7 DAY STORY WRITING CHALLENGE #10 WINNER

Prize: £500

Runners-Up:

The following writers just missed out on the top spot!

Rowan Maddock (Crime)

Katie Holloway (Dystopian)

Lydia Terry (Gothic)

Sam Bromley (Science Fiction)

Elizabeth Napier (Science Fiction)

Charlie Williamson (Romance)

Finalists:

The following writers just missed out on a runner-up position!

Magical Realism: Lily Victoria, James Hancock, Olivia Todd, Marc Revere, David Haworth, Rachael Hill, Imen Akugbe, Jack Vellum.

Historical Fiction: Jutta Rawcliffe, Caroline Ashley, Elaine Waite, Em Arata-Berkel, Stephen Patmore, Aggie Novak, Lisa Verdekal.

Science Fiction: Eden Meridia, Shilo Dawn Goodson.

Crime: Terri Mertz, Lisa H. Owens, Marie-Louise Mc Guinness, Rebecca Eastwell, Melanie Barrow, Kathryn Morris, James Rasco, Catherine Kerr.

Gothic: Lynda McMahon, J.S. Savage.

Thriller: Natalie Clark, Taylor Rae, Sam James, Felipe Orlans, Tara Tenzin.

Fantasy: Judith Wilson, Eric H Janzen, Billie-Leigh Burns, Peyton Stewart.

Surrealism: Deborah Thompson, Rowan Evans, Amelie Hood, Tamsin Williams, Irene Burt, Rosalyn Robilliard, Christy Hartman, David Klotzkin, J.C. O'Connell.

Paranormal: Jay McKenzie, Ryder Dietz, Katrina Matthews, Leslie Carlin, Hannah Underhill.

Dystopian: Lucy Goodchild.

Horror: Jinny Alexander, Jo Tain, Michelle Heimburger.

Romance: Wren Oldham, Victoria Mascord, Florie Kong Win Chang.

and the winner is…

Morgan McIntyre

TRANSMIGRATION

(SCIENCE FICTION)

Mariana Escárcega has lived many lives, and she can remember each and every one of them. She has lived through the decline of fossil fuels; through rising sea-levels and mass migrations. She has lived through wars, through peace – through poverty and excess. She knows that the green of the grass has never changed, or the way that brown eyes melt in the hot light of the sun. 

She can remember when they first discovered how to view a person’s past lives without damaging the brain, and she can remember when they worked out how to view the next life a century later. She was there for the violence, the rioting, the registers and arrests. She was there for the suicides, the protests, and the new legislations. Mariana Escárcega has been a wife many times, and a husband, and a child. She has killed, she has died, and she has loved. 

This will be her last life.

She is on a tour of Loch Lomond. The ferry has sailed from Balloch towards Inchmurrin and Inchgalbraith, and there it will turn and head for Luss. She visited this lake once before, many lives ago. The water is far older than her, and she can taste the age of it with every breath. It has outlived the boats on its surface, and the trees on its shores. It will outlive her too. 

The other passengers are all inside to escape the wind, and she is grateful. It has been a long time since she met anybody as old as her. More New people are born every year. Mariana does not know her real age, or name, or gender. It changes from body to body. 

She had a good childhood, before she could Remember. Her father was from Puente Genil, her mother was from Manchester, and she had two older brothers who practiced wrestling moves on her in the living room. Every day she would perch on the kitchen windowsill and watch the last drops of sunlight roll across the leaves of the oak next door. Sometimes she pictured the ocean or the hushed light of the moon and cried. Most of the time, she didn’t. She loved art, the colour green, and plum lipstick. She loved pescaito frito, animated films, and a shy boy in her English class. He had a growth spurt in their last year of school that left a strip of ankle between his trousers and his shoes, and she looked for that flash of skin all term.

Her mother was New, and her father had lived twice before – both times in Spain, both times a husband. When her brothers were both tested at twenty-five, neither of them had lived too many times between them, but they both held their heads a little bit higher as they left the clinic. When Mariana Escárcega was tested, and her memory returned, she sat down and sighed. The doctor was wide-eyed and fascinated, and her family embraced her in shock. 

At home that night, Mariana sat on the kitchen windowsill and examined the slow bruising of the sky. She remembered winter nights in a low wooden hut, and the way that the universe had writhed in the darkness above her. 

She still loved painting – had enjoyed painting in nearly every life – but the desire to create had left her. One day, when her brother made a teasing grab for her arm, she had a flashback to one of her marriages. When her vision came back, she was on the floor, head between her knees and shaking. Her family stopped touching her as much after that, and conversations trailed off when she entered the room. 

She considered suicide.

At twenty-seven, she went to test for her next life, and for the first time, saw only darkness. 

The doctor couldn’t meet her eyes as they detached the wires. He gave her a number for a support group, and a pamphlet titled What to Do When You’re Not Expecting (To Live Again.) A pale leaf spiralled in the draught of the door as she left, and she smiled.

She hugged her parents at home, ignoring their surprise, and then her brothers, and then she made pescaito frito for everybody. She watched the sunset from her perch in the kitchen until her vision blurred with the afterimage. Then she packed a suitcase and left. She didn’t worry about her family. They would love again. 

She lodged in Carlisle for a few days, to honour her short life there in the 1920s, and then again in Edinburgh, where she had stayed as a bachelor once, hopelessly in love with a local poet. She rode the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow, and then from Glasgow to Balloch. Watching the clouds race the train across the open sky, she traced the unchanged contours of the land with her eyes and cried. 

Surrounded by the hum of conversation and the whining rattle of the tracks, Mariana took soundless, heaving breaths and pressed her hands against her sternum. The fields stretched away behind her, green as anything she had ever painted, until they disappeared from view. 

She had no plan when she reached Balloch, and no idea what to expect, so she followed the road from the train station until she saw a sign for the Sunset Tour Company. Within half an hour, the boat was pushing its way along the expanding river until the land fell away around them. The water burst in leaping waves against the bow, and she found herself wishing she could match its frenzy and fling herself into the spray. 

She resisted. 

Her current body was only young – still strong and tanned – with good teeth and skin. She would live in it for as long as possible before it was time to go. 

She has been standing in silent thought at the bow, but now there is a muffled scrape as the screen door opens behind her. There’s a bar on board, and she can hear laughter and music. A deep voice is bellowing a song in Gaelic, and there is a smash of breaking glass and a cheer before the door slides shut again. 

 A soft set of footsteps make their way across the deck and a woman joins her at the railing. They are about the same height, but the woman is pale where Mariana is dark, and slim where she is curved. She looks as if she is in her early forties, but people rarely match the body that they wear. The wind tugs at her hair and they look at each other.

“Hello,” the woman says. 

“Hello,” Mariana replies. 

She has said more variations of that word than she could ever hope to remember. 

“I’m Persephone,” the woman offers. 

Her voice is low, and it almost disappears into the hissing wind. Mariana tilts her head. She hasn’t heard the name Persephone for many years.

“Really?”

“No,” Persephone smiles, and the corners of her mouth crease like it hurts. “But wouldn’t it be fun.”

Mariana finds herself smiling back. 

They turn to watch the view together. Every so often, there’s an announcement over the speakers. The ruins of a castle are pointed out – barely visible on one of the approaching islands. The trees have curled around it like longing, and the only part still visible from the boat is a single, crumbled wall.

There’s a brief increase in noise as somebody tugs at the door behind them, but they decide against coming out and it dims again. The women both sigh, and then turn to regard each other. 

“I’m Mariana.”

“That’s pretty.”

“It’s better than my last one.”

Persephone’s eyes soften in the shadow of her face. 

“Are you still quite New?”

Mariana exhales a sudden, startled breath, and then begins to laugh, loud and uncontrolled, until her muscles are clenching and the other woman is joining in. The lines on Persephone’s face don’t match the shape of her smile, but her laugh is warm in the evening air. 

“No,” Mariana replies eventually, her cheeks flushed and aching. “No, I’m not New.”

Persephone nods, and doesn’t ask for the unspoken joke. 

“I haven’t checked yet,” she says. “I love my wife – my friends.” 

Then she nods towards the shoreline, as if they might be gathered there, waiting in the shade beneath the trees. Mariana reaches out to grasp her hand. Her fingers are as cool as gold.

Mariana had not always been tested either. Sometimes there hadn’t been the option, like when she was a fisherman in the Sundarbans. She’d had a wife, and four small children, and they had lived together in a tiny village in the mangroves. 

Sometimes people were taken in the night, so the houses were raised on stilts. They could all feel the hungry weight of eyes against their skin.

The day that she died, she had been wading into one of the many rivulets that ran into the forest. Her net was in her hands, and she could see some of the other men further down, already waist-deep in the water. 

When the tiger came, it came from nowhere. 

One moment she was stepping into the shallows, and the next she was down, pinned between water and hot fur, shaken by a roar so loud she thought the forest was coming down around her. She clung to its chest to avoid the battering claws, choking on hot fur and mud. Her ear was crushed against its ribs, and the pounding thud of its heart was all that she could hear. When her head was finally caught between its jaws, she could still feel the living throb of it beneath the grinding crunch of teeth and bone. 

“Don’t,” she says to Persephone. “Don’t check.”

“Alright.”

The waves thump below the rumble of the engine, shuddering along the deck and up into her bones. 

“Promise me,” Mariana insists, and Persephone just looks at her, looks into her, before glancing out towards the shoreline. She nods.