This is a close reading of ‘Pick’ by David O’Dwyer which won the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize 2025. Reading the winning Flash Ficiton before this essay is advised.
As soon as I read David O’Dwyer’s ‘Pick’ I knew it was a winner. I love so much about this dark, brooding, sucker-punch Flash Fiction. The title has suggestions of picking things up, picking locks, picking at a scab. Taking what’s ours and what isn’t. And here, it’s the name of the main character – the lonesome man who ‘works in the quarry’ (pickaxe also springs to mind). It might be a family name or perhaps a nickname – the kind given among people who are close, familiar – and this sense of community that borders on claustraphobic, permeates the entire Flash.
O’Dwyer paints Pick swiftly: ‘woolly hat and donkey jacket’ – what a great detail; it’s cold outside and we have a sense of him being a buttoned-up type. We learn he ‘works in a quarry, breaks stone’ – the absence of the conjunction here simplifies the sentences, gives it a conversational tone that’s to the point, reflecting the kind of men who work and live in the area. Pick is ‘white-faced, lugubrious, red-eyed’ with the colours suggestive of a haunted, intense, sinister appearance. ‘Lugubrious’ is a bit of a mouthful, seems somewhat unexpected, but it evokes a narrator who’s a reader, a thinker, someone who puzzles over the meanings of things – it sets him slightly apart as he observes Pick entering ‘our bar’ after his Friday shift. The possessive adjective here is also perfect – a sense of collective ownership and again, that feel of regular routines, of community, of small-town life. A certain possessiveness.
All this, and we’re only two sentences along.
In the second paragraph, we learn Pick is half an hour late (people really do know one another around here), which creates a slight unease. Why’s he late? What’s going on? The narrator pulls him a beer, receives a ‘grunt of thanks’. There’s tension here – which way are we being led? Is Pick the strong-but-silent type? Or the quiet man who resents being bothered? What’s going on? We’re told Pick ‘takes a while to thaw’ offering us the promise of an answer, while reinforcing that sense he is, perhaps, a bit of a loner, someone who keeps to himself. Nonetheless, the narrator knows him, knows his drink (Bulmer’s Draught), and there’s that polite ‘thanks’ – so perhaps things are okay?
When the barman offers Pick a bit of friendly banter – about charity shop hunting and the LPs and badges he likes to collect – it seems that this is the direction we’re heading in. It’s a story, we might be thinking, of middle-aged loneliness. Masculinity and the challenges of finding connection. But… something is slightly off – Pick doesn’t take the cue, doesn’t reply to the narrator’s questions, just ‘shrugs’. Again, the ground we’re on is just that little bit unsteady, and this uncharacteristic behaviour nicely links with that opening hook about his late arrival.
Eventually, the narrator watches Pick leave the bar, and wonders if he’ll be back for another drink or ‘his microwaved cottage pie and chips.’ This last image, of a lonely man exiting the bar by himself, is a pretty depressing image and it’s hard, on a first reading, not to feel the rise of sympathy. But then, in a brilliant break, timed perfectly by O’Dwyer, we’re introduced to an entirely new character and narrative angle – a sentence that is simple and dark and devastating: ‘Rosemary was the name of the girl that went missing.’
Shit.
We’re given particulars. She was about to start Teacher Training; was known to Pick because she’d worked at ‘Webb’s Hardware Store’. He’d been spotted in the shop a few days before Rosemary’s disappearance.
And at this point, the bartender offers his first judgement: ‘It was strange Pick refused to lead the search’ because he knows the area intimately. What follows is an absolutely beautiful paragraph that concludes with the striking observation that Pick ‘appreciated how nature was constructed. How it fell apart.’ The sudden lyricism of this paragraph, combined with Pick’s deep knowledge makes him a more sympathetic character – and yet his eccentricities now rub painfully against the terrible knowledge of the missing young woman and the hint of suspicion now placed on Pick. Are we being confronted with a murdering oddball? (And is there not something slightly unsettling about his understanding of how nature ‘falls apart’? ) The ground, as ever in this flash, keeps shifting.
And now the barman admits that he’s often telling locals that there’s ‘nothing connecting’ Rosemary and Pick. He was ‘just fonder of her’. By now, we’ve come to trust our narrator. He seems to care about his patrons, is friendly, tells a good story, knows what lugubrious means. Maybe, then, it’s nothing? Maybe Pick is innocent.
When Rosemary’s brothers grab Pick outside the bar, twist his arm around his back and threaten him, the narrator ‘sees his face smudged against a pane of glass.’ What a brilliant (but awful) description, that verb working so hard to elicit pain and horror. He described Pick as ‘a creature crossed between an anemone and amoeba, trapped in glass’ and again, our sympathy rises. Is this not, perhaps, a witch hunt? Brothers lashing out? An attempt to lay the blame on the outcast, this Caliban-like man?
The bartender brings him in. Pour him a brandy. Things calm. He tells Pick that the ill will, the suspicion, will pass. The land, beneath the reader’s feet seems to steady. Things seem okay, the dust settled – until, that is, the final line:
‘But it hasn’t. Tiny questions, the soul beat within the chorus of our lives, remain.’
What an ending. It all comes crashing back. The worry, the doubt. The fact this man can never be trusted, can never be known. It’s awful. t’s unfair, perhaps. But there’s a daughter, a sister gone missing. And yes there’s nothing connecting them, and it’s a wild, dangerous place out there around the quarry… But who can say? Who knows what really happened?
Tiny questions, indeed. And how beautifully, poetically this appalling truth is expressed.
‘Pick’ is a phenomenal Flash Fiction – I was drawn into this world immediately, hooked by the narration, the sense of place and character. I was left deeply left unsettled as minor tremors became a thunderous earthquake; there’s no stable ground in this Flash.
The stakes are as high as they can be … with themes of culpability, friendship and persecution. O’Dwyer’s work is an incredibly haunting, unsettling piece of writing that also contains tremendous poetry… it’s only 471 words but it’s an entire world – and that is exactly what the very best Flash Fiction conjures.
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Rupert Dastur is the founding editor of TSS Publishing. His own work has appeared in a variety of placed online and in print. His debut, Cloudless, was published by Penguin Random Hsoue in February 2025.