Competition Nineteen Shortlisted: A Werewolf in Soho by Maria Thomas
I meet the werewolf at a noodle bar in Soho. Chain Reaction’s playing on the radio, and he’s using chopsticks to drum the beat, a tangle of beef chow mein in a bowl.
I’ve been drinking, but that isn’t why I’m queasy at the slices of carcass-pink beef peeking through ridges browned in dark soy and oyster sauce. I sit, let the barman pour me fat fingers of osmanthus wine, studying the menu, avoiding any mention of beef.
We’re the only people in the bar, downpour deterring passing trade. Outside scarlet lanterns wax in pools like blood moons. My clothes steam in the heat like wontons.
The wolf catches my eye, raises his glass.
“Ganbai,” he says. I raise my glass too, shuddering as he tweezes chow-mein into his mouth, canines catching spotlights, pearlescent shine like supermodels.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “don’t you like steak?”
“It’s my hands,” I say, and hold them up, as if the light will highlight x-rayed bones – white-on-black in the darkened bar – and he’ll be able to see chips and splinters, fissures and faults where they’ve fused like kintsugi porcelain, “they’re full of cow bone,” I say, “beef.”
He nods, frowns at his noodles and I stare into my glass, side-eyeing him until I capture the moment of recognition, and he turns, glances and I recognise fear, compassion, empathy, understanding.
Not something you expect from a werewolf in Soho.
I realise he’s seen the footage too – of heifers stumbling like sunny-day drinkers, milky cadavers littering farmer’s yards, teenagers prone in motorised cots, grainy images of cauliflower brains, infinite black-holes where florets are missing.
“Another drink for the lady,” he says signalling the barman, and he tips his glass towards me, scratches his chin, pushes the food away.
Maria Thomas is a middle-aged, apple-shaped mum. Maria recently won Oxford Flash Fiction and named Best Speculative Fiction by Welkin Prize who also nominated her for Best Small Fictions. Maria won Free Flash Fiction’s Competition 13, Retreat West’s April 2022 Micro. She placed in LISP and Propelling Pencil in 2022. She is on Twitter @AppleWriter, Insta @AppleShapedWriter and Bluesky @appleshapedwriter.bsky.social
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