Competition Twenty-Nine Highly Commended: What Remains, Luminous by Timothy Collyer
The courier handed me Marlene with a receipt to sign, like delivering takeaway. I slid her into a cobalt-blue jar with a silver lid. We’d had eight years, three flats, two broken hearts—mine early, hers eventually. She left twice before it stuck.
The funeral home said scatter her somewhere meaningful. But Marlene never stayed. A woman of exits. Sharp-tongued, brilliant, exhausting. She could make you feel like the only person—or furniture she’d grown tired of.
For months, the jar sat on the mantel. I drank cheap Jack Daniel’s—the stuff she called “bog water”—and muttered to her ashes.
“You’d hate this wallpaper,” I’d say. Or, “They renamed that gallery you loved after some dull banker. You’d have ranted for hours.”
Last night, raw, I cracked the lid. The ashes glittered like crushed shell. I dipped a finger in. Tasted. Gritty. Bitter. Like chalk, smoke, something else—electric.
She used to trace my spine in the dark, fingertips barely there. “You’re too solid,” she’d whisper. “I need you translucent.” I understand what she meant.
This morning, bathroom light revealed something strange: my fingertip, glowing blue-green. Like bioluminescence. Like something waking up. Under torchlight, it throbbed, like it wanted out.
The phosphorescence wasn’t random. She’d been eating plankton too—slowly, deliberately. Teaching herself to glow. Planning her exit in light.
Then—Puerto Rico. Her limbs trailing blue fire through black water, shrieking with laughter. “I want to be like this forever,” she gasped, flinging phosphorescent arcs at the sky.
I stared at my finger. Then the jar. My heart thumped—not with fear. With want. This is madness. I know. But I’ll go on anyway.
In darkness, I’ll burn with her—veins lit like constellations, nerves spitting stars. The last thing she gave me was direction.
Tim Collyer is a Wiltshire-based writer whose work spans speculative fiction, literary drama, and darkly comic storytelling. His recent accolades include winning the inaugural New2theScene Flash Fiction Competition and runner-up in the Pokrass Flash Fiction Award, and the DuMaurier Literature Award. Alongside a career in financial services, he writes stories that explore the surreal edges of everyday life.
Image -Tim Collyer
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