"Best British Short Stories 2021" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2021)

In his introduction Royle mentions many magazines and many impressive-sounding stories that nearly got in. He notes that "Extra Teeth" magazine started in 2019. He writes that "The Lonely Crowd" celebrated "five years of excellent publishing" and "If the chapbook is the best way to publish a good short story ... the anthology is surely the next best thing". He's picked a few stories from themed anthologies.

He sets himself a difficult task, one whose outcome people are bound to disagree with. How can one compare the quality of pieces that are in such different styles? Some may be the best of their type but does that type merit inclusion?

Lots of sunless beaches and condensation. Covid?

• Rings (Tom Bromley) - Oh dear. Already a story whose inclusion surprises me
• Definitely Not (Yasmine Lever) - Neither the main character's belated, suprising admission that he had heard her say "No" nor the ending compensate for the rest, which seems fairly ordinary to me. Not worth 20 pages anyway
• The Reservoir (Meave Haughey) - A pregnant mother of a baby wonders about seeping liquids. A woman has died. Interesting enough, given its brevity
• Bindings (Simon Okotie) - No
• Leather (AJ Ashworth) - Self-consciously meta - e.g. "It is the kind of curdling light that comes before a rainstorm, the writer tells us ... We are impressed by the writer's cleverness - or, at least, we think we should be impressed - but part of us may also be annoyed at having been pulled out of what might have been an interesting fictional dream" - which is Ok by me, though I enjoyed the meta stuff more than the partly supernatural story.
• Backgammon (Uschi Gatward) - A tense dinner party for 3 ends with the guest being told to leave early. Didn't see much in it.
• Am / Thought / Always (Emma Bolland) - A first-person ghost who's good at linguistics notices how her changed concept of time/existence makes her language usage different to that of her ex. Liked it.
• What Never Was (Gary Budden) - A woman who was 7 when her mother died wonders if her father thinks of what might have been. When she's 33 a man she's recently dated dies in an accident. She thinks of what might have been. I like the quiet way it ends, the little things she thinks she'll miss - hence the early mention of ducks and reservoirs. Restrained grief.
• Maman (Mel Pryor) - The mother of Madeline gets a letter from her daughter saying she'll never forgive her. At the end we learn that Madeline had seen her boyfriend kissing the passive mother. Madeline at the end might be ready for peace talks. I like the style of the mother's thoughts - mites, museums, etc. My favourite piece so far.
• The Red Suitcase (Hilaire) - It's winter in a one-bus-per-week coastal village. A retired male lives with his mother who does B+B. A young woman who hasn't booked stays for the week, gets wet doing walks. In the night he leaves a cap outside her door, the cap he wore when he worked on the railway. Son and mother learn little about the visitor, who leaves wearing his cap. It's a gentle portrait of a man who should be sad, but doesn't seem to be. We learn no secrets about him or his past.
• From far around they saw us burn (Alice Jolly) - A write-up of an real orphanage fire in 1943. A cover-up - the Catholic nuns didn't behave well, partly, perhaps, because they didn't want girls seen in their nightdresses. The PoV is of a girl killed in the fire - a ghost. Reportage style.
• Wendigo (Julia Armfield) - Ah, this is more like it. Wow factor. Two non-humans (ancient? Man-eating monsters?) drift from town to town, learning language from the radio, exchanging urban myths. One of them is dying.
• Hide (Roberta Dewa) - Another good one - maybe more than good. Set partly in a bird hide. Short on punctuation, and the grammar breaks - "their house was oh so small like Jarvis said they orange browned it moving in with drippy tins of Dulux it seemed so new but still the spare room stayed spare and blue and condensation ran the walls like tears as if somebody was slow crying, slower quieter all the time ... I gather like a murmuration all dark specks in the sky washing left right they never touch but know as one the sun is after them they sink to roost a quarter mile before my black bike reaches them they huddle in the hedges like the specks of me blown off they click click chatter ... the loneliness it fells her all of it but only for a moment she lies face down writes on the beach beside her with a finger so neat and damp and tight the sand she writes ... she has looked outside in her afterlife through the orange curtains with a pulse still pulsing so wanting to be loved and if not fly then run the sun rise rising"
• The Nebula (John Foxx) - Starts ok, tacky/soppy at the end (which is quite a large chunk of this short piece). Another surprising inclusion
• Edit History (Jen Calleja) - Descriptions of some mobile islands off Europe. Ends with an update that the islands have disappeared, and "Thank you for your submission. This will now be checked by an administrator for approval within 6 to 12 weeks. Would you like to keep editing this history?"
• Our father the sea (Douglas Thompson) - A son recalls his father who regretted leaving the Royal Navy after WW2 and starting a family. "inconsistency, you only realise in later life, is a disastrous quality in a parent". He became a senior lecturer. The son imagines why his father became a misogynist - an affair with a young colleague perhaps, who broke it off to save his marriage. But he told his wife and never forgave his family. There are self-conscious allusions to the sea. Tone and subject matter reminds me of my "Matters of Life and Death" story (Postbox)
• Hair (Isha Karki) - Hair climbing as sex? Liked it.
• Loom (Matthew Turner) - The 1st person's a caretaker of unoccupied London mansions. With a security guard he inspects one owned by Olian - a mysterious person/collection. He's well versed in the theory of urban sprawl, concepts of "home", how a building's hidden spaces might affect minds. At the end (as I suspected) he turns out to be Olian. He recovers his hidden wealth. There are some longeurs. Good though, especially the hidden wealth idea. "follows suite" on p.180 is a typo?
• Going downhill (Josephine Galvin) - Lisa catches a bus through Manchester - rundown areas, Bingo Halls, Emporiums. She's a single mother who married Rick, a man 5 years younger than her when she was 38. Now she's 51. He sometimes teases her about her age/weight - "Rick had stopped finding her attractive; that was natural and expected and not a fault of his". The views through the window become increasingly symbolic - restorations, improvements. Her destination was one of the 2 I'd guessed - "She was a city girl, and the city was always changing, updating, remaining fresh". OK. A bit linear
• 99 customer journey horror (Iphgenia Baal) - No