We’re pleased to announce the winner of the June WWWC: Maureen Alsop! Maureen’s response to the prompt ‘heroes and villains’ is an experimental and abstract tale of love, loss and grief.

Read Maureen’s winning entry, ‘Heroes and Villains’, below.

She was still in my mind. This energy. She was an energy. A physical strain drew me. To name the pain is to name the small acts of possession. I ran my finger down her sternum in the dark. It was a sexual wounding. The repetitions removed themselves, the wounds within the wounds, like words which become rhythmic.

He’d tracked her for months.

Not safe, she watched, him – her gaze was love’s first offence. The French blue walls, his eyes, a lichen carpet beneath the archway.

The clamp closing between contractions, followed by a raw incision. Scissoring a nerve, sutures, a half stitch, a basket weave, bobbins, bucks point, and closed pin kissed the last knife.

The laced blue gown a dream but once in this world. The ocean – and a few fruit trees, leathern by summer.

As she remembered, she remembered his hand darkening, the touch, the sound of graphite.

As she lowered the dead into place — there is no other cultivation, the bloodroot failed, salve upon the tongue of his small life. 

‡

What you never meant to say fell to the open river. Sometimes you became someone you recognised.

We die together with our words. The light going out, the evening a spell. No, think again ghost, something sweeter, a gateway at the edge of the aquifer.

With precision the barn closes its door to the wind and the whaler horses fade.

He was one of the dead who would not wait. He didn’t understand. That night at the pub she wrote on the napkin: It’s not a disease that makes us exist in two dimensions

Before the war, there was the scent of war. There was a third lung filled with decay, filled with sparrow’s wings. The sea bird’s disappearance was a premonition that shadowed the channel. Naval ships loomed like new cities on the horizon.

You said it would hit me, the weapon of the mind, a slowing of breath.

You’d always kept things hidden from others. Those things you were trying to control.

There was a cue. The radio made us dizzy.

I was of ordinary worth but couldn’t contain my need.

Your skin was sore when you walked through the alders. The skin of a ghost disappearing in angles.

You arrive slowly forward, and you would like to turn back.

I know where you live, my little ravening, a dark speck in the imagination. You left no short passage through my grief.

The plain’s anatomy shifted. From a marked location: unexplained bombs. The horizon is a slender entrail streaked with winter light. It is mid-autumn. A soldier sobs in the trench as the tanks move past. Graven, his horse’s forelegs splintered, and she lay a mongrel heap at the top of the earth’s fold. The sun fell the first day after the war. Neither peace nor loneliness was buried beneath the earth. We would start from what rescue held in us. I wanted to leave, to follow the river, and return to the small house. I wanted to measure what remained to measure us. There was a sodden forest half a mile beyond the city from where you came, where the orchard grasses bent into the patch of green. The horses were gone and a few cows, like a vow, lingering in the open mud. I didn’t say your name with softness I didn’t say your name. Blossoms became their figures in the open rain.

I lost my family in the raid. I never declared my injury. In atonement, consciousness would be observed.

Our limits, visible now, the canyon’s imperfection – their bodies which lay in the glen past the grinding stone. You saved my love against artillery – spare the massacre, forget the tower at the fort – let’s say we travelled south where the snow splintered the river and our horses froze deep in mud.

Let’s say that’s where things ended.

‡

I’d taken to the small house, to the williwaw, to the Christmas lagoon. But the sun didn’t track well on the horizon. A hair tangled the page. A bracken around the notebook hardened. Our mark making was a loose order. I thought of it quite often. I thought of the hard line we rode. I thought of the fourth layer. I turned the paper over. I crossed out the dun-coloured grass, the hawthorns, the ibis. His margin held my margin. One inaudible pattern calls to the other. Our arms, spokes of a wheel, tip our fingers into curves and ragged dashes; into vaporous sparrows and arrows and scrawls. The earth spins on in solitude. A line appears. It bends as I move through it. It leaves. He leaves. I still speak to him often. He says the people of my city are immortal. He says ash by ash, the old language becomes the first.

In dreams he came to me the night after it happened. When I say it happened, it was less than an accident.

That night I followed the scarred trail where the horse stripped the timothy and quack grass. I found square lettering in the clearing where fingers turned once pages. I stood and watched as if leaning against a fourth doorway. Pausing, I heard carriages carried away, a series of trees’ thud under a locking axe. I held a need to name the horses. A warmth greased their body and glass walls enclosed the pasture. The pasture fills with smoke. You disappear into a photograph of fire. It was in my sleep you returned.

If you love a certain shadow, please love mine.