Glasgow Student Short Story Prize 2009

Judged by A.L. Kennedy
Edited by Elisabeth Ingram, Rebecca CF Bradburd and Jose Velazquez

4 am

Kimberly closes her eyes and feels them sting with relief. She covers her face with her hands to shut out the creeping light of the new day. She should have gone home hours ago. Under the standing lamp a conversation is drawing out into maudlin nonsense. The atmospheric fairy lights are being undermined by a tepid, blue lack of darkness that reveals the floor to be strewn with cashew nuts and the scraps of labels torn off beer bottles.

    Once again, Mrs ex-Sutherland cannot sleep, and it's time to give up trying. The colours of her curtains tell her this. She has been watching them and orange night has given over to a blue that you might find in a checked shirt. She takes her place in the chair in the sitting room. She turns on the 24hr news and blows ripples across her hot cup of tea. The voice of the weatherman blurs the edges of her wakefulness.

    The chill air is soothing like ice on a bruise. As Kimberly steps out into it, she feels the stupor of the night evaporate. She is young; her pace is vibrant. She imagines herself in a Clerks advert: love every step. Passing over the bridge, trees flourish upwards in a rift through rows of blocks of flats. She turns into Otago St.  In this blank, unusable time, the walls and curbs that she has walked past and past and past return to her vapours of those pasts, the familiar feelings recalled in dreams. Bricks and stones mark out indistinguishable points of memory. Now they absorb the mood of her glances as she passes, and they hold it, waiting for the next, and the next, passing. She is aware of her life accumulating. There is a sweet smell of rain.

    Mrs ex-Sutherland mutes the television. The objects in the room are defining themselves with the recent familiarity of rented furniture. The light is whitening. She can see the crack she made in the glass vase that isn't hers. The dead silence of the city dawn leaves her bare.

    It startles Kimberly to see a man standing on the corner of Otago Lane. She flinches, as you do when you think you catch a face in a dark pane of glass, or when, turning, you see first a hunched figure and then that it is a bundle of clothes. But this is just a man and she walks on.

    Jerked back she gasps, feeling body behind her, a hand, pressure on her throat. There is the smell, tangy-sweet, of cider. Her arms pull air. She twists violently, breaks free, staggers backwards with her momentum, draws breath as she sees the lunge towards her. A scream tears out from her gut where the knife enters, at the point of waking. She falls down into sleep.

    Mrs ex-Sutherland looks up from her thoughts. She heard a noise. Did she? It tightened in her chest--a scream. Was it? She goes to the window. The street below her is empty. She listens. Could you repeat that please? She listens for a confirmation, an explanation. Nothing.

    From the alleyway across the street a city fox trots out, pauses, listening, watching. She can see the twitch of its ears. It is a familiar sight to her by now, but she watches intently. She has never before seen the russet colour of one. This is the fox's last waking hour. The unravelling colours are telling it to go home. It trots along, pauses, sniffs in the gutter. It trots along, pauses, the drone of a bin lorry. Mrs ex-Sutherland presses her face to the glass. She leans over to keep her eyes on the fox. It trots out of her frame of vision.