I resolved over a month ago that I was not going to enter the Fish One Page Story Prize this year. I entered it last year, with this in fact, and got both a complimentary critique and my name on the short list. I then got tempted into entering the Microfiction competition over the summer, and two of my efforts were runners up. So now I have a bit of a compulsion to keep entering Fish Competitions in the hope that one day I might do just that little bit better and win some money.

That is, of course senseless, because you have to pay an entry fee each time and as a rule I don’t enter anything which requires and entry fee, especially these days when I’m trying to save money. The Fish entry fee is particularly annoying because it’s in Euros, and so my bank charges me a quid for processing it. So all in all I had concluded by February that Fish Competitions were a pointless waste of money and I wasn’t going to be sucked into them.

I was doing really well, too The deadline for the end of the One Page Story competition is midnight tonight and I had actually completely forgotten about it until they sent me a reminder about it this evening, explaining there was still time to make a last minute entry.

There wasn’t, really. Not given that I hadn’t started writing anything. The premise of the competition is that you have to tell a story in less than 300 words, which maybe doesn’t sound very hard but ultimately is. At least, I find it hard because brevity isn’t my strong point

I gave myself an hour between half ten and half eleven just, and told myself that if I came up with 300 coherent words, I was allowed to enter them. I spent the first forty minutes trying to create an intriguing fictional incident, and failed entirely I gave up, logged into Facebook, and was instantly reminded, courtesy of a coincidental status message, of something which happened seven years ago this May. Once you have found inspiration, 300 words are childsplay to write, and by half eleven my entry was submitted.

In the interests of not wasting the precious pennies, I have now unsubscribed from Fish Newsletter updates so that I don’t get lured into any more acts of folly! In the meantime, I don’t think even quoting a line of the Hail Mary is going to make an Irish Catholic judging panel vote for this one

**********

First Kiss

“We can’t”, I said.

“Why not?” she said.

“It’s wrong”, I said.

She shook her head, sticking out her cute little tongue. “That’s not what you said in Oxford!”

I feel myself begin to turn a peculiar shade of pink as I protest vehemently that Oxford was different.

“Damn right”, she says. “You were wearing less clothes!”

The electrifying tension in the room is immediately dispersed. We both start to giggle, reliving that unfortunate episode in the shower block, and from there it is such a short step to finding ourselves in an embrace.

For a splitsecond we teeter on the brink of insanity, oppressed by that which is yet can not be. Then, uninvited, the midday Angelus gong shatters the silence of our private world. We both jump, unnerved, and clinging to each other, fall over the edge.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

The first touch is light, awkward; the second already firmer, more self-assured. By the third and fourth it has become more urgent, a desperate attempt to savour an unrepeatable moment. The weightless joy is balanced by the heavy guilt and I am the first to break away and end this forbidden pleasure.

This cannot happen; not here, not now, not ever. And yet it has.

In retrospect, it was a mistake to do it there, by the window, where the wandering eyes of inattentive students would catch sight of our display as they gazed idly out of classrooms.

Later, my cheeks burned crimson on the school bus as my sister asked why people were pointing and calling me a lesbian.

Tags: extreme lack of willpower, fish publishing, writing competitions

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.