After a record-breaking 600 entries, we are delighted to announce the shortlist for this year’s Short Story Prize. The selected stories will be judged by Omar Robert Hamilton, Kishani Widyaratna, and...
Thanks for joining us today Please, take some time to catch your breath Had you been running to get where you now are?
Just give me a minute I’m such an idiot, I came this close to missing my flight You can’t see, I’m marking a sliver with my index and thumb I arrived at the airport well in advance, strolled towards the departure lounge, telling myself I could take my time They’ve redone that bit when you get through the security checks, to make it just like all the other airports around the world The long snaking path forces you to walk by all the boutiques, where shop attendants hold out trays with perfume samples or plastic cups with shots of whisky It was 10 am, my stomach felt sick at the thought I remember looking up at the sign marked ESCAPE LOUNGE, thinking to myself, escape, yes please, that’s what I’d like to do I was drifting slowly, zoning out, under the glare of the artificial light, the clashing rhythms of the different pop songs as
This is not a story, this is a sequence The sequence describes human indignity, indifference, callousness… weary subjects, to be sure, and I feel weariness The sequence is about the distance between good and evil, which is a short distance, but steep Not in the way you might hope, either; to do evil is simpler than ever It is a downhill motion This concept has long been theorised, but this is not about theory
This is about feeling
When E was asked to describe her first five years ‘as a refugee’ in Sweden, she responded with weariness She told her interrogator that her experience taught her, like nothing before had taught her, the laws of gravity It was the first time she understood that the world was not flat She saw the earth clearly as a sphere, where the abyss above was the same as the abyss below Some bend some break at the sight of this, but none forget it No surprise that, in the stillness, her body ached as her mind did The mind and the body exist, not in opposition, but in parallel
I am not E, the husband I loved did not become a soldier, a soldier who by definition could only be my enemy That is not my story But I know the distance between a man and a soldier, and it is a short one I have seen the distance on trains, I have seen the distance in night clubs I woke up to the distance this morning I woke up to the sound of screaming I do not mean this is a metaphor: this morning I woke up to the noise of a woman screaming
Maybe there is no world without cruelty, maybe there is no world without power Our bias towards a cure leaves out this kind of data
Fireflies existed for the generation before mine but they are long gone now Like language All corrupted
At this point the narrator begins to speak in tongues The subtitles read: Mania & Mimesis
1
I watched a young man be hypnotised, as a performance The instructions were in
