like I have a girlfriend in a man’s body but then he’ll say something only a guy would say. He tells me that my breasts are like maultashen, a type of meat-filled dumpling, a Swabian dish. His hair is blonde now. He’s changed it again.
I learn that his younger brother killed himself and I think about this brother when I’m alone. He learns that my family is my mother and grandmother, that I don’t know my father.
At the end of summer he says ‘I love you.’ I don’t say it back, even though I do. I just pull him in for a kiss. Soon after, he leaves Berlin to go home to his parents’ for a month, air Bnb his room out and rest. ‘A month is a long time,’ I say.
The day before he leaves he drops a small blue dildo into my hand. I just look at it there, cupped in my palm, lifeless. Once he’s gone, I’m lost. I sit outside Dr.To’s crying over a bowl of braised lotus root and the Japanese waitress brings me a matcha ice cream on the house, a ritual that will continue for years. In his absence, a tooth falls out on my way home from a waitressing shift, just as I pass the seven foot frog sculptures on Weser Strasse.
By September, his head is shaved and black hair with some grey is growing in. Returning home from a party, as he sits on the bed he keeps a space between us, the width of another person.
‘I must’ve slept with two hundred and fifty women by now,’ he says, turning to look at me and then back at the ceiling.
‘OK,’ I say, my heart picking up pace. I don’t want him to see my shock.
I try to work out why he’s telling me this now. I close my eyes and I see a room filled with two hundred and fifty women.
Near the end, he invites me to visit him at work. Before I leave to go home he drops his house keys into my hand and tells me that he’ll join me after his shift. When I wake up in his bed, it’s 3am and I’m still alone. A text comes through: ‘I’ve gone to Berghain.’ I cycle home with his keys, locking him out of his apartment for the night. He is denied entry to the club this time so he sleeps on a bench at his workplace. I’m awake but I decide to wait until 8am to return his keys. In the morning, he hovers on the stairs leading to my flatshare looking uncertain, a look I’ve never seen on him before.
He stops touching my knee.
I’m told that I’ll meet someone else, that it gets easier with every break-up. A friend tells me that a man who drinks double espressos is surely a psychopath. But no one knows that only his touch reached me. It found me.
The following summer, I walk up his street. There’s his window, first floor, above the Turkish bar. There’s the sheet he used as a curtain. I remember the ladder, the snake plant and the holy water. It feels like these things belong to me. Like his room is inside me. I wonder if there’s a new object in there, if his new girlfriend gave him a gift before she left.
His window is open.