‘Jessica’ SHORT FICTION CONTEST RUNNER-UP

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Jessica

One of the first books I remember was 1000 Fun and Unbelievable Facts—an oversized affair whose letters lurched off its cover, primed to spill into my doughy palms. Jessica and I spent afternoons tracing the headings with sea-foam-soft fingers, sounding out the impossible four-syllable words. Moths lack stomachs, and thus mostly drink liquids like nectar. An African elephant only has four teeth. Goldfish may eat each other when under stress.

***​

Now, my mother and I bury Jessica on the riverbank. We should have done it on Sunday, right after we killed her, but it was 10 p.m. and neither of us trusted the dark. So instead, we covered her with a towel, left our clothes to soak in cold water and went to sleep.

My mother had first suggested floating her down the river bend for the fish to eat, but I thought that was disrespectful as fuck, and we were family. Jesus Christ. She was your child.

So now we haul her body into the mist-drenched morning and shovel the bank until we can roll her in.

When we killed her, my mother said that she had stopped being Jessica long ago, and it’s not murder if the victim isn’t technically “alive.” And I told her that morality shouldn’t skirt around technicalities.​

I drag Jessica by her clammy hands, legs streaking through the mud. Her mouth is frozen open in a gash, and I imagine her hunger accumulating against her tongue, exploding between her lips and leaving her behind. The back of my throat burns.

I lay her in the hole and pick up the shovel with my raw icicle fingers. Jessica stares up at me, eyes blank, blood a black crust on her shirt. We were always identical. The same widow’s peak and gently sloping nose, twin sets of braids brushing our backs. Jessica-and-Jennifer. We were the other’s reflection. When we were little, we dressed the same to confuse our mother. In the end, she stopped calling us by name and directed her words to whoever was in the room. You, help me wash the dishes. You, take your shoes off before entering the house.

I pour dirt over Jessica’s face, our face, first.

* * *

People online say it’s a rot from the inside, decaying you until you crave flesh to fill the emptiness left behind. I say it doesn’t matter anyway. This is what matters: Jessica’s body buckled into itself as she wasted away organs-first, emaciated throat swallowing her pulse, mouth opening and closing like a fish’s gills out of water. Jessica ate half our goldfish and spit their bones outside my bedroom door so I saw them when I woke. Jessica reached for my arm across the dinner table and tried to take a bite.

She was not the first like this. The disease originated in the countryside, spread to the city, and exploded from there. Children ate their parents. Parents ate their children. Businesses shut down, and people quarantined inside their homes, leaving only to steal from whatever stores had more stock than bloodstains on the floor.

This was my mother’s job now— leaving three times a week to trawl the abandoned shopping centers, running her fingers down the empty shelves, tiles echoing below her feet. Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have let her go alone. Before Jessica shriveled into a shell. Before I wrestled her down as our mother slit her throat with a kitchen knife, blood seeping tar-thick out of the wound— long-stagnant in its veins. This was because in April, after a trip to Costco, I had found our mother hiding a pack of ham in a floorboard under her bed. I shoved her aside and shook her shoulders until they drained bloodless in my fists, yelling that you can’t just hoard all the food, goddammit. What about me? What about us? Just stay home next time. I’ll split the portions. My God.

From then, until Jessica got sick, she and I made grocery runs. We had one bike, so each trip we traded pedaling and sitting on the back, knees cramped, bony arms around the other’s waist. Whoever was on the back brought the backpack for carrying food. In the earlier weeks, it bulged with soup cans and crushed bags of chips, zippers straining over the Double Stuffed Oreos Jessica loved. By June, it hung around our shoulders like a husk of skin.

On one of our last trips, we lingered in the Walmart aisle, bag on the floor, a single can of sardines in Jessica’s hands. She turned it back and forth, reading the label: WILD CAUGHT & SUSTAINABLE; 170 calories per serving; 1 serving per container. Two weeks expired, but we were long past caring.

Jessica weighed the can in her palm. “Mom never liked fish.”

“No, she didn’t.”

Jessica ran her fingernail along the can’s tab. “Eighty-five calories if we split it evenly. Eleven grams of protein each.”

 I kicked the bag down the aisle.

 The can peeled open, fish and brine permeating salt-thick through the air.

​* * *

“I think murder does something to you.” I say this to my mother as we wait inside the laundromat, our bloodied clothes spinning themselves pure. She stands against the wall, arms crossed. The blue-green fluorescents highlight the wrinkles in her face, and she looks like someone else, older and paler and thinner, her cheekbones stark against skin.

“I already told you. ‘S not murder.”

The washing machine—somehow still in service—clatters.

“You know what I mean.”

She walks to it and peers inside. 

​“I feel like she’s still watching us. Like I’ll turn a corner and she’ll be there, blood all the way down her chest.”

My mother checks the digital clock on the wall, the display frozen at 2:33 p.m. “Guess that’s guilt.”

“Do you think she still recognized us?”

My mother doesn’t look away from the clock.

* * *

Growing up, our mother left Jessica and me at home while she rushed to whatever job she was trying to keep. We had no television, and we weren’t allowed to go outside, so we spent the long afternoons roaming around the house.​

Our favorite game was hide and seek, even though the cramped apartment had few places to crawl into— few holes to fill. Still, we took turns being “It,” facing a corner and counting up to ten. Back then, danger had a countdown. A warning. Jessica always hid behind the curtains in our mother’s bedroom, but I made a show of searching each corner, turning over pans in the kitchen, cushions in the living room. The goal was never finding each other. We only delighted in the search— the rambling turns, the promise of something at the end. After picking through each corner, I’d wander into our mother’s room to see Jessica, silhouetted against white, shadow languid on the floor. I never mentioned how the light revealed her body, crouched against the wall. But she was always too vulnerable.

Once, I tried to surprise her, sneaking to the window and grabbing her through the curtain. My fists clenched around her neck as cloth closed around her head. Her mouth gasped wet against white. Her limbs pummeled blindly. I flinched back, and she tumbled out of the curtain, coughing into the floor. She pushed me in the chest.​

 “Sorry!” I shielded myself with my arms. “It was an accident! Promise I didn’t mean to.”

 She cuffed my shoulder, and I stumbled to the side, feet tangling in the rug.

 “You can get me back, okay? Okay?”

 Jessica, smiling now, shoved me into the curtain. I thudded against the wall, breath punching out from my lungs. I turned my head, and there was the ring of Jessica’s spit, translucent in the sun.

* * *

Noon beats down on us in a blast of dry heat, and I sit in front of our fish tank, watching the lone goldfish drift. Most of the ones left by Jessica had died when we ran out of fish food, and I dumped their limp bodies in the yard. Buried them like a trove of gold coins, earth swallowing the price of her decay.

The radiator wheezes in tepid gusts, and the television buzzes with static. None of the channels broadcast anymore, and even the static is spotty at best, but I like the white noise when it works. A constant background thrum. Something to focus on other than starving.

My mother leans against the wall, dangling a cigarette out the open window.

I fan the air in front of me. “That shit is gonna kill you.”

She lifts the cigarette to her lips and inhales deeply. “Better than being eaten alive.” The cherry glows like a drop of blood on skin.

I stand and fold my arms behind my back. “Did you know goldfish can cannibalize each other? When water temperatures rise too high, or when there isn’t enough food?” Maybe I should have left the fish corpses. The survivors might have lasted.​

My mother exhales out the window, and smoke curls around her upper lip like a ghost of breath. “Brutal.”

The television static fizzes out.

* * *

In the evening, I lie in the bathtub and wrap my arms around my chest. Our stock of stolen ramen ran out two days ago, and the hunger gnaws at me, corroding my ribs. I hold my breath and slide deeper into the tub. The water closes around me like a womb. I pretend I am Jessica, rotting in that riverbed, pulse gone long before my death.

I remember our mother telling us a story like that decades ago— fairies who’d snatch infants and swap them for a changeling, a copy not quite right. She had said this as she washed our hair in this bathtub, drawing pictures in the shampoo sliding down our spines.

 “You would’ve known if we were taken, right?” Jessica asked, eyes wide.​

 Our mother smiled. “You wouldn’t have been taken in the first place. I sat in that nursery and watched you every night. ”

 She’d never answered the question.

 Soap stings my eyes, but I watch my hands distort in the water. What if I caught the disease? If Jessica’s deterioration mirrored itself in me, our bodies hurtling to the same end? My mother would kill me. I know this, true enough to type in block letters and tuck between passages about elephants and moths. She might have to call a neighbor to help, but she would.

* * *

As my mother bathes, I kneel in front of the goldfish again. It bobs up and down, barely visible in the dark—a smudge of orange against blue. I press my fingers against the glass, and it swims up to me, mouth gaping into space. I open in response.

Madeline Rosales has recently won a Gold Key for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and has publications of poetry and prose with the Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Odyssey Youth Magazine, The WEIGHT Journal, and others. She works as a Senior Editor for Polyphony Lit, and as the Chief Editor for The Cardinal Review. 

‘Intergenerational’ SHORT FICTION CONTEST RUNNER-UP

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Intergenerational

It was around 2pm when we arrived, the roadworks puncturing the main road like great gouged wounds and sending us down the winding country lanes instead. “Lunchtime,” she’d said, which generally meant 12.30-1.00pm. We braced ourselves for the silence – no confrontation, never words – and almost in preparation, neither of us spoke during the final few minutes of the drive.

“I can still see your lipstick,” said Mum, glancing sidelong at me as we turned up the long driveway and the house came slowly, solemnly, into sight. “There’s wipes in the glove compartment.”

Women shouldn’t wear makeup. It’s ungodly.

Amy had bought me that lipstick. “Lover’s Kiss”, the shade was called. I, naïve and grateful, gave her my copy of Little Women in exchange, and she had to spell it out for me two weeks later as we settled on the stained sofa in her halls’ common room: “I like you, you idiot. Like like you.”

I wiped it wordlessly, the pale pink somehow more violent than blood as it smeared across the material, the scent of chemical cheapness filling the car.

“Better?”

“Better.”

God-fearing men don’t like women who wear makeup.

What about if women don’t wear it for men? What about other women?

When I was eight, I’d wandered into Mum’s bedroom and rummaged through her makeup bag.

Everyone else’s mothers wore it in abundance – the school gates were a safari of colour, birds of paradise laughing and fluffing and preening. My mum looked like a sepia photograph out of time. Even her makeup bag, when I found it at the bottom of her dressing table one afternoon (having crept stealthily, and with an enormous sense of my own narrative importance, into her bedroom) was greying.

I opened the zipper with my clumsy child hands, sticky with the sugared contents of a juice box, and silently monologued my adventure like I was the precocious heroine of some kid-friendly American movie, all dimples and Girl Scout cookies. I had eczema and hayfever and a burgeoning case of lactose intolerance; Mickey Mouse club I was not.

Similarly disappointing were the contents of the bag. It didn’t contain much at all – moisturisers and Tampax, mainly – and certainly held no glimmering, colourful secrets, nothing to suggest she secretly glammed up in front of the mirror when I was asleep. I was disappointed; I not only had a drab mum, but she didn’t even mind being drab.

Peeved and disheartened, I rummaged dispiritedly through a layer of old tissues and flicked an empty Nivea tube aside, and at the crinkly off-white bottom of the bag, found a photograph facing up at me. Big Eighties hair and double denim, and the unmistakeable stain of scarlet across smiling mouths – this couldn’t be Mummy, I thought, and I took it down to her, clasped in my clammy little hands.

“That’s not for you,” she said, and snatched it from me. She thrust a damp flannel at my face and scrubbed with a frenzied vigour at the citrus stickiness around my own lips as if it would somehow wipe the war paint from hers. I tasted sour milk and mouldy cotton fibres for hours afterwards.

We never spoke of the faded lipstick kiss on the back of the Polaroid.

We crunched up the driveway in unison, a show of military precision and political unity, Mum and me, me and Mum, the way it had always been, two gawky women with our grey eyes and straight brown hair, wrapped in our muted autumnal-hued jackets even as spring sighed and flickered and coquettishly unfurled all around us. The immaculate windows with their fresh flowers and the flurry of twittering activity at the bird table in the back garden all spoke of a cosy little house where any little girl would be lucky to have her childhood.

The door opened.

“Hello,” said Grandma, and we hugged. She was frail but steely – the grey eyes seemed to pass down the maternal line, and it felt like looking back – and forward – at myself every time we met, an Unheimlich in a pleated skirt. “How are you?”

I’m happier than I’ve ever been, Grandma. I met this girl at uni – Amy, she’s called – and we get on so well, it’s like I’ve been looking for her my whole life. She’s got green eyes, Grandma, like Grandad had, and she’s from Cornwall, like Great-Grandma, and she laughs like Mum does with that laugh that sounds like a crackle, a lovely little fireside crackle in winter.

“I’m fine, how are you?”

“Yes, fine, thank you. Hazel?”

“Yes, I’m fine too.”

Round one of conversation exhausted, she took our jackets and hung them on the hallway hooks with painful care and attention – like it mattered, like any of it mattered – and the three of us moved as one, wordlessly, to the kitchen.

The table was laid; gingham tablecloth that had seen better days but retained a quiet, pitiful pride in its shabby cleanliness. She was a woman of precision, and the salad, retrieved from her ancient fridge-freezer in time for a prompt 12.30 lunch, was wilting in much the same way as my silent resolve.

She poured tea that had cooled into cups that didn’t match the saucers. I thanked her and took a sip, and wished for sugars, sweeteners, even a splash of honey would have helped. Anything.

“Can I use your bathroom, Grandma?”

It always sounded so silly when I said it aloud – what are you, three? – but she wasn’t the sort of woman whose bathroom you just used without asking. She quavered a little before she answered, a kind of quiet wheeze escaping thin lips.

“The flush is broken in the family bathroom,” she said. There hadn’t been family there for years. The three spare bedrooms gathered dust, and I bit my tongue every time I thought of the refugees or homeless people she could have housed, if only she practiced the kind of religion she preached. “You will have to use mine, just off my bedroom.”

I’d never been in there before. The wallpaper, baby pink but yellowing at the edges, guided me on a geometric journey up the stairs and through her perfectly neat bedroom, the king size bed with its ruffle-edged satiny eiderdown a magnificent relic of days gone by. The side on which she slept looked no different to the side where Grandad had slumbered until ten years ago, the fabric unrumpled and the pillows artificially plumped. It was as if heterosexuality – sexuality of any sort – had never lived here.

The bathroom was pink too, pink and white like the marshmallow filling of the wafer biscuits at my childhood birthday parties, pink like the dresses of the Barbies she begrudgingly bought me – I conducted weddings between them in secret long before it was legal. I sat on the toilet with my skirt hitched up and pissed out a whole car journey’s worth of Fruit Shoot.

She had a dressing table just by the door to her ensuite, and as I left, closing the door behind me, I accidentally knocked a talcum powder pot onto the floor, sending it rolling beneath the chair.

Retrieving it, my sleeve caught on the handle of the lowest drawer, and it slid open with surprising ease. I looked in, of course I did – and she looked back.

There she was, my past and future self, my mother once removed, grey eyed and grey skinned in the monochrome of the Fifties. The high-waisted checked skirt suited her – I imagined it even had some colour – and the smile on her face as she hung adoringly on the arm of a bespectacled girl with ringlets had a strange sheen to it – an almost painted, glossy quality.

What about women who wear makeup for other women? What about women who wear it for themselves?

It was cold to the touch, and I flipped it over, half hoping for the perfect synchronicity of a faded lipstick kiss adorning the back of the image. There was nothing, just Grandma’s initials and those of a G.H alongside them. I wondered what had happened to G.H, who she was, what she’d said to Grandma to make that smile shine so bright.

Had they painted each other’s faces, swapped lipsticks in secret, laughed like crackling fires at private jokes the world could never steal?

Perhaps not. I always was a sucker for a sentimental story.

I replaced it and closed the drawer, then the door behind me, retreating down those rickety, faded old stairs. They were still in the kitchen, stilted meteorological small talk just about audible from the staircase. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Lover’s Kiss, applying it blindly without a mirror. I didn’t need a mirror. I didn’t need to see my reflection when two of them sat waiting for me, cowed and colourless, behind that wooden door.

“Hi Grandma,” I said, taking my seat at the gingham-draped table. “I want to tell you about my friend Amy.”

Chloe de Lullington (she/her) is an author and screenwriter based in Manchester, UK. Her debut novel, Cacoethes, a queer satirical sugar baby comedy, will be published with Northodox Press in June 2025, and she has had short fiction and poetry published in The Word's Faire, Bullshit Lit, Powders Press, and For Page & Screen Magazine. A lifelong outsider looking curiously in, she is drawn to the offbeat and eccentric, and the minutiae of peoples' lives that might mean everything - or could mean absolutely nothing at all.