Chalk Circle Short Story Competition 2026
WINNING STORY 1500 SHORT STORY CATEGORY
​​​A Blanket, But No Umbrella
D.M. Tomlinson
She didn’t really know it was wrong.
But how could she not?
If she had known, she probably wouldn’t have done it. Because, all told, she was pretty well-behaved. Even though Mama sometimes accused her of feeling herself.
Just because you’re twelve and you’re starting to feel yourself doesn’t mean…
If she had to tell the truth about it, she would have to admit that most of the time she was only good because she was too scared to be otherwise. For her sort of goodness, fear made all the difference.
Then, that wasn’t really good after all, was it?
The adults were busy. Well, busy is the wrong word. They were occupied. They laughed their big, juicy laughs while she stood close enough to listen, but far enough away not to be noticed. She wished she could have joined in, but as far as they were concerned, she was still only a child, and children didn’t join in with grown-up delectation.
After a while of standing there invisible, she noticed something. She noticed that the fear was gone. The fear that had always been quietly hovering in the background making her good, had dissipated. Without them knowing it, the adults’ laughter and enjoyment had somehow dissolved it all away. Fear can never withstand the blast of a big hearty laugh, everybody knew that. Their atmosphere affected her like a rush of laughing gas that blew in and made her silly. Because what she did next was definitely silly. No doubt about that.
She left.
Immured by their own giddiness, no one noticed as she quietly moved away from the festivities, crossed the living room, eased the front door open and slipped out into the night, closing the door soundlessly behind her. Just slipped. Not plotted. Not planned. Just slipped.
Before she even realized it herself, she had already put one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, and was heading down the street. Her footfalls were so quick and light that they barely made a sound on the pavement. No sound that she could hear anyway; she was too busy being silly. For what else could this be called but silliness?
It could be called folly.
It could be called get-your-ass-whupped-for-no-good-reason.
But she did it anyway.
Her quick feet took her a ways down the road and soon she stood in front of his house.
He wasn’t what anyone would call handsome, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn’t matter what ‘anyone’ thought; he was something to her. She’d seen him plenty of times but had only heard his voice once or twice. He was apparently what you would call the strong, silent type. Or maybe the dumb, silent type. Or perhaps more like the bordering on criminal, silent type, had she noticed. But she didn’t see that. All she saw was the glow she’d framed around him that made him appear like a young god whenever she could work up the boldness to look. He was something to her.
Maybe if he could have sensed all that, he might have gone on to do great things. If only he could have seen himself the way she saw him, his steps might have trodden a very different path.
But he didn’t see it. So, his life would dip onto the wrong road, heading down, down, down, as if it had been tied to a stone and thrown into the restless ocean, with quiet only to be found at the very bottom.
But that hadn’t happened yet.
They were still just a couple of dumb kids. One blind to himself, the other with sight enough for the both of them.
But still dumb.
When she got there, he was sitting on the porch on a broad, dark, wooden rocker that she’d noticed out of the corner of her eye each of the few times she’d walked past his house. The bench, long enough for three or four, was suspended from chains that looked as though they would understandably clank or squeak with every swing, but which surprisingly did not make the slightest sound. He rocked slowly, unconsciously, as though he had nothing on his mind. His brother was there too, sitting on a wooden chair of his own. It was made of the same wood, but his didn’t rock. His brother was a couple years younger, more her age, and, from an objective standpoint, better looking, but perhaps it was exactly those things that had made him sort of invisible to her.
Hi, she said.
Without words, before she knew it, she had ascended the four creaky wooden stairs to join them up on the porch. She found herself sitting with him on the opposite end of the rocking bench, just as if they were all good friends visiting on a warm, sunny afternoon, drinking lemonade and talking warm, sunny talk in familiar tones. But it wasn’t warm and sunny, it was dark. It was not afternoon, it was night. And not a star was to be seen through the clouds, which menaced a downpour, and nobody was talking because nobody was familiar.
She tried to engage him on any number of topics from school to what he liked to do in his spare time. She tried to ask in a way that seemed relaxed and unaffected, but the slight tremor in her voice gave her away, disclosing her nervousness at saying more than one word to him for the very first time in her life. His answers were short. Not abrupt. Just short.
There were three reasons for this.
One was that he really was a person of few words. Another was that no one, since the day he was born, had ever tried to find out anything about him by simply asking. The third reason was that, unlike her, he had never stood in front of a mirror, pretending to be someone famous who everyone was just dying to know about, fielding all kinds of questions. That sort of person would be ready for anything. No, he didn’t have the kind of imagination she had. He’d had no reason to. So, his unrehearsed answers were short.
But when he looked at her, his eyes sparkled in the dull luminosity of the streetlight, and the half-smile on his face told both himself and her that he didn’t really mind all the questions. That, in fact, he quite liked them.
All the while, his brother sat nearby and said nothing. It was as though they were the adults, and he was the child, and the best he could hope for was to be allowed to stay up and listen and not be sent to bed.
With every answer and every passing moment, she felt more and more comfortable with him on that hard, rocking bench. And although he’d never really taken any notice of her before, he felt pretty cosy with her, too. It was as though someone had been weaving a blanket over the two of them as they talked.
Thunder rumbled and crooked lines of lightning hung in the sky just a split-second longer than they should have, making them both, very naturally, fall silent. They loved the spectacle and, in a way, sort of forgot about one another as each watched the sky and listened.
Then the rain started. With big, heavy drops. It was practically being poured out of the sky.
The sound of the downpour alerted her to the fact that she didn’t have an umbrella with her, and that practical thought began to eat its way through their cosy, imaginary blanket leaving holes edged with teeth marks.
Suddenly, she noticed a shape on the path.
Mama wants you home.
It was her brother. He looked sad, lonely, tired and worried as the rain attacked his umbrella.
I’ve got to go, was all she said.
There was no reason to stay. Their cosy blanket had been dissolved.
As the brother and sister walked away side by side in the rain, the boy stood on the porch following them with his eyes while they slowly grew fainter and finally got lost among the raindrops.
I’ll deal with you in the morning, was all Mama said when they got home.
This was better than anything she could have expected! Usually, Mama went crazy over far less than this, but maybe she just wanted to hold on to the joy of the evening a little longer.
So, just this once, without either knowing it, mother and daughter shared something in common.
WINNING STORY 360 FLASH FICTION CATEGORY
The Asymmetry of Truth
Sam Austrums
At first they paid Daniel for remembering. The company had discovered that machines, while prolific, were poor at the small accidents by which a life declares itself real. They required the damp wool of a school coat steaming beside a radiator, the chipped rim of a breakfast cup, the pause before a father answered a question he would rather not hear.
Daniel sold them a Tuesday morning, 1998. His father stood at the basin, bare to the waist, striking his razor against the enamel while the radio murmured behind a veil of steam. Daniel, eleven and late for school, lingered in the doorway.
'Never hurry what is sharp,' his father said.
For this, they paid seventy eight pounds and sixty pence.
In time, Daniel's employment altered. He no longer supplied memories but judged those contrived by the machine. Was the grief too eloquent? Would a child notice the stain on the ceiling? Had the silence lasted long enough? He corrected such matters until the inventions acquired the asymmetry of truth.
Presently, there was less work. The machine had become accomplished. It had learned the untidiness by which people recognise themselves, and required no further correction.
Some years afterwards, when his father was dead, Daniel found that the voice had gone first. The face remained, as faces do in photographs, but the sentence at the basin had worn thin through handling, and he could not now remember the shape his father’s voice had lent it.
By then the company no longer purchased memories. It sold them.
For twenty-four pounds ninety-nine, Daniel ordered an hour of remembered childhood: FATHER, RESERVED, LOVING, NORTHERN. The room darkened. Steam flowered upon a mirror. A man raised a razor and struck it twice against enamel.
'Never hurry what is sharp.'
Daniel removed the headset.
In an old contract he found the Tuesday morning reduced to a clause: licensed in perpetuity for training, adaptation and derivative use. He read it twice.
That the machine had remembered his father was not what troubled him. In the silence afterwards, Daniel could no longer tell whether he did.
He thought of the £78.60. At first they paid Daniel for remembering.
HIGHLY COMMENDED STORY 360 FLASH FICTION CATEGORY
House Rules
Lana Dove
By the time the kettle clicks off, they’re quiet. I don't turn around straight away; there's a kindness in not watching, though I've stopped being sure who it's for anymore. I've asked myself more times than I can count, and I still don’t have an answer.
The work is always the same. Someone else. Another kitchen. A different hand of cards, dealt but never finished.
I deal them seven cards and walk them through the rules of Gin Rummy. Sets or runs, three or more.
Discard what you don't need. Draw what you do. The rules are simple; that's what matters.
I square the deck twice before I cut it. An old tic I've never quite tried to lose.
They ask what happens if they change their mind partway through, the same question they asked months ago, back when I was doing their shopping and managing their medication. We’d just continue playing cards, I tell them now, same as then. That's the point of asking twice, the interview, the folder, the six-month wait. They nod, satisfied with the answer, and pick up their cards.
​
I take their hand, cold at the fingers already, warm still in the palm, and press the cup into it. Milk first, the way they like it. I've added what the doctor left without ceremony. Drink it before it goes cold, I tell them. They do, frowning at their cards, and saying something about the taste we both let go unanswered.
We play two hands. There’s a brief catch in my throat. Is it grief? I'm not sure care and grief feel all that different, in the end. They laugh at my terrible luck with the draw pile, and I let myself enjoy the moment.
Another? I ask, reaching for their cup, though we both know there won't be one. They shake their head, laying down a run to be proud of. They say they’re glad it's me here, and not a stranger. I fill the kettle anyway, more from habit than need, and stand with my back to them while it works towards the boil, seven cards still face down on the table between us.