Read the three runner-up entries from our annual short story competition
The theme for this year’s short-story competition, held in association with Montblanc, was ‘the experiment’, which gave rise to highly original narratives. As a result, the judges – Bazaar’s Lydia Slater, Helena Lee and Erica Wagner, the authors Maggie O’Farrell and Kaliane Bradley, the super-agent Caroline Michel from PFD, and Montblanc’s brand director Georgia Noutsi – were entertained, moved and impressed by the submissions.
The top accolade was unanimously awarded to Stephanie Y Tam for her powerful and elegant tale 'Bird Bones', exploring the silence between intergenerational relationships. Tam wins a Montblanc Meisterstück 149 pen, which celebrates its centenary this year, as well as a two-night stay at Chewton Glen in Hampshire.
The calibre of other entries was so high that in the end, the judges chose three runners-up: Sam Rennie’s ‘Limerence’, a brilliantly observed skewering of a classic meet-cute; ‘Acacia’ by Sabrina Wolfe – a compelling, melancholic work of fiction; and ‘Pacificadora’, an imaginative take on lockdown, love and fruit-based mania, by Philippa Howell.
Read all three spellbinding stories below.
‘Limerence’ by Sam Rennie
So the other week I was in the waiting room looking up how to make olives fancy and then how to make olives fancy for one when I overheard this guy reciting his phone number to the receptionist and for some reason I found myself writing it down. On his way to the exit he dropped a bag of shopping and the largest lime I’d ever seen fell out and rolled away so I saved him in my phone as Big Lime.
Since then, whenever I brush up against the cute agony of being alive, I distract myself by writing a message to Big Lime. Obviously I don’t actually send it; I just type out whatever thoughts are in my head and then when I’m finished I hold and drag my thumb across the screen to highlight and delete the block of text. Maybe it’s because I’m in my Romantic Era – falling in love with everyone and doing absolutely nothing about it – but in my head this feels like an updated version of when people used to write letters they would never send, pouring out their hearts and then watching the paper burn. What’s surprising is that this feels exactly how I imagined: I’ve always wanted people to be like oh my god who are you texting, I’ve always wanted that shot of me staring at my phone and smiling, and even though I know it’s not real, the act of typing something to someone and being seen by others to be typing something to someone is enough to transport me to all kinds of imagined worlds, as if each message is a different timeline I could be living.
In the office, when someone brings in a cake for someone’s birthday, I take a picture and draft a message that says about to eat so much dairy i shit myself. Out shopping, I write as if I’m Big Lime’s wife and I’m asking him what he wants for dinner. In the moment it actually
feels like this is who I am: married with kids, stressed about schedules and errands. When I catch my reflection, I notice my hair is not chaotic enough for someone so pressed for time, so I play with it until I look as rushed as I am pretending to be. This role stays with me long after I leave the store, the performance triggering a physical exhaustion as if I’m pushing against the elastic of time, simultaneously imagining myself to be much older than I am but also from an earlier period of history in which I am some random housewife. At night I lie in bed looking up the sort of things I assume this version of me might search like how to tell if your partner has stopped loving you and is it normal for your partner to joke about leaving you and is it normal to hate your kids and how to delete search history. Eventually I put the phone down and stare at the wall until I feel tired enough to sleep and when I close my eyes my life flashes with insignificance.
I used to send messages to my best friend until they said I was too annoying and couldn’t contact them all day every day. As if that’s a bad thing? Like, sorry for caring so much? Sorry my brain literally never switches off? Sorry I have little versions of all the people I love walking around in my head? I thought everyone had that, but a lot of the time it feels like whenever I leave the room I just completely disappear from their lives. But somehow it’s my fault I’m so emotionally intelligent that I notice whenever someone’s not one hundred per cent happy. So, yeah, I would say you can talk to me whenever you need. I would say this is a judgement-free zone. I would say did you get my last message. I would say look at this chunky cat. I would say are you ignoring me. I would say i am always here for you, and I would remind them of that every single day because I am a Good Person. They would reply with something like oh my god chill out i’m just tired, which is fine? But then they’d share these posts that are all: me, wishing i was dead and somebody asks how I am: yeah all good just tired so?
Now nobody sends me anything and I spend an embarrassing amount of time making sure my phone isn’t on aeroplane mode. I’ve noticed that if I don’t have an outlet I will spend all day typing things like how do you live in the moment and what are you supposed to do with life and things to do before you die and is it normal to feel like you’ve wasted your life and do jalapenos go with mince and i feel like i’m not in control of my life and how long are you young for and what do people say on their deathbed and what do people regret most in life and what do jalapenos go with. If I search what I think is a harmless question the results will be like you are super depressed and you won’t be depressed if you buy this air fryer and why haven’t you bought this air fryer and thank you for buying this air fryer and would you like to buy another air fryer. Sometimes it gets too much, and all I want is to be a normal person living a normal life. Enter: Big Lime.
Back in the waiting room I walk up to the receptionist and shout out my phone number even though nobody asked me to, then I look over to see if he’s paying attention, maybe writing it down, but he isn’t even on his phone. Something’s different, his presence elevated by all the secret lives I’ve imagined us living. I sit next to him but leave an empty chair between us to not make it too obvious. While I’m reading the last message my best friend sent me – please stop talking about olives – there’s an announcement that they are running twenty minutes behind schedule. Big Lime looks over and rolls his eyes and in return I give him a thumbs up, but then it feels awkward so I go back to my phone and search can you freeze cheese. At one point he takes out his phone, so I open his chat and wait, and when his status suddenly changes to online it makes me jump. This, in turn, makes him jump. He does a nervous laugh and in the brief period of eye contact we have I wonder if this is the start of something, if this is the story we will tell years from now, what our first words to each other might be, what he will say in the speech he gives at our wedding, and I smile in a way that says I do! but he’s already turned away.
Now somehow Big Lime is talking to me and I haven’t said a word in like ten minutes. I was in the middle of drafting a message to him – they just said they’re delayed so tell the kids we might have to push back Mega Mince Monday – when he turned to me and said, ‘Do you have an air fryer?’ and I didn’t reply because I was too busy thinking really? those are our first words? so he carried on and said, ‘I keep getting adverts for air fryers and it’s really weirding me out but now I can’t think about anything else.’ I have imagined this moment so often I’m not entirely sure it’s happening. Usually I am the observer, not the participant, remembering what other people have said or done more than my own contributions. He gestures to my phone and says, ‘Sorry I didn’t mean to–’ and I tell him it’s fine, to not worry, I’ll just finish this and, yeah. So without thinking I press send and then immediately hear the vibration of his phone. With a little oop he takes it out and reads my message. For a while nothing happens. It feels like I am finally participating in something. Glancing back and forth between our phones and my face, his expression unravels everything, and I find myself mentally scrolling through a stream of all the ways everyone else is choosing to live, thinking about how often I try to find a real world equivalent to the exaggerated versions of life I consume; how easy it is to imagine the what ifs, the montage of all the things that might happen; how much time I spend predicting the story of my life so that even when it moves in a particular direction I barely react because it feels like I am simply rewatching moments I’ve already seen. Eventually he mouths something but the audio is cut, the performance has started to stutter, and the only thing I can hear is the sound of all these different timelines collapsing into one.
‘Acacia’ by Sabrina Wolfe
I’d known Bill for two years but I only really started to talk properly to him in the summer of 1993.
He was older than me, not that that kind of thing mattered there, but he kept himself away from the rest of us. Took it all more seriously. The rest of us were friends. I think we’d have been friends anywhere. Could picture us all heading out on bikes in the evenings, yelling behind us that we’d be back before dark.
I couldn’t imagine Bill on a bike, somehow. His legs looked too stiff to move in that way. His back was always straight up, never hunched, even when he was fruit-picking. I don’t know how he did it, crouched to the floor picking strawberries, but still looking stretched out, long. There was no slouch to Bill, no ease. Straight and lean and serious. Not the sort of body that could have fun on a bike.
The rest of us picked fruit together. We’d eat some of it, while we picked, though we’d be told off later. We knew there wasn’t enough fruit to eat while you picked. But those strawberries! In the first years, anyway. So red it was impossible not to try a few. And it felt as if the whole thing was going to work out fine, with strawberries like that, that we’d grown ourselves.
Bill was on watering duty, and he did it properly. Watered the soil, not the plant. Turned the hose off between rows. Watered at the right time of day, and made notes in a yellow book he carried in his work belt. Noted down the exact time, the exact amount, the position of the sun. In the evenings, he’d read over the book, flick back to previous years. Compare. I can still picture him, sitting in his red boilersuit, marking up that notebook with his pen.
I was friends with all the rest of them, but I was closest with Kip. He and I would sit under the acacia tree playing cards most evenings. Our pack was tattered by then and the top right corner was ripped off the Queen of Hearts. We’d play Shithead, and Slam. We’d play Cheat. Shithead was spoilt if the Queen of Hearts was left till the end. You could spot her straight away; she couldn’t stay hidden. We made up rules for her: you had to play her last, we said. Third of the three.
We sometimes wondered if we should rip corners off other cards, to disguise her better. Wondered if we should rip all of the corners, make all the cards the same. But the pack was precious. We hadn’t brought enough cards with us. This pack had to last. We couldn’t bring ourselves to rip the corners off them all, even if that would have matched the poor queen.
We’d play with the adults sometimes, after supper. Even with Mum. She’d never played much cards before then. It wasn’t her thing. Would have felt frivolous to Mum, to play cards. She used to plan protests in the evenings, make placards. She used to write letters to her MP, organise petitions, knock on doors.
But there was time there for Mum to play cards. She should have enjoyed it, but I think she missed the placards and the protests. Even though what we were doing in there was bigger, better. I think she missed the camaraderie of crowds, the anger of opposition. At least when you’re marching, you get to go somewhere.
I was sitting with Kip, playing cards under the acacia tree in June 1993, when Bill stopped to chat to us. I know it was June, because we were supposed to be pollinating the courgettes and I worried Bill was going to tell us off. He didn’t though, just asked if he could join us for a hand. He sat down, crossed his legs in front of him as if he was hinging stiff metal joints. I became aware of the tattiness of the playing cards, the dirt we were sitting in.
But Bill was friendly. Said it was a good idea about the queen. Told us about a pack of cards he’d had as a child where the Ten of Diamonds was missing all together.
He’d made a new one, he said, painted the back to look the same, convinced it would match perfectly. Felt disappointed when he finished and realised that you would always be able to spot the handmade card. A piece of paper, cut in shape and painted with watercolours, in the middle of a machine printed pack.
We played a few rounds. After a while, Bill started to chat. He said he liked the hems of my trousers. We all dressed the same, that was the way of it, but I’d cut the cuffs off. Felt freer. Could run faster. I liked that he’d noticed.
We didn’t say much back to him, that first time. Worried that anything we might talk about would seem too small to him, with his yellow notebook and his workbelt. But I liked how he talked to us.
We played cards a few more times that week, Kip and Bill and I. Always in the evenings, once the work was over. Before then, Bill had always stayed with the adults. Talked with them after meals. He was 17, closer to them than us in most ways. I didn’t know why he’d started coming down to the acacia tree, but I hoped the others had noticed.
One evening when Bill arrived, Kip said he’d something else to do, and he wandered off. I think he found Bill difficult, found the air around him too heavy. I saw Kip with the others soon after that, a bunch of kids running through the dirt by the watering unit. The adults used to tell us off if we ran too close to the machinery, but they’d stopped bothering now. Dozed off after meals. Seemed languid.
Kip was still my favourite, but I started spending time with Bill in the day too. I’d always thought his dedication was because he was Jonty’s son, but I realised it was more than that. I’d only been 11 when Jonty started The Experiment. Hadn’t paid too much attention to the whys of it. But the way Bill spoke about it was different even to the way Mum did. If we could just make it work here, he explained to me, they could use this model anywhere – anywhere – in the world. Anywhere in space, even. If we could just make it work here, we would have solved most of the world’s problems. No big deal.
And he showed me the right way to water the plants, so you didn’t waste water, how to check for spider mites, and how to monitor the oxygen levels. He showed me the things he was worrying about. The size of the tomatoes this year compared to last. How the growth of the acacia tree was slowing. How the adults seemed tired all of the time, never did anything in the evenings anymore.
That summer, in 1993, I got used to spending time with Bill and his stiff limbs. I got used to the expression on his face when he told me we just had to make it work. I got used to seeing the creases between his eyes when he made notes in the yellow book, and flipped back to compare to the year before. Towards the end of summer, he stopped writing in the book so much and we started to spend more time playing cards again. Kip joined us, and most of the others too. Bill didn’t talk much in a big group, and I missed the things he’d been telling me, but I thought I probably knew enough, by then, for my own work belt in a few years.
We sat in a circle, in the dirt, and the others laughed, and made jokes about the Queen of Hearts, and we played Slam and Shithead and Cheat, and I looked up at Bill, and smiled at him sometimes, when I saw his forehead creasing. He smiled back. Honestly, I’m sure he smiled back.
It was September when I heard him arguing with his Dad one evening. I’d been harvesting apples, had taken it more seriously than I would have done before. I didn’t eat any. Placed them carefully in boxes, making sure not to bruise them. Making sure to leave space between each fruit so that it could breathe. For airflow. If one of them started to rot, it wouldn’t spread to the rest.
I heard Bill and Jonty arguing, but I couldn’t hear the details. Bill had his notebook out and he was trying to show pages to his Dad, but his Dad wouldn’t look. Was shaking his head. Bill started shouting, and I had never heard Bill shout before, though I couldn’t make out many of the words. I think he said ‘ego’ but that might not be right. I might have heard a presenter, on a TV show, using that word about Bill’s Dad later. Bill might not have said it at all.
Bill didn’t come and play cards with us that night, and – though I suppose we were friends by then – I didn’t go and look for him.
I woke early the next morning. Mum was still asleep. I’d left the playing cards by the acacia tree and I wanted to get them before the sprinklers came on. I pulled on my red boilersuit, didn’t bother with shoes, walked out into the dirt and down the hill that led to the orchard. Mornings here weren’t like mornings on the outside. The sun came up behind the glass, refracted in the dome’s geometry.
I walked down to the tree, and as I looked over I knew it was Bill’s body, though his limbs were crumpled, disorganised in a way he would have never held them when he was alive. His yellow book was neatly by the trunk, he must have placed it there before climbing up. He was face down, and as I got closer, I could see his shoulder blades through the fabric of his boilersuit. They looked just as they always had. Lean. Taut.
I didn’t go back to get anyone else. Didn’t yell out. Didn’t cry. I picked up the yellow notebook, and sat, cross-legged, with it in my lap, next to Bill. I watched over his disorganised limbs until Kip found me, after breakfast. Found us.
Everything happened quickly after that, I don’t remember much of it. The Experiment was shut down that day. Mum and I went to stay with her sister, my aunt, on the other side of the country. We had to take a plane to get there. I had a panic attack looking out of the window.
I never saw Kip again. He’s probably not called Kip now. My name has changed. Mum’s too. Jonty’s name was on the news for weeks afterwards, but I’m sure that has changed now as well. Only Bill gets to keep his real name, I suppose.
We’ve got our own house again, Mum and me, with a tiny yard. I walk into the yard in the mornings most days, and watch the sun rise directly, not through glass. I never get bored of the tiny yard, boxed in by fences, and the endless direct sky, the sun breaking the horizon above me.
I bought a new pack of cards when we got here. Shiny. Stiff. No corners are missing. But I took two cards out of the pack, and replaced them with my own. The Ten of Diamonds and the Queen of Hearts. Cut the correct shape out of paper, copied the illustrations with pencil, painted them in with watercolours. They are flimsy, fragile.
The paper is thin.
You always know where they are in the pack.
‘Pacificadora’ by Philippa Howell
Alan and Ayesha met on a Himalayan Health Exchange and were married within a few months. As Sod’s Law would have it, their individual assignments seemed fated to be at opposite ends of the Earth, so marital contact was limited to acrobatic rendezvous in airport hotel rooms, wherever their flight paths crossed.
One day they learned to their joy that they had been assigned to the ‘Pacificadora Project’, and were to spend an uninterrupted year together in the frozen wastelands of Antarctica. The Pacificadora Project was a study of ‘communal isolation’, and Ayesha and Alan were to be a Couple in Dual Confinement. The media labelled them the golden couple of anthropology, and their somewhat bitter colleagues predicted lavish TV documentaries and high-profile lectures. Maybe even the Reith.
‘Antarctica! Cryogenics with sex!’ chortled Alan. Ayesha blushed fondly.
To their surprise they were issued with a clothing list, which included swimwear. ‘All will be revealed!’ Alan joked again. Ayesha smiled again.
They were assigned one of a dozen little red houses, perched on the ice. There were also Confined Families, and groups of Collectively Confined Friendsin larger red houses. Every fourth Sunday all the residents were allowed to leave their houses and socialise. They would make their way across the ice to the Great Barn, emerging from their 900-fill power-down duvet-coats like a cloud of fluorescent butterflies. The Pacificadora Staff organised music, games, food and drink and there was a large, heated pool in the basement, for the prescribed swimwear. The Confined Families played tag and ninepins, while the Collectively Confined Friends danced eightsome reels in swirling groups. Alan thought it was all dreadfully old-school, but he and Ayesha mixed with other Couples in Dual Confinement, swapping anecdotes about their partners over drinks. It crossed Alan’s mind that they might forgo the anecdotes and just swap their partners. He dismissed the thought reluctantly; perhaps they were being watched.
The months passed. Ayesha enjoyed the daily routine of indoor exercise, study, and keeping house. Technology was banned so she and Alan handwrote their journals documenting any notable shifts in their thinking, mood, or activity. She congratulated herself on the successful conjoining of their eclectic lives, and felt she was proving herself to be adaptable and capable. She also discovered she was pregnant, and was pleased.
Alan, on the other hand was pissed off. He missed globetrotting, and dropping like a latter-day Livingstone into remote pockets of the world to patronise its indigenous people; he also missed the impressionable students at far-flung places of learning who happily joined him in bed.
Alan had also discovered that he didn’t like Ayesha.
One Sunday evening when nothing else was happening, Ayesha decided the time was right to tell Alan her news. She finished her weekly report and left him to finish his while she prepared a fish molee, made from tinned tuna, rice, and spices. Then she showered and put on a saffron silk shirt, and earrings, which resembled bunches of bananas. When Alan emerged from the study, he seemed subdued and not particularly hungry. He munched his way through the curry, staring at her earrings. Eventually he muttered, ‘I miss bananas.’ Ayesha smiled, nursing the secret that would cheer him up. Later she put the earrings back in their box and got into bed beside him, but before she could say a word he whispered: ‘I miss bananas terribly,’ and turned his face to the wall.
Alan’s claustrophobia became stratospheric with the baby news. He plunged into painting, teaching himself Spanish, and running on the spot, but nothing helped. He tried to doze on the sunbed but the built-in track of waves breaking relentlessly on the shore irritated him so much, he smashed the sound system. He yearned for external contact, desperately missing the internet. He couldn’t finish anything, not even his sentences. And now, thanks to his wife’s earrings, he had become obsessed with bananas.
He remembered Kelly’s Farm near his childhood home in Sidcup, where they boasted that their shop sold ‘a million pounds-worth a year!’ Not of bananas, he knew that. They sold all sorts. Plus there were ‘Pick Your Own’ fields of strawberries in summer, and carthorse rides for the children. That must have brought in a few bob. ‘Bananas,’ he muttered, staring out of the window into the icy darkness, remembering Mum’s banana bread studded with fat sultanas, her banana splits stuffed with ice-cream, and a stack of pancakes covered in sliced bananas topped with maple syrup. While Ayesha slept, he crept into their study and designed a banana-wallchart as a countdown to freedom. ‘Six bananas are six days,’ he murmured, ‘seventh banana crosses out first six bananas, that’s one week; four lots of seven, that’s four weeks to go.’
The following Sunday, on arrival at the Great Barn for the monthly knees-up, the Head of Staff informed the residents that a sneezing bat in a Chinese market had caused a viral pandemic, and the world was going into lockdown. Instead of a triumphant return to civilisation, Alan and Ayesha were facing infinite dual isolation, she with a fast-growing foetus and he with banana mania veering out of control. They realised that the experiment was now deeply unremarkable; who would be in the least interested in the effects of communal isolation if the whole world were experiencing the same thing? Not only was their thunder stolen, but for the first time in their lives they felt a teensy bit pointless. Worst of all, they saw their pointlessness reflected in each other. Ayesha went quiet. Alan was manic.
The monthly extravaganzas in the Great Barn shrank to short briefings, followed by rather dry pizza. No one dressed up anymore, and the atmosphere was subdued and resentful. A finite experiment was acceptable, but to have no end-date was intolerable. Music played, but the Collectively Confined Friends seemed too depressed to dance, the Confined Families too exhausted to separate their squabbling children, and the Couples in Dual Confinement sulked in silence, terminally polarised. A return to civilisation might mean exposure to a deadly virus, but ‘Bring it on,’ Alan muttered, ‘I choose Death.’
The Pacificadora Project was disintegrating, and Ayesha and Alan documented this in their weekly reports, somehow managing to keep it general, not personal. However, they were like rats in a box breathing the same air, inhaling each other’s fury and frustration. The weeks passed in silence only punctuated by occasional slanging matches.
‘I don’t want my baby to be born here!’ cried Ayesha.
‘Bugger the baby, I can’t live without bananas!’ yelled Alan.
After one particularly ugly incident to do with bed linen, Alan cut the duvet in half and took to sleeping in the sitting room. They created no-go areas for each other, and drew up a strict rota for cooking and bathing. Ayesha devoured books on paediatrics whilst Alan researched hydroponics, planning to germinate banana seeds on his shower sponge under the sunbed tubes. If he could only get hold of the seeds! He slept in his Speedos and dreamt of diving into banana custard, and in the mornings he wandered around unabashed, damp and unmistakably exhilarated. Ayesha refused to notice.
Sixteen months had passed since their crossing by cruise ship from Argentina. Alan’s banana calendar was five months out of date when the UK lockdown lifted briefly, and a small window of escape presented itself. Now makeshift landing strips had been cleared on site and light aircraft were to fly in from Chile to lift the desperate residents out. Ayesha and Alan would fly back to Punta Arenas, then on to Argentina, then London. Ayesha, now heavily pregnant, was top of the list, and Alan, as her husband, was expected to travel with her. The couple managed to be almost civil to each other, agreeing that they would ‘play the game’ when back in the UK, give interviews if asked, and make the most of any career opportunities. Once the last trace of limelight had faded, they would go their separate ways. They were packed and ready the night before their departure, and even ate dinner together.
The next morning Ayesha could not find her passport. She was sure she had put it in her hand luggage, but despite emptying the contents out on to the bed several times and feeling for holes in the lining, it was not to be found. She turned their little red house inside out, and Alan watched her. When she finally cracked and yelled accusations at him, he merely smiled and refused to respond. Ayesha had no choice but to miss the flight, and she watched it take off, knowing Alan would inhale any whiff of publicity on arrival, and feign regret that his darling wife was unable to be with him.
However, once his plane had risen through the clouds, a remarkable change came over Ayesha. The fury left her, and she felt surprisingly serene. The sun was sparkling on the snowy landscape, and a diversionary boat trip was organised to visit some Emperor penguins. Later the news came through that Alan’s Aerolíneas Argentinas flight from Buenos Aires to London had vanished off the radar shortly after take-off. When she heard, Ayesha promptly went into labour and gave birth to a daughter. The Pacificadora Staff closed round her in support, and she named her baby Aisla, from aislamiento, the Spanish for isolation. Ayesha soon found comfort in the arms of the Head of Staff, and a return to the UK rather lost its attraction. Some months later, when a way was found to bring in a regular supply of fresh fruit to the settlement, it came as no surprise to Ayesha that Aisla was particularly fond of bananas.
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