"Best British short stories 2022"

• "Let us look elsewhere" (Mona Dash) - Short. Begins ok. Fades into abstracts
• "How to find yourself" (Sara Sherwood) - Numbered sections, lettered subsections, roman-numeralled subsubsections by a woman whose interests since school involved soaps - fanfic, etc. Her romances don't endure. At 27, after 2 years with a man, she returns to mum and starts a blog.
• "Single sit" (Edward Hogan) - A divorced 50-ish conservatory salesman sleeps with a single-mum customer. He helps look for her young son when he disappears in the night. He finds the son by cliffs. He doesn't think the one-night-stand will lead to anything.
• "Offcomers" (Rosanna Hildyard) - A teenage trainee florist lives with an isolated sheep farmer twice her age. She'd visited the farm on the moors by chance and felt destined to live there. She's been there a year. Foot and Mouth is threatening. He sometimes hits her. He's angry when a phone call tells him that his 800 sheep will be culled. He kills himself in the barn. It's her first-person PoV. The violence isn't explicit. The vocabulary and clipped, precise imagery are like the inverse of free indirect speech - her voice is coloured by a poetic, narrational one. The final paragraph is "I look at the sky. Already blue, and a curlew spiralling there, and it is a sign if there ever was one, and so I turn from this wild place, this place of ruined barns and lead mines, speechless fields and derelict farms; this place that humans must always leave, and I run to the car". Big topics (individual vs the world, trying to find one's place in the world, domestic abuse, suicide)
• "Lammas" (Uschi Gatward) - Protesters against the exploitation of public land. Socialists, anarchists, and a JP. England, in Hilter's time. I didn't get it.
• "Plain speaking" (Tony White) - I didn't get this either. Beyond me. I know Keats wrote On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.
• "Pebbles" (Max Porter) - A white boy, Jeremy, 10, whose black friend Benny catapults a stone against a windscreen is scared when the driver gets out. The driver's not physically aggressive, but the memory haunts him - "The shame becomes him, runs through him like barbed wire absorbed into a tree". We get the future thoughts of the driver too. Or did Jeremy shoot the pebble and let Benny take the blame? Over the years they phone each other about the pranks they got up to. At the end the I's merge - the thrower, the non-thrower, the driver giving the boys lifestyle advice.
• "square / recess / moon" (Ben Pester) - the narrator tries to befriend a work colleague who identifies with his room so strongly that the narrator falls under the spell too. I like it - best story so far. Typo on p.109 - "I few weeks later"
• "Sarcophagus" (Alice M) - in an MRI scanner
• "The Comet" (Sonya Moor) - A make-up artist in France finds that she's preparing Simone Weil for a TV interview. Thanks to weil's campaigning, the narrator had an abortion. During the interview Weil is asked to bare her hair and get it loose. She does
• "Sink Rate" (David Frankel) - A woman on a beach watches a plane crash, one that she could have been on. I first saw this in the Bristol comp anthology and liked it then too.
• "Lick the dust" (Leon Craig) - A gothic tale about academics, libraries and old heads.
• "Culverts" (Neil Campbell) - Chat in an isolated pub. Men without partners. Women who haven't moved away from the village.
• "The Chicken" (Rz Baschir) - A girl aproaching puberty lives with a strange naan-bread-eating couple in Paris, who eat lots of chicken. At the end she (thinks she) turns into a chicken.
• "A visit to the bonesetter" (Christopher Burns) - People are selected at random to be tortured while being asked questions. A partner is selected to overhear the screams. It doesn't last long. The couple in this story discuss the emotional consequences afterwards. I like it.
• "An easement" (Paul McQuade) - A couple in the USA, 12 years together, move to a farmhouse. Josh's idea. His parents are dead. He brings boxes of his mother's books. The land next to theirs is an easement, owned by the government. The hot, dry summer kills their plants. She becomes pregnant. She dismantles the wall, a stone a day, trying to destroy boundaries. He studies his mother's books. When the rains come, she tells Josh that they need to discuss the future. I can't see much in it - standard symbolism.
• "New to it all" (Sean Padraic Birnie) - His first lover had been a scratcher. This one bites - the finest razor cuts, unhingeing her jaw. The ending's not quite satisfying, but it's ok.
• "The meat stream" (Will Wiles) - during lockdown a man enjoys a streaming show about meat. His partner thinks it odd. A thin film of meat grows over the skin. He peels it off and eats it. One day he disappears, perhaps absorbed by the screen.
• "Chicago forecasts" (Chris Vaughan) - Max lives 27 floors up with his mother. We learn about various missing people in his life. Financial market traders. I like the style.
• "Wild city" (Sophie Mackintosh) - The narrator and his supervisor visit a city that's been allowed to return to nature. At the end maybe the narrator's body is replaced piece by piece with vegetation.

People transforming. Gothic/macabre, or maybe a bit surreal.