"Flakes of a fire" (Writing East Midlands, 2016)

This is the Writing East Midlands Competition anthology with several familiar names - Roy Marshall, Pat Borthwick, KM Elkes, etc. It's free online. The judges were Pascale Petit and Paul McVeigh. I'll focus on a few pieces that caught my eye.

Peter Hitchen's 1st prize story, "The Space Between" concerns a male archaeologist and his wife, on a Scottish island doing research for a year. They each do their own thing. Sheep have died in the cold winter. Only at the end does she seem to have more troubles than he has. In L Fisher's 2nd Prize winner, "Mika and Don’t She Hear the Sound of Grass Growing", the (female?) narrator likes Mika (female), though people say she's "Not the full shilling" etc. The narrator's mother seems to understand - better than the narrator does - that it's love, that it won't last. I've read Giselle Leeb's "As You Follow" (3rd Prize) before. Oktoberfest in London. Halloween. A boy-man who's with a group of men entrances the narrator. They go to the Thames. At the end "a small hand is dragging you into the dark and as you are pulled down, the waves whispering, the waves whispering and moving on." In these 3 stories a new emotional component is introduced before an inconclusive, lyrical end.

I like Amy McCormack's style - a person who likes her story "Mountains" may also like some of my stuff. It's packed with implicit and explicit analogies. The male first-person architect lives with a Chilean. After she returned from Chile having been away for a while researching Neruda, things changed between them. He'd built a room for her in the garden. She's noticeably pregnant. When the child's born, she and the baby are inseparable. She speaks only Spanish to the baby. She takes the baby away. The persona gets used to being alone like his business partner's always been, the final paragraph being a repetition of an earlier one about his daily routine. Maybe there should have been more about the period between the birth and the separation.

The ending of Sarah Tinsley's "Woven in Place" is predictable. I liked the piece up to then.

I like Richard Goodson's "Pine". I don't get "It only takes ten minutes"