Competition Twenty-Nine Shortlisted: Impossible Summer by Jaime Gill
The boy is happy. See him sitting atop a double-decker bus with his new friend Grace as they bump along Northumberland’s coast and listen to shared music on the boy’s walkman, headphones linked. The North Sea’s a grey beast down to its deep gloomy heart, but on rare summer days it wears a glitter crown. The whole world is dazzle, the sun winking through the windows of houses they pass. When the singer cries “ba ba ba BAH” they scream it to the skies with him.
The boy is also afraid. His fifteen years have taught him he can’t own happiness any more than he can own sunshine. He can’t make either, they can only be given or taken away. The universe gifted him eight beautiful years at the start of his life—a happyish family, fields on his doorstep, friends to explore with—then snatched them away. His parents divorced and he’s since followed his mother as she pinballed through a life of increasing chaos. He’s moved six times in five years, to increasingly grim towns. All the while he’s watched his mother fall apart in car crash slow-motion, alcohol the solvent ungluing her.
And yet. His mother is sober when he gets home that evening—she is sober that whole summer—and he can’t even see addiction’s gravity tugging at her. Perhaps it’s because they’re dancing together in the living room, strutting comically to Marc Bolan’s “I Love To Boogie”. In his mother’s eyes he sees his surprised delight mirrored.
Five months later he’ll call Grace on New Year’s Eve and tell her that he can’t make it to her party, his mother died that morning in a bedroom ripe with vodka and despair.
In the years that follow, the boy will get lost in darkness many times and for many years, but the memory of the impossible summer never dims. It will guide him as he slowly learns how to make his own sun, carefully assembled from found fragments of love and art and hope. The impossible summer will become a blueprint for his own happiness.
Sometimes he wishes he could find a crack in time, somehow slip through the decades to see his mother again. He’d like to show her his sun and try to teach her how to create her own. He’d probably fail—he suspects everyone has to make their own sun and many can’t. But he’d like to try. Oh, how he’d like to try.
Jaime Gill is a queer, British-born writer happily exiled in Cambodia, where he works and volunteers for nonprofits. He reads, writes, boxes, travels, and occasionally socialises. His stories have appeared in publications including Blue Earth Review, Trampset, f(ri)iction, Phoebe Journal, Orca, New Flash Fiction Review, Orca, and Exposition Review, won several awards including a Bridport prize, and been finalists for the Smokelong Grand Micro and Bath Short Story Awards. He’s Pushcart-nominated and currently writing a novel and far too many short stories. More: www.jaimegill.com instagram.com/mrjaimegill jaimegill.bsky.social twitter.com/jaimegill
Digital art by Sewkhy Tan – sewkhys_art – Instagram
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