Honorable Mention – Flash 405, February 2025: “Anchor”
Fiction
The mothers told your mother that you are a bad influence. They smell the smoke on your pleather jacket. They found your cigarette butts on the nature trail behind our church after the Sunday service, wedged between the slats of the small wooden bridge erected by the boy scouts over the brook. I try to tell my mother that you have no influence at all. How can you? You’re quiet. Each Sunday, you linger in the back of the sanctuary, as if you don’t want to be noticed, and yet, somehow, they always notice you. Notice us.
I tell the mothers that we are just friends. Best friends. They don’t believe me. They saw us coming out of the woods, my hair all mussed, dead oak leaves clinging to your flannel. They don’t get it, because they know I’m a good Christian girl, but they think you will corrupt me. They don’t understand that I’m trying to teach you something better than drugs: that if you lie on your back on the bridge and just focus on the sky’s bright blue slashed by sharp sticks, everything else will fade away. They don’t understand that it’s my sanctuary, that it’s where I worship.
You don’t understand, either. You think I’m stupid. Sheltered is the word you use, but the connotation is the same.
From that bridge, with the sky caged in by oaks and maples and other trees I never learned how to identify, I believe that I will change you. You offer me a cigarette, and I say no, starting on the same rant. We’re young, our bodies are temples, my grandpa died of lung cancer, on and on. I believe that you will be better. I believe that I love you, and that you love me, and there are no ifs, ands, or sex about it. I breathe in the smoke you exhale, your face just inches from mine. I love the smell.
Judge’s Comments:
I was immediately sucked into this piece from the first sentence. I’m so fascinated by these characters, the complexity and ambiguity of this relationship between two young people from seemingly different worlds.
Abigail Mills (she/they) is a writer born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia. She is an MFA fiction student at George Mason University, where she specializes in realistic fiction focused on interpersonal relationships explored through voice-driven prose. Her work has appeared in Santa Clara Review and Volition.
Photo by Emil Karlsen