Competition Seventeen Winning Story: Frontier by Emma Phillips
They said your ma would lift her skirts for the hint of a gold rush, so you balled your fists and knocked them down in the dirt. When you pulled them up on well-worn boots it was hard to see their scorn for grit. You kicked your heels and ran to be free from their tuts.
******The truth was your ma did a lot of things to survive. She taught you to cartwheel fast as a wagon and to keep your chin up when hope was trodden to muck. “Use this,” she told you, tapping her head with the same fingers that lined up shots, “don’t be fooled by any who say your power lies in your hips.”
******Her power lay in her good pair of shoes, the ones the prospector bought before he offered his heart then sold it to another. When she slipped them on, she was still that girl who followed her dreams to the creek bed, back when she could get by on her wits and dance her way out of trouble.
******“Gold ain’t the only treasure worth seeking,” she told you, dropping coins into a jar. As you shook the pan like a tambourine, she showed you the beauty of moonlight. You dredged up all and nothing out there, picking your way through silt. When the sun rose with the colour of a bruise, it warmed your findings to dust. Your ma said you were looking at it wrong. The specks were constellations.
Emma Phillips is a teacher from Devon. Her work has been placed by the Bath Flash Fiction Award and in Best Microfiction 2022, long listed by Reflex fiction and appeared in Blink-Ink, Popshot and Mslexia.
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You truly took me to the time and place.