I’m delighted to have my ELEVENTH win or short-/long-list this year, in the form of winning the Henshaw Short Story Competition! Having won £200 and publication, I am delighted!
The Henshaw competition is a prestigious challenge run by publisher Hobeck Books. Winning their Autumn 2023 Short Story Competition has been a dream come true; when I first received the ‘winner’ email, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
My story is about an inappropriate work relationship, leading to gaslighting and insecurity. I was aiming to create something real and raw with this story, putting our protagonist in a situation that is both relatable and questionable; we don’t like what she’s doing, even as we ultimately find her flirtee the antagonist. It’s an interesting game of loyalty for the reader, and I hope to challenge the classic ‘good protagonist’ requirement (as I have done in my novel, ‘Muay Thai For Monogamists’, where an initially-obnoxious protagonist becomes more loved in the readers eyes as her insecurities are revealed).
Ultimately, it is a story about heartbreak and what could have been.
Please find the winning story below…
Saturday Morning by Genevieve Flintham
That which comes easily:
We were twenty-seven and both unencumbered with the type of love for our partners that we had in the early, rose-scented days. Thirty was rapidly approaching and we laughed over the fact that we were a Taurus and a Gemini, as if it meant anything. My mother had moved to Greece to find herself and your mother was growing asparagus, so we decided we had things in common.
We started sending each other asparagus memes and funny Greek phrases as if we were winding ourselves into the other’s family life. We never enquired after each other’s partners, except to use such damning phrases as ‘If we were single, would you ever consider…’
I gave you my phone to put songs onto the office Spotify account, and you added ‘Saturday Morning’ by The Eels. I started thinking about you on Saturdays, and then I noticed how you always put a new social media story up on Saturday mornings, as if you were thinking about me too.
We shared a work project, and we stole off into Meeting Room 5 – the only one without a window to the office – on more occasions than the work warranted. We pretended that we were delivering outstanding service on a project that required anything but, but we were just consumed by flirty hyperbole.
At the office Christmas party, I waited for a drink at the bar in the gaudy circus tent, trapeze artists winding their way through hoops in the sky, and you pressed your hand against the back of mine. It could have been an accident. It sent a thrill through me that was more exciting, more alive, than anything I’d ever felt.
I started to wonder whether you could make a good father – after all, we were of that age where I had to think firmly about such tropes. Thirty is a kicker on an oil-slicked horizon for a woman who wants their ovaries to remain firmly in gear. I tried to weigh up with logic, but logic falls foul of emotions and emotions pretend to be logic.
He’d make a great father, my emotions told me, dressed in the straightjacket of logic, nodding in the way of a therapist. He has those qualities…
My emotions ran dry there. Never mind; logic can be a wily bugger, always leaving at the moment that I require actual, factual qualities.
You were fun. Of that, I was sure. After the hand-touching incident, things dialled up a notch. You added a few more songs to my Spotify playlists, enhancing my ‘Deep Work’ and ‘Gym’ collations. Soon, I was even smiling on the treadmill, as one of your songs spasmed into my ears, driving my legs to go further, harder.
I thought about you when I made love to my boyfriend. I didn’t even think of it as making love anymore; it was an animalistic requirement that led to greater productivity and better skin. Both were proven facts. My emotions spun around logic again, like Christmas lights around a tree. They switched on and dazzled, hiding the fleshy green spindles underneath.
You gave me a book – Life Of Pi – and I devoured it, looking for the hidden meaning. Were you the tiger? Was I? Was the novel really a misunderstood love story? Did the sea represent passion? I read it twice. Who am I kidding? I read it five times and bought an additional copy so that I could highlight and annotate without you seeing my obsession grow on the original.
My boyfriend read it too. He thought it ‘must be good’, given how many times I was reading it; even though he ‘never reads’, he decided that it looked too enticing to forego.
He started asking me about it, and I answered in crude, short words, wishing that his disputes, his mind, wouldn’t infringe on the book’s copyright.
And then you started asking me about it. We discussed it at length in Meeting Room 5 – which we’d started referring to as ‘The Red Room’ because of the colour of the walls, only we decided to keep the new name a secret. It gave me a thrill, knowing that we had a shared Red Room, even if the only clothes shirked were our jackets after a hot lunch break.
Our discussions became a form of foreplay; I would wait for my eyes to glitter before giving a response, as if I could say forbidden things without needing to move my lips. You swallowed everything. It inflated me, the power of knowledge, of conversation, and I added ‘intelligent discussion’ to my list of factual qualities. I imagined you sitting at the dining table in the evening, having ‘intelligent discussion’ with our intelligent offspring, saying delightful things that made us all laugh, before we sent the children to bed so that we could shag on the dining table.
Sex kept interrupting my wholesome images. It felt like an end destination which could never be explored, even though my body – my ovaries – were on an important road, bombing down a motorway at one hundred miles an hour, waiting to either crash or be rescued. Watching your hands as we sat in the meeting room, typing away on a nondescript keyboard, one strong finger twitch after another, was enough to drive me insane.
If we were fifty, things would be different, I reasoned. There is a certain expectation put upon women of a certain age who wish to birth offspring, to engage both logic and emotions in the selection of a co-pilot.
On a Wednesday afternoon, when the project had drawn on for too long and our bosses were questioning the additional time required – meaning that we had to start moving past exciting conception to birth something concrete – you told me that I’d make a great mother.
Don’t be ridiculous, I told you, batting my eyelashes as if I was offended. I’m way too young to think about that, I said.
I didn’t want you thinking of me as some gorged broad ready to spill; I wanted to be seen as a cirrus cloud: thin, streaking past, twisting into new and exciting shapes.
Thus was the dichotomy; I knew that I wanted children, and yet I didn’t want you to think of me as anything less than exciting. Twenty-seven is a tricky age.
As you were leaving the meeting room, I stood up at the same time and we accidentally pressed together. My buttocks set themselves on the edge of the table; your groin pressed into my lower stomach; I felt your body heat rocket right through me. Your breath smelled like porridge and I inhaled, automatically, my eyes in line with your lips. I ached all over.
And then you were gone, disappeared from the meeting room as if nothing had happened. I sat back down, panting, feeling my heart thudding in my neck, feeling that most dangerous excitement.
Feeling alive.
I confused my anxiety for all that is passionate and right in the world. This is how it’s supposed to feel, I told myself, as I waited for my legs to fill with blood and propel me back to standing. This is how love is supposed to feel.
We didn’t acknowledge the incident, but later, in the kitchen, you looked at me with eyes that were almost black. You’d changed the background on your phone; it used to be a picture of your girlfriend, but she had metamorphosised into a cactus. You tapped the screen to check the time, your dark eyes drawing themselves away from my face with a mixture of longing and confusion, as if there was thick treacle between us, and I took the phone screen as a sign.
You were showing me a sign.
And it helped that the cactus was the shape of an engorged penis.
I started listening to your songs on the way to work, filling my commute with a painful type of longing that cut through the humdrum of boring Earth. Why think about the news, or getting five fruit or veg a day, or texting my mother back – or checking what time it was in Greece before calling her – when there was something more ELECTRIC waiting ahead of me on the A road, dragging me along with promises of a glittering future?
Our project finished, but we had the company messenger app. We knew it was being monitored – everything was monitored – so we kept it light. You asked how my mother was doing in Greece and I asked whether your mother was planning on growing any other types of vegetables. In this way, we were able to keep each other injected into the normality of our lives outside of work.
Every time Mum said something remotely interesting about Greece, I told you. In turn, you sent me pictures of your mother’s vegetable garden, which I found fascinating. I would zoom in on each picture – on my phone in the toilets, obviously, not on the work monitor – and try and guess what she was like. She had patterned pink gardening gloves – was she a feminine type? Would she sew patterned pink romper suits for our fresh little buds?
You sent me a picture on a Sunday once, and I was filled with burning excitement all day. You were thinking about me at the weekend. It was a picture of asparagus and poached eggs. I took my boyfriend to the farmers market and bought as much asparagus as we could find. We had it with poached eggs in the afternoon before fornicating on the sofa, condom firm between us. He wouldn’t make a great dad; he didn’t even realise that the sea in Life of Pi represents the hidden depths of life.
I looked at the ceiling and thought about you.
That which comes harder:
I heard it first from my manager. She said it blithely, but her eyes were fixed on my face.
So exciting that he’s going to be a dad, she said.
She tilted her head to one side, as if I had become unzipped and she was examining the contents. We were in Meeting Room 3 – The Blue Room – and I stayed very still, a dried husk, a tumbleweed pausing midway across the great road.
Not true. Obviously, I assumed it wasn’t true. I cornered you in the kitchen. You wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Yeah, we’re really excited, you said.
But what… what about us? I said, breaking all of the rules.
There was never an us, you said, smiling weirdly.
I unzipped and it all came out. The songs, the book, the hand touch, the way you pressed me against the table. The pictures, the messages, the way you messaged me on a Sunday.
You’re imagining things, you said, your eyes as light as I’d ever seen them. I don’t mean to gaslight, but it sounds like you’ve invented a whole little world there.
You laughed, and I zipped back up and felt my insides rearrange.
That which comes hardest:
“Hey.” You’re with them. Your wife smiles, her face blank and empty. There’s no way that she ever read your favourite book five times or listened to Saturday Morning on repeat. Your daughter ignores us.
“Hey,” I say, slipping my fingers between my husband’s. We walk past, the supermarket aisle seeming to stretch on forever.
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Vieve Flint 
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