Fish Anthology 2025
SELECTED BY:
Sean Lusk ~ Short Story
Tania Hershman ~ Flash Fiction
Ted Simon ~ Short Memoir
Billy Collins ~ Poetry
Photos of the books launch will be posted shortly.
Read an excerpt from winning short story – This is London, baby by Jay McKenzie
Read winning flash story – Lover by Allegra Mullan
Read an excerpt from winning memoir – Last Days by James Ellis
Read winning poem – The Harvesters by Michael Lavers
Introductory Note
In a time when literature competes with endless screens and shrinking attention spans, writing and reading remain quiet, slow, thoughtful pursuits.This Anthology is an antidote to a world saturated with noise and numbed by distraction– a balm to soothe. These stories, memoirs, and poems speak of uncertainty, defiance, longing, humor, rage, love, and of the fragile beauty of being alive.They are carefully constructed, imaginatively executed, and honestly conveyed.These pieces are not answers, they are fragments of witness, dream, and resistance. They show what literature still does, and they ask what literature still might try to do. We hope they meet you wherever you are, and leave something of themselves behind.
It is regrettable that more of the brilliant work submitted to Fish could not be included in this Anthology. Our thanks to judges Sean Lusk, Tania Hershman, Ted Simon, Billy Collins, for making those hard choices. And to all those who entered the Fish prizes, without whom this Anthology would not be possible, keep writing – the balm is in your palm!
Clem Cairns & Jula Walton
June 2025
Contents
SHORT STORIES |
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This is London, baby |
Jay McKenzie |
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The Making of Us |
Robin Booth |
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Top Line |
Hannah-Fleur Fitz-Rankin |
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My Dead Mother |
Jo Stein |
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The Only Dalit in the Village |
Mohini Singh |
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Sore Winner |
David Ralph |
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Keeping Cool |
Linda Chase |
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Lonely Meets Lonely |
Nicola Schofield |
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Entropy |
Barry Brophy |
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Fiasco |
Rand Richards Cooper |
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FLASH FICTION |
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Lover |
Allegra Mullan |
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Empty Space |
Justine Sweeney |
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Breath and Bone |
Letty Butler |
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I’ve Lost a Lot of Friends Through Love |
Ralph Storer |
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A.W.O.L. |
Lisa Donoghue |
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For a Good Time, Call … |
Annalisa McMorrow |
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Leaving in Four |
Rebekah Clarkson |
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Picture This |
Simon Roberts |
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Transformations |
Shakira Christodoulou |
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My Father’s Wedding |
Xavier Combe |
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SHORT MEMOIRS |
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Last Days |
James Ellis |
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Journey into Danger |
Claire Brown |
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Splav |
Mary Ethna Black |
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Mothers and Daughters |
Eve Grant |
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In Between |
Dian Parker |
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Leaving |
James J Chambers |
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Skin |
Anthony Dew |
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Exclamation |
Noelle McCarthy |
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Africa, Once and Again |
Lance Mason |
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My Hummingbird Heart |
Philippa Groom |
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POETRY |
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The Harvesters |
Michael Lavers |
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Prayer at the Cove |
Wes Lee |
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A zuihitsu on how everything is about my estranged father |
Sue Burge |
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On meeting Shakespeare in the supermarket |
Kate Bailey |
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Aubade to My Phlebotomist |
Partridge Boswell |
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Blitzkrieg in the Library |
Séamus Scanlon |
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On Cabbages |
Michael Lavers |
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Whatever else |
Jane Williams |
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Kells Turning |
Elaine O’Connor |
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The Fisherboy’s Knots |
Paris Rosemont |
This is London, baby
(an excerpt)
by Jay McKenzie
Advance to Go. Collect £200
Angel, 1998. It’s The End – not the end, but The End – and Layo is throwing down sick beats, and on, on, you could move all night because your hips are liquid, your belly undulating and oh!how you could dance forever. It’s Renegade Master, it’sDreams, it’s two hundred birthday pounds in your fake Burberry Jacquard. Eighteen, ready to be a woman in a Topshop crop top and button-through Snob skirt. Raise your arms, neon-pink bra line limboing under lycra, close your eyes and love that they’re looking, lookingbecause you’ve never been hotter or slicker or wilder. Wink caught, bite your Glam-Shined lip like they do in Cosmo, gnashing lips, bruised tongue, plum and swollen and not like you imagined, staggering arm in arm down the milk-truck rattle of Islington High Street, finger plucks the leg of your knickers like a banjo string and this is life, welcome to living, baby.
Bank error in your favour. Collect £200
Euston, 2001. Elbows press into a sticky table in The Rocket on Euston Road and you blink blink too hard and fast like all the others because I mean, what the fuck? Stretch the student loan out for six more weeks but Jesus!drinking to understand or not, and to forget or not, it’s like kids and toys only it’s not, says an old man in a stained Led Zeppelin t-shirt. Drink hard, drink fast, pints chased with Aftershock, tribal trauma sucked and exhaled as one breathing building, grateful for your heartbeat, seeing but slamming drinks to not see shadows falling from towers. What would you do?asks a city exec in crumpled pinstripe and you can’t stop the blurring at his edges but know that you need to fuck him to feel something other than the crushing weight of Hell. Spew burning aniseed into his toilet, find four crumpled fifties in your pocket and crumble because did you steal it or earn it while the world burned?
Lover
by Allegra Mullan
Your lover is the model on the box of hair dye. She is the model in the advertisement for a significant brand of Croatian lager. In the lager advertisement, she is laughing, but on the side of the box, she is very serious. They pay your lover to ride a train to Amsterdam. They pay her to get a balayage. They pay her to be punctual and to wear: stirruped dance tights, a black raincoat, shirts of undyed linen. They pay her to stand behind a sheet of annealed glass and breathe on it and then write a word in her condensed breath. It is for her that people use hair dye, people drink beer. They invented cameras and stood breathing chemicals in dark rooms, for her. When her father was sick and couldn’t wash himself, she washed him with a cup of warm water. Once, she tried to move him and hurt him with her hand and he pissed himself. And he said, I’m sorry, and she cried. The roof of her mouth is arched in a steep vertical from sucking her thumb for all those years as a child. You meet your lover after a shoot, and she is drinking iced tea at a metal table. When she looks at you, you have this feeling in your stomach, like something inside you is coming loose and rising up through silted water. You order half a pint of the Croatian lager; you feel you are wading through water lilies.
Last Days
(an excerpt)
by James Ellis
‘How long have you worked here?’ says Lizzie.
‘Nine months,’ I say.
‘Nine months? Why are you really leaving? Is your girlfriend pregnant?’
‘No.’
‘Ahh, Claire, look at him, he’s gone all red.’
I ignore Lizzie but fan my face with the newspaper which makes her laugh. Lizzie, wide and strong. Lizzie with freckles and frizzy blonde hair. She lives with her biker boyfriend, Joe, in a cottage outside of town. She once told me, watching my expression, that when they have sex Joe goes on for too long, making her sore and bored, so she thinks about chores and shopping and cracks in the ceiling while she waits for him to finish, while he shakes her around like a rag doll.
‘You’ll miss us, though, won’t you?’ says Claire.
‘I will,’ I say. And it’s true. I will.
The newspapers are full of Margaret Thatcher’s election victory. “Maggie’s Made It!” says the Daily Mirror. “Home, Sweet Home!” says the Daily Express. But I buy the Expressfor the word square on the puzzle page. Today’s target is twenty-seven. Claire looks over my shoulder and I cover the paper like a schoolboy in case she spots the nine-letter word before I do.
Claire wants to be a doctor. This is her gap-year, working with Lizzie and me. We’re auxiliary nurses on a geriatric stroke ward. Last month, on my birthday, Claire gave me her copy of The Catcher in the Rye. She’d written her name on the inside cover in tiny indecipherable writing and I wondered if she wrote her name in all her books, and if so, why, and if not, why this one. And Lizzie nudged her and said, ‘Give him a hug, Claire. It’s his birthday.’
The Harvesters
by Michael Lavers
Bruegel, 1565
There we are outside Antwerp in the sixties.
I mean the fifteen-sixties. Tired and sweaty.
Trees, not very green. Low hills.
Birds veering slantwise through the chalk-white air.
I’m wearing a smock with open collar.
You’re in a giant hat, popular back then,
if you remember, almost a kind of shield or sail.
We’re finishing another tedious day,
but aren’t quite ready to go back,
wanting to feel the weight the shade has
when the sun leans on it from its perch
over the trees. You had been weeping that day,
if I remember right. Some dispute
with the Parish over the place for a grave.
Under your visor there’s an ardor to your cheeks,
the kind of ghostly charge after a storm over the sea.
You have taken a break from gathering sheaves
and are sharing a meal with the others,
whose names, if you gave me a minute,
will come to me. Marie and Thijs.
And I wanna say Jaan. Where are they now?
Did Thijs ever resolve that thing with Henk?
Like us, did they get other lives,
driving a milk truck maybe,
teaching High-School French in Santa Fe?
The kid who stared at me last week,
across the restaurant, did he recognize
the man he knew, this man stretched
like a corpse in the shade of that tree?
Why did I feel I had earned such indecent repose?
Did I think the field was half mowed,
or half unmowed? Was I actually sleeping,
or was it a pose, an echo of the great ongoing
harvest Father Claes said all are gathered into
as we ripen, are cut down, and fall.
But who’s to say? I mean, just look:
how could I know that something
from that day would never die, or fade, or change?
That the man by the bushes who had set up his easel
would choose that moment, fleeting and brief,
to set a version of us down, though a version
without the welts the scythe left on my arm,
without the sweat, with just a faint tinge
of my worry, or your tears?
To him I must have seemed content
to lie there doing nothing with my life—
that life, at least—but stare at clouds,
humming songs about maidens and sheep,
about bays whose boats are always sleepy,
whose water is always calm, always warm,
