Winner of the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize 2025
*
Pick, in woolly hat and donkey jacket, works in the quarry, breaks stone. White-faced, lugubrious, red-eyed, he comes into our bar Friday nights after his shift.
Tonight, he’s half an hour late.
As soon as he comes in, I pull him a pint of Bulmer’s Draught, wait for the clank of coins on the wooden counter, the grunt of thanks.
It takes him a while to thaw.
“Well, Pick are you heading into town tomorrow?” I wipe the space in front of him, referring to his weekly habit of scouring the second-hand shops, the record stores.
“Aye. Will do.”
“You should be running a stall. You could sell LPs and books and those badges you wear.”
This is normally Pick’s cue. To talk about Smoke on the Waterby Deep Purple. Or Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix. Or Bruce Springsteen’s Because the Night, sung by Patti Smith. Or Cat Stevens’ The First Cut is the Deepest.
Tonight, he shrugs. Puts down his drink. Glances at the grouse in the glass above me, the bottles of vintage Redbreast whiskey, the calendar on the wall.
I head down the bar. A few minutes later, I see the black velvety patch on the back of his donkey jacket as he leaves. I wonder will he be back for a second pint. Or his microwaved cottage pie and chips.
*
Rosemary was the name of the girl who went missing. Rosemary Jameson. No relation to the whiskey distillers but a young woman due to start Teacher Training College in September. Pick knew her, on account of her working in Webb’s Hardware Store. A customer confirmed that Pick was in there a few days before the disappearance. Blathering on about Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, by Dexys Midnight Runners. It had been released that July.
It was strange Pick refused to lead the search. He was familiar with every excavation and pit for miles around. Forest paths and winding tracts. Lakesides, grottos, dumps. Blind spots behind clumps of trees. He’d grapple with stone, sand, riprap, gravel, slate. Appreciated how nature was constructed. How it fell apart.
“There’s nothing connecting Pick to that girl’s disappearance,” I’d say to the locals. “He was just fond of her that’s all.” And I’d wipe the counter clean and pull pints.
One night, Rosemary’s brothers grabbed Pick outside. Pressed him against the wall, twisted his arm behind his back. Said things, threatened more. I saw his face smudged against a pane of glass. I saw the whorls of hair, the creased white skin, the crooked monkey hat. A creature crossed between anemone and amoeba, trapped in glass.
I brought him in, poured a brandy. “The boys are frustrated,” I assured him. “It’ll soon pass.”
But it hasn’t. Tiny questions, the soul beat within the chorus of our lives, remain.
***
David O’Dwyer lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He is a graduate of Italian Language and Literature and completed the MFA in Creative Writing in University College Dublin in 2016. His stories have featured in various competitions including the Fish Short Story Prize, the Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition, the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition, the TSS Publishing. Spring Competition (runner up, 2018), Epoque Press and Reflex Flash Fiction. David’s short story ‘Stale Peaches’, was published in Leaving, Award Winning Short Stories by Hammond House Publishing, in 2018.