Competition Thirty-Five Shortlisted: Michelangelo of Morecambe by Chris Cottom
Tomorrow the bulldozers will bash down our sixties semi, won’t care about its double-height rococo chapel. It’d been our single garage until Dad went to a Billy Graham Crusade, came home saved, and extended it heavenwards. The council’s routing its relief road through our cul-de-sac so we’re moving to Blackpool where Dad can still run beach missions and I’ll start Big School. The other kids won’t believe any Lancashire lass ever lived anywhere so over-the-top ornate, with statues and pillars and swirly gold everywhere. I’ll keep schtum about the pillars being faux marble, actually plastic wastepipes which Dad painted to look like the real Italian stuff. But I’ll describe his ceiling frescos of God asleep on a cumulonimbus and Noah checking his queue of two-by-two ruminants while a moody raven sulks in a corner. I’ll tell them about making my Barbie and Ken smooch on the pulpit steps, deep-carpeted in what Mum called cardinal red, how she’d bow to the altar and make the sign of the cross every time she went in, even if she was only taking Dad a cup of tea when he was on his back being the local Michelangelo. I’ll explain we had a telly in there so she could watch her Pope John Paul videos, that I watched the royal wedding on it with Roger Mclaughlin, except it went on so long we started our own ceremony until he had to go home for tea because it was Alphabetti Spaghetti. But Big School’s not until September and tonight I snuggle into my sleeping bag, Barbie and Ken cosy-cosy on the steps, Mum and Dad by the altar rail, all of us gazing up at our little bit of Heaven here in Morecambe while we wait for tomorrow and its rumbling bulldozers.
Chris Cottom has recent work in Banshee, Barrelhouse, Fictive Dream, matchbook, New Flash Fiction Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Orange Blossom Review, The Broadkill Review, The Good Life Review, and elsewhere. He’s packed Christmas hampers in a Harrods basement, sold airtime for Radio Luxembourg, and served a twelve-year stretch as an insurance copywriter. He liked the writing job best.
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