Competition Twenty Highly Commended: My mother has become an owl by Jane Broughton
She stares at us, her anxious family, impassive and unblinking. After a long silence she tuts and fluffs her salt and pepper feathers, settling them over her stout body like a thick musty shawl. She shuffles her scaly feet and flexes her blackened talons. We shiver as she shreds the old newspapers that line her nest and continues to stare at us.
We twitter away, offer her tasty morsels and sweet titbits to tempt her to engage with us. She remains quiet and our guilt makes us mice as we scuttle around her. She swivels her head and looks into the darkening sky. I reach out a hand and she pinions me with a glare. I beg her for a sign; a glint of recognition.
She yawns then snaps shut that cruel beak and closes her eyes, excluding us. We look at the debris of her prey, food half eaten and bones discarded. We try not to dwell on the fetid stains blotching threadbare furniture.
The Sheltering Oaks Care Home had seemed the best place for her, but that was before she started growing feathers. Now, suddenly, they have no vacancies. We crack open the door for a gasp of fresh air, but it’s enough.
Mum scents freedom. She spreads her wings, swoops through the gap and speeds up into the night sky. We see her silhouetted between bare branches, heavy in the air like an overstuffed handbag. She screeches, possibly a farewell, and disappears among the trees.
Jane lives in Manchester and won Beaconlit Festival’s flash fiction prize in 2019. This unexpected success prompted her to start writing seriously in her sixties. It’s never too late! She enjoys the challenge of writing flash fiction, the shorter the better. She has work in EllipsisZine, Full House, The Wondrous Real, Paragraph Planet, Free Flash Fiction, Writing Magazine and Reflex Press. She’s a LISP and Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award finalist and tweets @janeb323. @janeb.bsky.social
Photo by Rúben Marques on Unsplash
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This piece is incredible. I think it is the most soulfully inspired, beautifully descriptive flash fiction I have read. You truly have a gift as a storyteller, and I admire your brilliant use of imagery, your breadth of words. Bravo!
Love this piece. What a good metaphor and really well worked through, the story well structured. Do I get the impression your Mum was a bit fierce and independent? Mine too, but my mother is an (Australian) scarlet robin, who arrives as a pop of Constable red against the grey-green of our bush block in late autumn and winter. Mum comes as a male because the females are mousey brown, their breast hardly red, and I might not distinguish her from other small birds: she wants to be seen. From our verandah, there she is on the left on our wire fences, flashing off to catch bugs; when I whack balls for our cattle dog along the side of the tennis court, she’s flitting up high on the court enclosure. My Mum loved English robins and used to feed them outside her flat in Scarborough, Yorks, so her birdy choice is no surprise. Although she could be quite a buzzard at times! She also loved the donkeys at the local sanctuary. Fortunately, no donkeys have shown up. Yet. 🙂