2016 Autumn Flash Fiction Competition

3rd Prize

Douglas Bruton

Douglas Bruton won The Neil Gunn Memorial prize 2015, the William Soutar Prize in 2014 and HISSAC in 2008. Recently he has been published by Aesthetica and Fiction Attic Press and Brittle Star Magazine, as well as in The Eildon Tree, Transmission, The Delinquent, Grasslimb Journal, The Blood Orange Review, The Vestal Review, Storyglossia, Ranfurly Review, The Smoking Poet, Interpreter’s House, Flash Magazine, The Irish Literary Review and Northwords Now.

Blind Milk-White Cataracts of Dead Fish

If you asked, she’d tell you she got them at a good price and she got them at Anders and son. They know her there and her name’s Milly Cartwright. That’s what she’d tell you, holding up the small parcel as proof of what she said, and she’d show you where Bernie Anders, the son, has written her name in blue pencil.

It’s a parcel of fish heads, maybe five or seven, depending on how many’d asked for the heads to be removed. Ladies mostly, and they’re squeamish sometimes and they say seeing the eyes staring up at them, well, they can’t bear it. And when they’re cooked, the blind milk-white cataracts of the dead fish, well then they can’t eat what’s on their plates. So they ask Bernie Anders senior, please, if he wouldn’t mind and if it’s no trouble, to remove the heads.

Once, as many as nine, and he keeps them in a small basin of ice and he knows Milly Cartwright’ll be by before the shop closes. It gives him some pleasure to wrap up the fish heads he has and to make a gift of them to her. He asks the boy to write her name on the parcel, not for any other reason than he likes to see her name written down.

Used to be she was pretty and gay, and she turned men’s heads when she walked down the street. It’s hard to believe now, but it’s true. And Bernie Anders senior had a thing for her then and they’d walked out together for almost a year, dancing some Saturdays and kissing in the park, and more than kisses one night. Now, all that’s just a memory that they share. He winks at her, calls her darling, and he hands over a parcel of fish heads at the end of each day, her name written on the paper.

And Milly Cartwright shows you, if you ask; sometimes even if you don’t ask, and she says that Bernie Anders senior is a nice man and she got them at a good price, by which she means that he never charges her for those heads of fish. She smiles and briefly looks pretty and not old. Then she clutches the parcel to her, hunches her back and hurries off. 

She boils up the fish and makes a thick soup, the smell of the sea hanging over the neighbourhood so we all can smell it; and she sings when she’s cooking, dances across the small space of her kitchen floor, imagining she’s dancing with someone. And in the morning, when the fish-head soup is cool, she spoons it into small bowls that she sets out on the stone-paved back garden and all the cats in the neighbourhood come to feed. She has names for each one and she tells them her name is Milly Cartwright and they rub themselves against her legs and purr with pleasure, and these days it is enough.