by Laila Amado
1st Place Winner – Flash 405, February 2025: “Anchor”
Fiction
Back on Earth, your body becomes a jellyfish. Soft and undulating, it no longer knows how to walk. I remember how you used to stand upright, back rigid, shoulders straight; everyone envied the proud angle of your chin. Now it’s all gone. You cling to the walls, dragging this shapeless body along like an alien appendage, but it sinks under the pull of gravitational force, spills all over the floor.
Who knew that something so pliant can be so resistant? Your body refuses to follow where you push it to go.
When night drops, gravity finally lets you go. You rise up, up, up, all the way to the ceiling. I tie a silk ribbon around your wrist so that you don’t float away, leaving me for good. In the light of unblinking stars, you hover over our bed, cold and distant like the Moon.
Judge’s Comments:
I love the dreaminess of this piece. There is a calm rhythm to it, but it also has this melancholy. I see in it a portrayal of that experience of looking at someone and mourning who they used to be.
Laila Amado writes in her second language, has recently exchanged her fourth country of residence for the fifth, and can now be found staring at the North Sea instead of the Mediterranean. The sea, occasionally, stares back. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best Small Fictions 2022, Best Microfiction 2024, Lost Balloon, Cheap Pop, Milk Candy Review, Necessary Fiction, and other publications.
Photo by Vinay Tryambake