June 2026 Results

First Prize

Kilmacolm, One Last Time by Katharine Thomson, Exeter, UK

 

Second Prize

Báthory, Marcin Ostasz, Spain

Third Prize

Fluoxetine by Shuvayon Mukherjee, Sydney, Australia

Short List

A miracle at Totterbridge, Stan Riley, Brampton, UK

Long List

A miracle at Totterbridge, Stan Riley, Brampton, UK

A Train Ride Away, Maya Sanders, Edgard, Louisiana, USA

Báthory, Marcin Ostasz, Spain

Between the Cracks, Taria Karillion, Corwen, UK

Excavation, Philippa Leah, Haslemere, UK

Fluoxetine by Shuvayon Mukherjee, Sydney, Australia

Hammered Home, Jacqui Cooper, Bradford, UK

Kilmacolm, One LastT Time by Katharine Thomson, Exeter, UK

Playing With Fire, Lucy Bignall, Adstock, UK

The Message Library, Lyndon Davis, Nottingham, UK

 

 

Kilmacolm by Katharine Thomson

 

As I sat in Departures watching, with an odd sense of detachment, the two-hour delay come up on the board, it occurred to me that I was the last of all of us left in Glasgow.

 

My uncle had departed first, two days ago; my brothers were back home in London; Mum and Dad were steadily putting miles between us in an overloaded hire van heading south. Even Grannie had left before me: her urn was in the back of said van, wedged into a cardboard box labelled “Grannie” amongst silver cutlery and damp bedspreads.

 

I had arrived at Glasgow Airport two days earlier after a typically convoluted and stressful journey north. M&S had still been open, so I grabbed a bag of bagels as an emergency dinner; coming wearily through Grannie’s door in Kilmacolm, I deposited them on the hall table next to a fetching cylinder decorated with a seascape. “What’s that?” I asked Mum. “Grannie,” she replied.

 

So began my last visit to my grandparents’ house, a mélange of grief, comedy and heavy lifting. The house was already sold, with completion due the following week. Our task was to sort the last of Grannie’s possessions ahead of a final clearance by a homelessness charity, and in the process to systematically dismantle the physical trappings of a ninety-six-year life.

 

It soon became clear that my mother and uncle had taken up contrasting positions at each end of the sentimentality spectrum. Chris was determined to shift as much as possible, as quickly as possible, via Facebook marketplace, while Mum pressed everything from electric blankets to Grannie’s slippers on me and my brothers (refusing as diplomatically as they could via video call).

Mum was also adamant that the house be passed onto the new owners in spotless condition, despite their clearly stated plans to renovate the entire interior. In particular, she seemed inordinately worried that they might complain about the quality of the hoovering. It was therefore with a degree of apprehension, and a keen awareness of maternal scrutiny, that I set to hoovering Grannie’s own bedroom. The hoover turned out to be the same model we had owned twenty years ago – Grannie being never knowingly overspent – and only moderately effective; nevertheless, under the beds I saved from it a 20p piece and a 2019 cinema receipt for two tubs of vanilla ice cream. I wondered what Grannie had gone to see, and with whom. I hoped she had enjoyed it.

 

As I hoovered, previous versions of myself from the last twenty-five years strolled unbidden across my mind, unhelpful ghosts watching me work.

Fourteen-year-old me, self-conscious about everything, left here to keep Grannie company in the aftermath of Grandad’s death. She fed me sherry and boiled eggs, and cried when I finished Grandad’s last jigsaw. It was the first time I saw her lose control. For two decades of widowhood after that a note sat on her dressing table, in her spiky, spidery handwriting: “Surprise yourself every day with your own courage.”

 

After his death, Grandad’s bed became mine when we visited; it was a foot away from Grannie, who kept the light on for hours, snored dreadfully and slept deafly through all attempts to nudge her.

 

Student me, visiting with a friend on a train tour of Scotland. We thought we were so hip and helpful because we cooked her a meal with garlic and she said she liked it, as if in decades of feeding a family it had never occurred to her to add flavour.

 

Focus. Focus on the hoovering.

 

But even this brought endless memories, some laughably specific, as I moved noisily from room to room.

 

Here around the table we sat countless times on the first night of a holiday, stiff and grumpy after a day’s driving from the south, eating stew and fruit pie with milk poured over instead of cream.

 

Here by the window Grannie studied the paper with a magnifying glass (“I’m very worried about global warming. And about Putin.”)

 

These carpet grooves were left by her chair, pulled up close enough to the TV to bring the Scottish rugby team within earshot, the volume blasting and the subtitles obscuring most of the screen.

 

I stood here, spaced out and grimy off a delayed train from Manchester, exhausted from my final clinical exam.

 

In each room I was conscious for the first time how old everything looked. Visiting as a granddaughter, this house had never seemed particularly old-fashioned; now it felt dated and sad. I felt a pang of guilt remembering the probate houses I had visited over recent years of indecisive house-hunting, barely sparing a thought for the people in whose homes I trespassed. I thought too of Grannie and Grandad, repairing everything they could, rarely buying new, taking such care of each possession.

 

The only place undesecrated was the garden that Grannie tended with such knowledge and care. When my grandparents first moved here from the Highlands I was still child enough to lead my little brothers in games, hiding in the ditch along the back fence and dodging behind the flowerbeds. Within a few years the world had shifted forever; it was a new, grown-up me who returned to console Grannie in the wake of Grandad’s death.

 

In recent years, as her eyesight failed, a professional gardener had been brought in to tend Grannie’s beloved garden. If he thought he would get an easy ride from a nonagenarian with poor vision he was soon set right. Her flowerpots now sat grouped, ready for removal; I knew that whichever of us adopted them, they would never know again the same nurture. Three came to me; these were nominally empty, but one was transported full of soil and contained, I discovered a few months later, the seed of a tree. The tiny sapling that emerged (unidentifiable to me) brought a new wave of fear and grief, as if its surely inevitable death at my hands would be a second bereavement.

Seven years ago: Grannie’s 90th birthday. Serendipitously, there was a royal wedding the same day and a party at the gardening club. I thought I was taking Grannie to it, but it soon became clear that she was taking me. As her many even older friends ushered her to a special seat, I felt like I was tagging along with the queen.

 

Come on, back inside. We’re not done yet.

 

On the walls hung dozens of Grannie’s own paintings. Was it really my hands that dared to remove them, after all these years? Each one left a pale rectangle, a spectre of what ought to be there.

 

We struggled to divide the pictures: nobody could bear to lose them but no one had any spare wall space. There was a brief impasse, until my brother had a fit of sentimentality over video call and offered to take all unclaimed paintings. This was greeted with relief by everyone except, one imagined, his long-term girlfriend with whom he shared a flat.

 

Here at the kitchen sink I learned to peel potatoes. Here too I carefully poured my red wine down the plughole, four years ago and secretly pregnant.

Along with an old writing bureau of Grannie’s mother’s and the dining table that had somehow survived two generations of children scratch-free (“Not for much longer,” I thought ruefully), I became the proud owner of a toy dachshund, a blue teapot and a set of lampshades that I broke within minutes. Mum also pressed on me a pad of writing paper, neatly printed with Grannie’s name and address at the top.

 

“The children can draw on it,” said Mum, pre-empting the obvious question.

That last visit. Hours uncountable on a train. A taxi to the hospital. I texted her, although I knew she wouldn’t read it: “I’m coming. If anyone else reads this, please can you tell her?”

 

Until I experienced both, I never realised how alike birth and death are. Both feel out-of-time, dreamlike. You want to shout, “Don’t you know what’s happening?” at those strange people still living in the world you inhabited only yesterday. Between you and them a great chasm has been fixed.

 

Both death and birth involve hanging around in hospital, in a cuboid of space that is now your entire world. You live out of bags, lose track of your clothes, text people at all hours who bring you snacks which you eat with your hands. The hospital staff are your new family, and you marvel that in a few short hours they will return to that other world, to cook a meal, chat to a partner, watch TV.

 

Eventually the hospital spits you out too and you emerge, blinking and dazed, to a new reality. It seems incredible that the trees, the bus stop, the car park are still there, oblivious to the fact that the whole universe has changed, uncaring of the shift that marks a line between the old world and the new.

That was six months ago.

 

On the final morning of house clearing some old family friends dropped by. Everything was now boxed up, so we sat in the empty living room and ate their sandwiches while everyone except me caught up on thirty years of gossip. It was strangely comforting to sit as I had countless times before, a passive absorber of stories of distant relatives and neighbours I would never meet.

 

We sat here on the day of the funeral, and the phone rang. It was disconnected. We looked round at each other, nervous, willing someone to say something. Finally it stopped, and we laughed, and said “It’s Grannie, phoning because we’re all together.” And inside we believed it.

 

Shortly before coming north this final time, I dreamed I met Grannie.

 

Somehow I knew as we spoke that this was the latest of many dream meetings. This certainty stayed with me long after I awoke and all other details of context and conversation had leached from my brain.

 

Finally, Glasgow Airport again. My plane eventually appeared, and I returned to the world where I was no longer a gawky teenager on yet another Scottish holiday, but a thirty-six-year-old mother with a job and a house and a life, and in which Grannie was gone. Irrevocably, incomprehensibly gone.

 

It turned out Mum was right about the writing paper. Three weeks later we took the children on holiday to France, lugging them and our bags on and off far too many trains, across platforms and up and down stairs. The children needed hours of distraction and the paper worked wonders – they drew dragons and castles, people and dogs, strange fairy babies and cats with wings. They didn’t like the strange black writing at the top of each page, so I showed them how to fold and tear it off cleanly. This produced a neat strip with Grannie’s name and details like a calling card that, despite my best efforts, we left strewn across France on cafe tables and on trains hurtling through vast landscapes.

 

Mortified as ever at the mayhem in our wake, I consoled myself that this was Grannie’s own last grand tour. She would have enjoyed the warm evenings in shady squares, although she would have had fewer coffees and more gin and tonics. She would have had a good stab at speaking French, and would somehow have magicked up gallant young men at every station to carry her bags. She would have insisted we send postcards, while forgetting to send any herself. And perhaps, her sight miraculously restored, she would have gazed at the cathedrals, the people, and the sunlight through the plane trees with an artist’s eye.

 

 

Báthory by Marcin Ostasz

 

At the beginning of the nineties, everything was grey and dirty. My 141 bus was an articulated, rattling, four-axle, unheated vehicle, which swerved dangerously on corners. Its colour was red, but its oval chassis was hidden under layers of snow, ice, and grime. Sand and gravel mixed with sleet had accumulated above the wheels, which I scraped off with a shovel. My line linked Warsaw’s Central Station with the city’s northern suburbs on the other side of the river. The station was a grey rectangle with a flat roof, erected in the middle of an empty square, which was littered with construction debris and rubbish. The suburbs were rows of identical, grey blocks of flats, surrounded by muddy yards and pools of brownish water.

 

I met him towards the end of that winter. I parked my bus at the terminus and cleaned it. There were always some coins, hairpins, nail clippings, tissues, sunflower seeds, and apple cores under the seat covers. A man scrambled up through the open front door. Small and bent, but sturdy, he had several large, textile bags with him.

 

I greeted him, ‘Top of the morning!’

 

He settled on the front seat, next to my driver’s cabin. As I approached him, I smelt him, too—unwashed clothes and cheap cigarettes. He counted some banknotes as I drove out. His hands were small, his fingers strong and swollen, working fast. The banknotes were foreign, larger than ours, green or light red.

 

He got off at the second last stop and trotted away towards a five-storey block of flats. That’s where I collected him one evening.

 

‘How are you today, sir?’ I asked when I saw him through the open door.

 

His bags were full. Lifting them made him breathe like a little train.

 

‘Do you need any help?’ I asked.

 

He hauled all his bags up and took his usual seat.

 

At the terminus, he carried half of his load down onto the pavement and returned to pick up the rest. I lifted one of the bags.

 

‘Gosh!’ I nearly sank under its weight.

 

He let me follow him into the station. We stopped at an escalator leading down to a platform.

 

‘I’ll manage,’ he hissed, still without looking up at me. He grabbed the bag I was holding.

 

Below, men and women, cheaply dressed, small, strong, and swift like him stood along the edge of the track. Steam rose from their furry hats and heavy coats. They were smoking, cursing, shifting the fully loaded bags on the moist and cold platform floor. Some of them took off their mittens in order to rearrange the contents—jumpers, socks, cigarettes, vodka bottles. A train arrived. It was long and tired, composed of dark green, dark blue, or grey carriages that were the property of various state railways. As the train’s brakes squeaked, the crowd swarmed towards it, shouting, elbowing one another, and pulling its doors open. The man from the bus fought his way and got on, hauling his bags up first, and then pushing them along a corridor. When he’d stopped, he turned to look outside, and our eyes met. He dropped his head and opened the door to a compartment.

 

I read the sign on one of the carriages—the train’s destination was Budapest, and its name was Báthory. I looked it up in a Popular Encyclopaedia I had at home. Stefan, or István, Báthory was the common king of Poland and Hungary in the sixteenth century, at the height of power of the two countries.

 

Two mornings later, as I was reading my book, resting my elbows on the steering wheel, I heard footsteps and gasps for air. The same sour smell hit my nostrils. In the rearview mirror, I saw him settle in his usual seat. I opened the door to my cabin.

 

‘How was the journey?’ I asked.

 

He counted his banknotes and turned his face towards the frozen city.

 

‘Where do you sell your stuff?’ I enquired.

 

‘In a market. An open-air market,’ he said with his head down. His fingers were flicking colourful banknotes.

 

‘Is it big?’

 

He looked at me through his thick, scratched glasses.

 

‘Is the market big?’ I asked again.

 

‘It used to be a stadium.’

 

I stepped out of my cabin. ‘My name is Zbig.’

 

‘Jan.’ He got up. We shook hands.

 

After his next trip, he gave me a few slices of Hungarian salami, and I offered him a cup of hot tea from my flask. He shared the tricks of his trade—a wooden pole and a chain that served to block and lock the door of the train compartment to prevent robberies at night, the way he packed his bags to hide the most valuable items (cigarettes, vodka, perfumes, premium canned ham) inside jumpers or socks, the amounts he bribed train conductors with.

‘Is the market far away?’ I asked.

 

‘Right at the station.’

 

‘That’s handy, indeed,’ I said with a friendly smile. ‘And how’s the business?’

‘Slow but steady. But it’s not all about money,’ he added quickly, as if offended. ‘Last time, after the market had closed, I went up to the castle and strolled along its walls. A monumental place, full of history.’

 

The spring rains washed my bus. The days became longer. As I drove into the station, the sun blinded me, and I had to lower the windscreen flap. Weeds appeared in the mud in Jan’s estate. He invited me to his flat, cooked Hungarian goulash, and opened a bottle of white wine.

 

‘Tokají,’ he said, pointing at the label. ‘From the north-east of Hungary.’

His flat was similar to mine—only two windows, one in the kitchen and the other one in the bedroom. His fingers didn’t bear any marks of a ring. I scanned the interior for any other signs of a woman or a family, but the only decoration on the walls was a display of tools—screwdrivers, spanners, keys, and wrenches.

 

‘They gave them away from the factory after it had closed down,’ he explained.

‘What did you make?’

 

‘Aircraft engines. Fifteen years of service.’ He poured himself a glass of the wine.

 

‘Two decades in a sewing machine factory,’ I said, stirring the goulash. Jan’s spoons were large and heavy. ‘Then, they offered a free bus driving course.’

 

He looked me in the eyes. ‘Lucky you.’

 

‘What about your folks?’ I asked.

 

He dropped his gaze and swallowed. ‘I grew up in an orphanage.’

He took a long sip.

 

‘I never got adopted.’ He was looking at me again.

 

‘I’m sorry.’ Although I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to say.

He placed the empty glass on the table. ‘What about yours?’

 

It was my turn to pour wine, drop gaze, and swallow. Tokají was sweet and had the consistency of syrup.

 

‘They met in a teaching college and taught in the same primary school,’ I said.

I told him about the accident—how Dad and Mam were coming to visit me just after I’d started my job, how allegedly there was an oil spill before a sharp bend, and how Dad, even though he was a careful driver, couldn’t do anything. Their car crashed into a barrier, rolled down a hill into a forest, and hit an oak tree head-on. They both entered into coma at the same time in the hospital, holding each other’s hands.

 

‘As if they had planned it,’ Jan said with a wee smile.

 

‘As if.’

 

We both drank up.

 

As I strolled home through the unlit city, Jan’s face as a child kept me company. He craned his neck, trying to catch the eyes of potential parents. His little head trembled, and tears flowed down his cheeks.

 

It became hot, and Jan wore shorts, sandals, and a khaki shirt. A baseball cap, which once used to be yellow, now sporting streaks of dirt and sweat, decorated his head.

 

‘I’ve met someone,’ he announced once on his return, keeping his head down.

‘Where?’ I asked.

 

‘In Nové Zámky, on the platform. Her name is Irena. I’m supposed to meet her at the same time next week.’

 

He kept quiet for the rest of the journey. But as he was leaving, his hand squeezed the handrail.

 

‘I’m nervous.’ He looked up at me from the stairs.

 

‘I’ll go with you,’ I offered.

 

‘Really?’

 

‘I’m curious.’

 

‘Thank you.’ He dropped his eyes again.

 

I took three days off. We left the following evening. Irena was supposed to wait for Jan in the morning, just when our train would arrive. Jan had bought flowers and a box of chocolates, and I had brought a book to read while Jan was on his date.

 

The train left Warsaw and moved fast through the plain separating Central Poland and Silesia.

 

‘Over two hundred kilometres per hour,’ observed Jan proudly. ‘The highest train speed in the former Soviet Block.’ 

 

Our train rolled into Nové Zámky as scheduled, a few minutes before eight. Jan positioned himself at the stairs leading down to an underpass, the flowers in his hand. I sat on a bench, watched the sun rise from behind the blocks of flats near the station, and opened my book. A local train arrived, and people swarmed onto the platform. Jan craned his neck, but the crowd flowed neatly into the underpass, and no one approached him. He waved at me.

‘Let’s wait!’ I shouted.

 

There was another train, then another one. We walked into the station building, but no women were waiting there.

 

‘What’s she like?’ I asked.

 

‘Petite, dark hair.’

 

We inspected the square in front of the station—to no avail.

 

We spent the rest of the day wandering. Jan threw the flowers into a bin. We ate the chocolates while sitting on a bench on the platform before boarding the return train. In the last hours of the night, as we were speeding towards Warsaw, Jan pulled down the window and extended his arm into the darkness, towards the track poles blinking in the lights of the train. He stuck his head out. The wind took his cap and tore at his sparse hair.

‘Jan!’ I screamed.

 

‘Perhaps I got the day wrong,’ he shouted.

 

‘Perhaps.’ I dragged him back and shut the window.

 

Jan continued his trips with the same regularity, although he’d stopped counting his cash and talking—he just watched the city go by. One day, when the first frost had appeared on the road, he didn’t show up in the evening after his planned return. I walked down to the platform and waited, but Báthory didn’t arrive. According to the screen in the main hall, it had a delay of over three hours.

 

I ran to the station master’s office.

 

‘What happened?’ I asked.

 

‘Some sort of accident,’ a man in a railway company uniform replied, not lifting his head from the bowl of soup he was paddling through.

 

At home, the television news showed some commotion at a railway line—cops, paramedics, an ambulance on signal. I turned it off immediately.

 

I still drive my 141 bus, although now it’s a quiet, hybrid vehicle with air-conditioning and a self-balancing, intelligent suspension. The Central Station looks like a spaceship—it’s been cleaned and polished. The surrounding space has been turned into a botanical garden.

 

Once, when my evening break was longer, I walked back one stop. There was light in the kitchen window of Jan’s flat. It was yellow and warm. A young woman spread the curtains. She lifted an infant and let its feet rest on the windowsill. The baby leant its hands on the glass, as if waving at me. It slipped down a tad, but the mother held it up. Outside, it was dark and misty.

 

I left when they’d disappeared from the window. The headlights of cars passing by pierced through the fog and illuminated the uneven pavement until, in the distance, I saw the friendly face of my 141 bus.

 

Fluoxetine by Shuvayon Mukherjee

 

I never asked Ma about her favorite animal, but it was probably one of those birds that eats insects off the backs of sub-Saharan oxen. She had a neurotic desire to look after people, and if they swatted her away, she’d swoop right back in and start pruning again. After she retired from nursing, she bought a herd of bison and spent her days fluttering around them instead.

 

Before the Big C took her she used to say, without a lick of humor, that they were her kids. All fifteen of them were good as gold, she’d add, ‘cause they did nothing but chew on grass and fart. Besides, she saw them every day—the fence kept them in, the grass kept them busy.

 

But me and Tom?

 

Ma always said she never quite saw us enough.

 

I spot my bovine siblings through the kitchen window: they’re blobs of brown in sunlit fields, distorted by the smudge on my glasses. Across from me Tom sits with his feet up on the dining table—something she never would’ve allowed—watching tendrils of smoke from his blunt spiral up into nothing. His nose is wrinkled; in less than a week at her farmhouse, Ma’s patchouli-scented candles have infused themselves into our clothes.

 

“We don’t know squat about bison, Billy,” he mutters.

 

“Don’t matter,” I grunt back, still peering out the window. “They’re our siblings. We gotta look after them.”

 

“They ain’t our siblings. They’re just bison. Big cows.”

 

“Still our responsibility.”

 

The word makes Tom wince. “So, the vet’s coming. Then what?”

 

“Depends what he says.”

 

“Will it cost?”

 

I shake my head. “Said he’d come here for free. On Ma’s account.”

 

“But after that? He ain’t gonna cure 'em for free. ‘Sides, you know I don’t like pills and such.”

 

At that I suck my stomach in. He hasn’t mentioned the weight I’ve gained since we last saw each other. But he’d definitely have something to say if he knew it was from my medication.

 

Taking my silence for assent, he puffs out another cloud of smoke and watches the vapor melt between us. A frown creeps onto his face.

 

“We got enough going on as is. There’s this place,” he waves the blunt around, “her money, all her stuff, a funeral to sort out, and now the bison?”

 

My nose pinches, but I force the tears back. I haven’t cried in front of Tom since we were kids, and I don’t plan to now. I let my breath flow out through puckered lips, controlled, like my therapist taught me.

 

“We knew about the bison long before she...”

 

His eyes soften. “Eh, you’re right. Guess we didn’t think she’d go so fast.”

My gaze drifts from Tom’s face to the wall behind him, where Ma'd put up a framed photo of us three years ago. A teenage me sports the same glasses I’m wearing now; she bought them for my birthday in my last year of high school. Tom’s beard was shorter back then, trimmed around his jawline, and his eyes were bright, unweary. Ma’s head is sandwiched between our shoulders, her smile so wide it squeezes her eyes into wrinkled ovals.

He follows my gaze, craning his neck to look at her.

 

“That was when she got the bison, wasn’t it?” He sighs. “Wonder if the Big C was growing in her even back then. We just didn’t know it.”

 

“That’s why we gotta look after them. For her sake.”

 

Now Tom’s looking out the window. He pulls his feet off the table and draws in another puff, deep in thought. The sun shifts in the sky. I close my eyes, enjoying the warmth on my face.

 

“They teach you much about bison in engineering school?” he says finally, lip tugging upwards. “’Cause I’m just a mechanic. You got the brains.”

 

“We could learn, I s'pose. Ma did, after all.”

 

“You gonna drop outta school and take care of 'em? You know I can’t. I got bills to pay.”

 

“I can’t either.”

 

“Then what do we do?” He snaps his fingers and points at met—the same way he does for every stupid idea he's had since we crashed our dirtbikes in fourth grade. "Billy-boy. Billy-boo. I've got it. What if we sold 'em?”

 

I find myself looking past him again. Ma smiles back at me.

 

“Or,” he continues, “you know what I heard?” He blows out smoke and lowers his voice. “Bison meat's supposed to taste pretty good. Aren’t they sick already? Could be kinder to just… you know.”

 

Still she smiles. My eyes flutter shut and a whiff of patchouli wafts past, as if she’s still here, bustling around the kitchen with her chessboard apron on.

“Billy?” Tom falters.

 

I point across the kitchen table to a porcelain vase of marigolds and the threadbound book beneath it. The vase thumps against the table, then wood scrapes as Tom drags the book over. He opens it. Each turn of the page is a shallow breath tickling my nose.

 

"Names," he murmurs. "Wait, birthdays? What the heck, they've got diets too? Jesus. Don't remember her writing down my favorite treats."

 

“They’re her kids too.”

 

He snaps the book shut. “Should we cut ‘em a slice of the inheritance, then?”

The doorbell tinkles from outside. She never replaced the old thing—was vintage, she'd say—even though the brass of it was mottled blue-green before I was born. Once upon a time its tinkling signaled visitors, ice cream, parcels. Later it was nurses. Now? I don’t quite know.

 

Knees creaking, I clamber to my feet. “Must be the vet.”

 

Dr Johnson stands in the doorway with a clipboard under one arm and flowers in the other, his brow furrowed in sympathy. A plaid shirt and jeans; no white coat. I'd dreaded them when Ma was ill. There'd been a kick in my chest whenever they swished past.

 

“Some lilies. In Jane’s memory,” he smiles.

 

We slip on our rubber boots and traipse into the fields, the sun a weak suggestion at our backs. Tom's holding the bison scrapbook in one hand, but on the other side of his body—as if he doesn’t want me to see. Waving bugs away from my nose, I ask the vet how Ma looked after the bison.

 

“Jane was remarkable,” he says. “I don’t know many people who can manage a bison herd by themselves. Those bison were looked after exceptionally well.”

“But how’d they get sick, then?”

 

He shrugs. “We’ll see. Seems like they were healthy until just before she passed. Maybe she was too weak to care for them towards the end.”

 

Tom walks in silence a few steps behind, sniffing. I stopped badgering him about allergy tablets a while ago. “Pills aren’t good for you, Billy,” he’d told me.

 

“Natural’s best.” And that'd been that. For all the trouble it gave her in life, I wager Ma’d be proud at least one of us carried on her famous stubborn streak.

The bison have scattered themselves across the grass, some chewing, others watching us approach. The stench of droppings is overpowering. Up close they're way bigger than cows, and, oddly, more beautiful. Their heads droop close to the ground, but their humps rise above eye level. There’s no consistency to their shaggy brown fur: on their heads it grows long, the color of dark chocolate; on their backs, it’s shorter, faded to sun-worn teak.

 

I've only been out here a couple of times, I realize. And never this close.

 

The vet picks his way past piles of dark manure, hot grass crunching under his boots. He leads us a short distance from the largest of the bison.

 

“You see that one?” he says, pointing. “That’s the male. Your mother did well—fourteen cows per bull is a good ratio for a herd this size.”

 

The bison stands there, teeth working on a clump of grass. His head and horns are much bigger than the others. His shoulders, too. He looks like he could flip a car.

 

“His name’s Zachary,” I tell them. “Ma named him.”

 

The vet nods. “Well, Zachary is sick. Can you hear that?”

 

Under the wind and birdsong there’s a harsh wheezing noise; a noise I know. But I know it paired, like it often used to be, with the chime of syringe drivers and the clack of boots on linoleum. Beside me, Tom's stopped sniffing.

 

“He’s coughing,” the vet continues. “You’d better hope it’s just influenza and not tuberculosis. I’ll need to do a skin test.”

 

I glance at Tom, but he's staring into the grass. The book sags in his hands. After a moment he fishes in his pocket for a lighter, and the blunt reappears between his fingers.

 

“Everything fine?” asks Dr Johnson, eyes darting between us.

 

Tom’s looking away now, far in the distance, so I break the silence.

 

“It’s just—the cough, that’s all. Sounds like Ma did when...”

 

“I understand," he says. His hand hovers near my shoulder, then withdraws. "Take a moment. I need to check the other bison, anyway.” He strides off.

I wait for Tom to say something. He always has something to say. My mind drifts to the past week—the first without Ma—when life was on fast-forward. Faces, words, and emotions revolved so quickly through my brain they’d congealed like dried blood.

 

All the weight of it is in me somewhere. Pressure behind my eyes; a yawn deep in my chest. I’m about to leave, admit defeat, when Tom finds his voice again.

 

“They’re suffering, Billy. Just like she did.” He lets out a breath, smoke billowing. “You were right. We gotta look after 'em.”

 

“But what if it costs?”

 

His back to me, he shrugs at the horizon with a single shoulder, as if she's out there somewhere and just told him to put the smelly thing out.

I take a deep breath. “Tommy?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“I’m in therapy. They gave me pills. I know... I know you don’t like them and you think they're bad news but... but I'm not like you and I wasn't there enough when she was sick and God, I needed help and..."

 

I sniff.

 

"I'm sorry, Tommy."

 

He looks back at me. Watching. He blinks, and breathes, and when his eyes open they're moist. Then he puts out his blunt and spreads his arms wide.

 

“I’m gonna look after Ma’s big cows,” he smiles, “and I’m gonna look after you, too.”

 

He stinks of weed, but he's warm, and his jumper smells faintly of patchouli. The tears fall before I can stop them—but this time I let him see.