{"id":6346,"date":"2024-11-14T17:53:19","date_gmt":"2024-11-14T07:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=6346"},"modified":"2024-11-14T17:53:19","modified_gmt":"2024-11-14T07:23:19","slug":"announcement-susan-hobson-wins-the-october-wwwc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2024\/11\/announcement-susan-hobson-wins-the-october-wwwc\/","title":{"rendered":"ANNOUNCEMENT: Susan Hobson wins the October WWWC!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We’re pleased to announce the winner of the October WWWC: Susan Hobson. Responding to the prompt ‘one long, lost weekend’, Susan’s eponymous short story is a curious little tale of guilt and loss.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Read her winning entry below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

 One Long, Lost Weekend <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The weekend was over. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gary sat on the couch, hunched over his whisky glass. The police had gone, scornful incredulity barely reined in. He couldn\u2019t blame them. He found it hard to believe himself, and he had been in the middle of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He picked up the bottle, poured more into the glass. Watched his hand shaking. He\u2019d never drunk so much as he had this weekend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vaguely, he remembered plans he had made. A long weekend, no work for three days \u2013 a great time to catch up with his mates, unwind, relax. Only\u2026 <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Another memory barged past that one. The row. Emmie yelling at him, calling him selfish again<\/em>, packing up the children in the car, driving off. He was pretty sure he rang her afterwards, but she blocked his calls. He tried ringing round her friends, family, even her mother, but none of them had seen her. Probably just as well, at that point. He was annoyed with her. Actually, he was angry, even furious. Incandescent. How many times had he taken his turn at looking after the kids so she could go and do whatever she wanted to do? She wasn\u2019t being fair. He hated unfairness.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, he went with his plans. She\u2019d be back, when she calmed down. In the meantime, he wasn\u2019t going to waste his weekend, was he? Funny how little he could remember about the rest of the day. There was a bar involved, he was pretty sure about that. Maybe several. There was a\u00a0girl, too, he thought, dyed hair, cat-eyes. He couldn\u2019t help being attractive. Anyway, he only flirted. He was positive about that, absolutely positive. Even though he could barely remember her \u2013 what was her name? Shelley? Susie? No, it had gone. Names weren\u2019t that important, after all.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be honest, Saturday was a blur. These things happen. To be even more honest, Sunday was not much better. He knew he had slept like the dead, and then woken up on the couch still feeling like death, with the hangover from hell. And he knew he had thrown up, because despite his best efforts, the smell still lingered.\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Actually, he had been quite glad that the kids weren\u2019t around to witness his moment of weakness. A man likes to feel that his children look up to him. And they would have said \u2026 well, he\u2019s not sure what they would have said. Dom, the scruffy, shaggy one, never spoke to him much anyway. Probably would have escaped to his room to play on his computer. Or his PlayStation \u2013 or was it an Xbox? Couldn\u2019t remember exactly what devices Dom had at the moment, even though he had paid for a succession of them. Couldn\u2019t have his kids going without, after all. And Allie \u2013 what was she, ten? eleven? \u2013 she was forever babbling away to her mother, but he couldn\u2019t imagine her talking to him if she had seen him like that. She would have just looked at him, and somehow that would have been worse. He would get them both really nice presents \u2013 that would fix it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, he didn\u2019t remember much about Sunday either. Only that the house was empty. Too empty. All the times he had wished the house could be quiet, so he could think, and then, when it was quiet, he found his head was empty too. Must have been the booze the night before. Only one cure for that. That\u2019s when he opened another bottle of whisky. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was something wrong with the house. He kind of noticed it on Sunday, or maybe he only became aware of it today (Monday \u2013 he was sure it was Monday already), or maybe he was just confused. No, he definitely started seeing it yesterday, because he remembered now, he remembered settling on the couch to watch the sport, glass in hand. Only, no matter how he clicked on the remote, he couldn\u2019t find any sport. Or a movie. All the channels except for the kids channels and the nature programs seemed to have disappeared. Weird.\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There were a load of other things that had vanished, too. Had Emmie sneaked back in and cleared things out, taken them away with her? Only, it wasn\u2019t her things that had gone. Her spare keys were still in the bowl by the door, but his keys were missing. Photos displayed on the walls had been moved around, and though all the pictures of Dom and Allie that Emmie had taken were still there, the few photos he had taken were all gone. So was the wedding photo. The kids\u2019 bedrooms were untouched \u2013 did Dom really keep his room in this state? \u2013 but his bedroom (his and Emmie\u2019s) had been \u2026 rearranged.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her clothes were still hanging in the wardrobe but his had disappeared. The bed was still there but the sheets \u2013 the ones they had slept in last week \u2013 had been stripped. There was no sign of them. He’d even checked the laundry basket, and then the washing machine and the dryer (it took a while to work out how to open that). And there weren\u2019t any clean sheets in the cupboard either, not to fit his bed. In the end, he spent another night on the couch.\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This morning, he had tried contacting her again, but no answer, and again he drew a blank with her friends and family. He wasn\u2019t even sure what some of her friends\u2019 numbers were. He started to imagine her caught up in some traffic accident, in hospital \u2013 maybe worse \u2026 He called the police. Two officers, a man and a woman, turned up at his door. He told them his wife\u00a0had gone off and that he was worried for her safety, and his children’s. He told them she (or some persons unknown, but obviously it had to be her) had broken in and removed things, random things that belonged in the house. Belonged to him. He showed them a list \u2013 quite a long one by now. No, there was no sign of a break-in. Yes, she had left in response to a row. No, there was no evidence that she had wilfully damaged anything that didn\u2019t belong to her.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was when he tried to explain about the sheets and the missing TV channels that the officers exchanged glances and told him they\u2019d be in touch if there was any news. Then they left, taking one last look at the whisky bottle. He wondered if they had smelt it on his breath. <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Gary sat on the couch, hunched over his whisky glass. The weekend was over. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re pleased to announce the winner of the October WWWC: Susan Hobson. Responding to the prompt ‘one long, lost weekend’, Susan’s eponymous short story is a curious little tale of guilt and loss. Read her winning entry below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[942],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wwwc"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-1Em","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6346"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6348,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6346\/revisions\/6348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}