Honorable Mention – Flash 405, June 2025: “Illumination”
Fiction
Arthur says: ‘You use too many exclamation marks.’ He has a scholar’s melancholy and often groans aloud. Putting my arms around his neck, I kiss his bald spot and finger-comb his magnificent grey beard, flecked with white like the North Sea in January. Wonder have I married my dad?
Rooks circle woods, their harsh voices borne to us by the wind. Go, go! But go where? Browsing the royal library, I discover a huge leatherbound volume with GUINEVERE printed in gold on the spine. A book about me! ‘Written long before you were born,’ says Arthur. ‘Don’t even try to decipher its runes.’ I heave the book open, but its pages crumble into fragments, falling in showers of gilded dust. Arthur sighs. ‘Fetch a dustpan and brush.’ However! One of the Future Chroniclers mistakenly adds me to their Signal group (I know, right?) and thence I access bits of insider info, e.g. I’m to be accused of witchcraft and BOUND TO THE STAKE.
Excited squeak betrays my presence in the group. Consternation, concern. ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell them, ‘I’m looking forward to it. I’ll go up in a whoosh!’
I want something real. A touch of flame.
Them: ‘We’re sticking to the original version. Lancelot gallops in and rescues you.’
‘Who?’
Schoolboy sniggers and snorts. Turns out they used AI for the love scenes.
Lance is taking me to the New World to be an online influencer. Scatter petals over everything. Interview other semi-celebrities. ‘You can keep chickens.’
‘Hens, do you mean? The live adult female birds? As opposed to shrinkwrapped corpses in supermarket freezer cabinets?’
‘Chickens,’ he insists.
Hmm.
Do Lance and I have anything in common? ‘What sort of books do you like?’ I ask. He replies: ‘We’re not readers, we’re characters in someone else’s plot.’ At first I’m charmed by this meta-philosophical Shakespearean idea. But no, he means it literally. ‘Dreamed up, loved
up,’ he says, kissing me. ‘We’ll have loads of kids.’
Me, doubtfully: ‘I don’t think Guinevere was ever a mum.’
Lance: ‘She will be, haha.’
‘Haha’ I echo. No exclamation mark.
Judge’s Comments:
This is a lot of fun! I love the idea of a kind of weird, very meta, retelling of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot! (And I am definitely using exclamation marks!)
Frances Gapper’s work has been published in four Best Microfiction anthologies and lit mags including Your Impossible Voice, trampset, Splonk, Southword, Wigleaf, The Forge, Atlas and Alice, 100 Word Story, Literary Namjooning, and Trash Cat. She lives in the U.K’.s Black Country region.
Photo by Wikimedia Commons