The Winner of 2014 Flash Fiction Competition

1st Prize

Zena Hagger with:

Killing Aunt Maud

I am going to kill Aunt Maud. It will be difficult, since she is already dead. She inhabits her ashes in Uncle Abrahim’s tuba, kept in place by a sheet of cling film which she plays like a kazoo. At 3am. 

She always was a cantankerous old bat, dressed in permanent black with a cane that cracked floor tiles. When she vacated her body, it was cremated and not buried as a Yiddisher alte moyd should be. She also left an unfinished bucket list. I can just hear her precise Franco-English now. 

‘If I cannot do it alive, then you and I will do it dead.’

As a result of the failure of the BASE jumping parachute, her ghastly cremation urn crashed and split. Luckily, Uncle Abrahim had been busking with his tuba as he waited for her landing. Scooping up her remains, he poured them into his instrument and legged it before security guards puffed out of the office block.

Then the kazoo hints started. ‘Let It Snow’ sent the tuba, her ashes and me to Antarctica. Surprising penguins with ‘Surfin’ USA’ moved us on to California. Have you ever tried to surf with a tuba wrapped in ten rolls of cling film and wearing a life-jacket? I skipped the country before they locked us up. We met the Dalai Lama in a Thai monsoon. He giggled at her rendition of ‘Singing In The Rain’. Eventually, I lugged her home and collapsed in my armchair to read a heap of post. There was a knock at my door.

‘Jacob Gutnick.’ He raised what looked like furry caterpillars over his eyes. ‘You called for a plumber?’ He hefted a tool bag. ‘Miss Fuchs?’ Only Aunt Maud would give a name like that. Faintly, ‘Going To The Chapel’ came zuzzing out of the tuba.

A month later Aunt Maud woke me and Jake with an enthusiastic rendition of ‘The Wedding March’. By then, he had taken a haunted tuba in his stride, fixed the central heating and charmed my mother. Two months beyond that we were engaged and mother was wedding planning. Aunt Maud fell into a decline and only in the quietest moments did we hear a thready humming of sea shanties. What can you do with a depressed ghost?

Jake, Aunt Maud and I were standing on top of Beachy Head. The kazoo was belting out ‘A Life On The Ocean Wave’. The wind was drifting around curious sightseers, wondering why two people were holding hands over a noisy tuba wrapped in a black scarf.

‘I’m going to miss her.’ It was time for her to go. Why was I hesitating? The kazoo softened to a croon, then a dirge, a funereal version of the wedding march.

‘Me too.’ Jake’s caterpillars crawled towards his hairline. ‘I have an idea.’

‘Go on.’

‘Do you have a bridesmaid’s outfit that would fit a tuba?’ The kazoo burst into a round of ‘Oranges and Lemons’.

I will kill her.

Sometime.