FFF Competition Twenty-Three Judge’s Report by Chris Cottom
16 September 2024
Wow! It’s been such a privilege to savour the fifteen longlisted stories, such a revelation to witness how inventively each writer has conjured setting and situation, language and syntax. After Ian graciously asked me to judge this competition, I laboured, as a novice judge, with imagined responsibility. How would I choose? Indeed, each longlisted story shouted its credentials to me, each gleaning colour and character from unlikely places and polishing them with care and precision. In the end though, the six shortlisted stories simply announced themselves to me, some quietly, some loudly, and each time I returned to them they invited me further into their worlds and whispered their further secrets.
The author of the shortlisted story ‘An Occasional Destruction of Roses’ plunges us into a dystopia where science ‘as always’ is ‘defeated by the deafening sound of commerce’, a world that’s perhaps not future-distant after all. Don’t be misled by the ‘crimson fronds’, ‘pale rocks’ and ‘scarlet flowers’ of the opening; this is a world where children succumb to the red weed and die that very night. The author maintains the story’s chilling power through a voice that’s unremittingly unemotional, and astutely avoids escalating the narrator’s quiet cynicism into an OTT rant. Only in the final sentence are we, the readers, commanded to realise that this is our world too. ‘Effective or not, infected or not’, we’d ‘better use’ the spray or our ‘government will want to know why.’
The shortlisted story ‘Our Town’ is a heart-warming tale of redemption. Into our ‘once vibrant’ place (does this sound familiar, residents of Anytown UK?), now so ‘grey with isolation’ that ‘we do not know why we starve, or what we hunger for,’ steps an angel baker with a basket and a simple message: ‘Let us eat cake’. One by one, each of us (and, yes, the author must be talking to you and me) unglue ourselves from our devices to ‘emerge like moles into daylight’, to reconnect in ‘the soft glow of shared stories and laughter’, to bind ourselves into a tapestry one ‘thread of kindness’ at a time, to eat ‘brioche and bagels, rose cake and velvet cake.’ This, without doubt, is a story for today.
The beauty of the shortlisted ‘Unspoken epilogue’ rests on the realisation that the moments that matter are the small ones: ‘blankets on the sofa, wind at the top of a big hill, bare feet in the sea’. But the author doesn’t stop with this carefully ‘curated collection’, but drives the reader on to a new level of emotional intensity as the dead narrator comes to understand that ‘the walls of the box are not made from wood’ but from words and tears and stories and memories. They’re surrounded by love. ‘Unspoken epilogue’ is a exquisitely simple proposition, exquisitely expressed.
In the highly commended ‘Dule Tree’ the eponymous narrator has been a long-time restrained witness to many of men’s horrors, yet has ‘flowers and fruit in abundance’. It still, however, sacrifices these to its own need to ‘syphon all the sustenance from the land’. The author has created a compelling and entirely consistent voice. It’s the voice of a survivor, who’s ‘soaked up’ ‘black-hearted deeds’, who continues to ‘bear the weight of the dead’, yet remains too self-reliant to waste energy judging those who have hung from its branches. The author takes us through a very long lifetime with extraordinary depth and economy before delivering an absolute sucker punch of an ending. Finally, the Dule Tree has had enough. It has ‘given, taken, and watched’ and wishes ‘to see no more’.
The ‘dim-eyed’ but eternally resourceful women of the highly commended story ‘The Marketplace’ don’t (or probably can’t) bring hens or tomatoes to sell. Instead, they’ve ‘harvested sorrows’, have come to ‘barter their woes’, to peddle ‘packs of guilt’. Although they ‘babble’ in the ‘midday swelter’, it’s a sisterhood only of shared suffering, a dog-eat-dog world where one ingénue is another’s next meal. The author weaves a marvellously inventive extended metaphor where leather-skinned and red-scarfed women circle each other’s wares, spy the hapless fair-haired novice, watch the ensuing negotiation ‘open-mouthed, like hippos taking in water’ (one of several fabulous similes) until suddenly – and how wonderfully the story self-interrupts – ‘Too late, they’ve exchanged.’
The winning story, ‘A Poet Rejuvenates The Parts Other Treatments Cannot Reach’, is a sensory feast: ‘candlelit pages, wax-spotted’, ‘the clatter of London’, ‘the rain on the Heath’, ‘thirst for grapes’. Who can resist an edition of Keats ‘brindled with notes’ in a ‘long-ago teenage scrawl’? This is a very assured piece of writing in which the author moves us seamlessly up and down the emotional scale, from ‘sardonic smile’ to the ‘edge of undiscovered lands’ and back to ‘the girl-next-door’, mirroring Keats’s own love life as well as his ‘search for fellow poets hidden in the hills’. The story is rich in descriptive power and emotional resonance, from the ‘pounding, pacing heart’ of the opening, through ‘the patient, laughing friend’ (again, why use one adjective when you can use two?) to the exultant triple ‘Yes,’ of its glorious conclusion. Bravo!
Chris Cottom
chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom