This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots as a literary magazine in the 1920s, when our undergraduate contributors (including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and W.H. Auden) showcased the best of Oxford’s creative talent. We received nearly 30 entries, and they were all of an exceptionally high standard. The judge Dr Clare Morgan, Course Director of the MSt Creative Writing at Oxford, offered the following praise to this winning story: “The assured grip on form and tone, combined with an acute eye for detail, swayed me, alongside a wry and self-deprecating humour“.

Was it after all of substance, she wondered, meandering towards Holywell Street, was it after all of substance: her notion that love inevitably came to inexplicable ends, and people somehow went past her; was she spiteful, or accustomed to finding that her solitude never ended more than temporarily? Come what may, in the winding streets of Oxford, in the comings and goings of tourists whose ghosts she felt acutely, admittedly not at this hour of the night on a Wednesday; only occasional weary professors and overworked students rubbing their eyes flowed around her, here, there, she continued to wonder. His memory lived not wholly, how inadequate, in her, hers she was positive less than that in his mind, after all it was but a brief meeting, covering the edges of her conscious in a way reminiscent of the fog draping across the tower of All Saints Church, which she could see now in her mind, even without turning her head ever so slightly in the direction. Still, what was she contemplating as she looked into Blackwell’s store front? What was she trying to remember, her eyes fixed upon the latest release and the newest of the endlessly creative displays, but those numbers in rushed scrawl across a hastily grabbed napkin?

More than the companionship she sought in those elusive digits, the hints of a three, the curly tail of a two, the impossibility of recalling the sequence after a dashed through seven, she hungrily pursued the sentiment in her mind, ruminated if like Proust, all it would take for the memories to return would be a familiar taste , for her the taste of the semi-sweet hot chocolate and the feel of the cardboard takeaway cup before the fogged up window of Jericho Coffee Traders. The moment played in her head, her impatience at the ever ostentatious conversations of the undergraduates, the affected indifference of their older counterparts while name dropping the latest big names in cinema, art, literature, the grandiose, I’m a big fan but they’re somewhat niche, counting down, anticipating the moment when the pink haired barista would turn her way and she could finally take her order, to go. A gust of coolness then, Oxford as ever windy in February, the door swinging open tentatively, she noticed, how could she not, a step in her direction, such a graceful movement yet somehow shy, and then the coat, the coat she saw first, a grey woollen trench, and the tattered copy peeking out of the pocket. If not for that tattered copy, none of this reflection now, but there it was, that pale off- white corner, the faint turquoise of the l and the f, the more assured dark of the a and the y, and then he shifted slightly, and her hopes were confirmed, it was indeed a copy of Mrs Dalloway, and how could it not be fate then?

How was it that the quote went? “Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life,” she had muttered, and he turned around then, he couldn’t not have heard, in the narrow corners of that white High Street building, and gave a private nod directed at her, and asked what it was that filled her with “extraordinary excitement,” and then of course the decision was sealed, to ask what Peter had asked, so quietly, yet so earnestly, the drink was not to go after all. Thursday, four hours into the afternoon, and her day was brightened by the discussion of the great English tragic genius, and woe the bodies taken by the sweep of the tide, Ophelia certainly with her heart break and loss was worthy to be considered, and what of Dazai across the world? Lost in the discussion, with a stranger who was not a stranger so much as unexpectedly a kindred soul, she remembered very little of him, snippets of detail really, the dark brown eyes, the way they matched his coffee, the leather strap of the camera he had bought on a whim outside The Ballroom Emporium, and had she read Susan Sontag, and what was her own “arm of consciousness” and then just as abruptly the awkward apologies of staying until closing time, and the buttoning of her jacket, and the wrapping of her scarf and the frantic grabbing of tissue. Then, awkward tender silence, the sound of his pen scratching the surface, hers likewise struggling to find grip on that hastily seized tissue, after that exchange, the temporary brush of their hands, what a cliche to call it scalding, and yet, and then the walk back which proved to be so fatal. 

If fortune had looked favourably upon her, it seemed she had exhausted fate’s patience the moment they exchanged those unwilling parting words, for the sky began to swiftly cause a tantrum, why was it that things in Britain closed at five, an hour was not enough, and her own, disastrously unsuitable jacket, her own fault for scorning modernity’s love for the waterproof really, she vowed never to look down on polyester again. The digits disappeared, or rather came together into an indecipherable mess, and since then it seemed so did her mind- pouring over the pages of her latest legal case, the names blurred into absurdity, the rationale became irrational, or perhaps irrelevant, “what was it all for,”  how could it be she had in that brief instant cared about him more than she ever cared for justice? She should not have thought that, she went too far, Sally in the novel was positive, and she was too, “what a lark” indeed to have such feelings for an hour-long encounter. 

Clearly this could not be described as more than a destined disaster, a defeated idea, a fiasco, a mocking of the young woman with a hardened heart who somehow gave way to sentiments, beside the novel was not the epitome of happiness either, so how could she expect a meeting that began over a shared love for sadness and tragedy to end in any other way? That novel- a constancy of feelings and sensations, the story unfolding in Clarissa’s mind, more than on paper- and what irony for her life to mirror it so closely, beyond fictitious revery nothing else had transpired, no further developments, chance meetings, engrossing conversations, assuredly solitude remained the fixed option. A role “one must respect”, which previously she had accepted, yet now the notion lodged unpleasantly in her throat, and somewhere in between the third and fourth ribs. 

Third, fourth, again those ubiquitous numbers, certainly incorrect, she had never been much of a stickler for Freud’s belief of the subconscious, but ought she find a specialist, she was sure somewhere in one of Oxford’s winding streets and tucked away suburban areas, there would be a passionate believer claiming to recover the eleven necessary numbers for the small sum of at least a week’s worth of rent. Irritated she shook the idea off, glancing up again at the tantalising countdown from fifty one to forty eight, and took a step forward, she had been rooted here long enough, much in the style of Estragon and Vladimir, except she knew not even the name of whom she was waiting for, and with her dim reflection in the storefront, after a brief delay, gracefully, yet shyly, moved another. A dash of grey and a line of brown, and then in the window her own dark silhouette became starker still in the outline of a hesitantly approaching other, and if Clarissa’s darkness had been profound, hers abruptly became considerably lighter. 

Winner: “The Ghosts She Felt Acutely” by Polina Kim

Runner-up: “Letter from the Orient” by Dara Mohd

Shortlisted entries:

“SPLAT!” by Sophie Lyne

“A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull” by Jim Weinstein (pseudonym)

“Rhonda May” by Matt Unwin

“Any Blue Will Do” by Kyla Murray

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots as a literary magazine in the 1920s, when our undergraduate contributors (including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and W.H. Auden) showcased the best of Oxford’s creative talent. We received nearly 30 entries, and they were all of an exceptionally high standard. The judge Dr Clare Morgan, Course Director of the MSt Creative Writing at Oxford, offered the following praise to this runner-up: “The piece dealt in big themes of global significance and handled these with aplomb to construct a moving and finely balanced narrative which drew me unswervingly along with it.“

The night that my friend stopped by for his usual drink, I didn’t know that it would be the last time. The sun was halfway through setting and The Lamb & Flag had started to rise from its resting place on St. Giles’ and come alive. I watched my friend push his way through the patrons crowding the bar and take a seat on the leftmost barstool. Then he lit a cigarette—Gauloises, from his homeland Syria—and completely ignored whoever was next to him. This was routine. Sometimes he had a legal reading to get through or a jurisprudence essay to write. He stayed like that for a minute or two until I, of my own volition, went to him.

‘What will it be tonight, Taym?’ I asked him from behind the bar.

‘Barman, you ought to stop asking questions you already know the answer to,’ Taym replied sternly. Then he smiled. I never knew when he was joking and when he wasn’t.  

‘Tall glass of milk coming right up, then.’ 

It was almost the end of Trinity term, 1967. The pianist was playing a half-familiar tune and the students looked anxious about examinations, albeit pleased, even if only for one warm evening. They complained like they always did and roared with laughter over humiliating tutorials and cheated games of cards. But Taym had his fingers splayed across a letter paper, holding it still against the wooden bar that was sticky with dried-up beer, writing feverishly in a script that ran from right to left. It wasn’t English. 

‘That sure looks interesting.’ I set his milk down before him. ‘The language, I mean.’

He pushed his dark hair away from his face. Sweat gleamed on his brow. 

‘Sure does,’ he muttered half-heartedly. 

I leaned over the bar to get a better look at the upside-down script, but he suddenly stopped writing. I looked up to find him already glaring at me. 

‘Calvin, I can’t write with you watching over me like a fairy Godmother.’ 

He said this humorously but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. 

I tapped the letterhead. ‘Those look like numbers.’

‘Because they are numbers. English numbers are taken from these Arabic numerals.’ He rotated the paper. ‘That’s the Hijri date. It reads: 29 Safar 1387.’ 

‘1387?’ I repeated. ‘Have your people forgotten to flip a calendar page?’

This time it was I who said it in good humor. He didn’t so much as show teeth. 

‘Not everybody wants to live on the terms of the English.’ 

I did not know what to say to that. 

‘Well, are you writing to your father again?’ I asked tentatively. 

‘Yes,’ Taym replied. Then, in the most casual regard, he added: ‘He’s going to war, now.’ He dragged from his cigarette and I stared at him as though I heard him wrong. I knew his father was an affluent General in the Syrian Armed Forces but I suppose I didn’t know what that really meant until then. ‘I got his letter this morning.’

‘But—’ I hesitated. ‘That’s not a good idea, is it?’ 

He looked dumbfounded. I didn’t see why.

‘We are from the Golan and my house there has just been reduced to rubble.’ He leaned forward on his elbows. ‘What do you think, Calvin?’ His gaze was startling. ‘What would you do if it had been your house and not that of some lower-order Bedouin?’ 

‘Taym,’ I sighed. ‘That’s not what I’m saying—’ 

‘Then why did you say it?’

‘Come on, you know I didn’t mean—’ 

A glass shattered against the counter at the other end of the bar. I flinched.

‘Hey, barman!’ A drunk student shouted, the beer from his shattered pint glass pooling. ‘Stop flirting with the milkman and get me another pint, would you?’ 

His friends burst out laughing. 

Taym kept his head down, focused on the letter that he seemed to force himself to continue writing—determined to do anything other than look at me. It was futile to keep standing there. And it was truly an awful night to be the only bartender on call. I turned away to clean up the mess and make the student and his friends their drinks, a pack of obnoxious first years who couldn’t get enough of their newfound freedoms. 

It was at this point that I couldn’t keep up with the Sisyphean drink-making and beer-tapping and so I had to abandon Taym—still working through that glass of milk and writing God knows what—at his barstool. I really started to wonder what the hell he was writing. When I finally returned to him, sometime after sundown, the pen was placed atop the papers like a makeshift paperweight and the glass of milk was empty. I couldn’t tell if he had finished writing or just taken a hiatus. I served him another glass on the house but he didn’t touch it. 

‘I didn’t mean to provoke you,’ I admitted. 

‘I know you didn’t.’

‘Then why the fuss?’ I asked. ‘It’s complicated. You can’t expect the born-and-raised Englishmen around you to understand it all like you do, can you?’ 

He stared at me like I had slapped him across the face. 

‘The born-and-raised Englishmen in question are Oxford students—’ he looked around the pub emphatically. ‘—supposedly the smartest in the world. Can the smartest in the world really not understand the gravity of their own ignorance?’

‘You have been in England for some time now, Taym. Surely you’ve made do.’

‘Made do?’ Taym repeated, amazed. He was silent for a moment, as if he genuinely expected me to repeat myself. ‘Time changes nothing. I can pass fine; a foreign man in an English suit who introduces himself to be from a place you will know how to find on the map. You’ll even shake my hand. But then a certain word will come in a certain accent and this is when the white man will smile big and have his Aha! moment: Forefinger jabbed into your face—’ he copied the movement. ‘—staring at you like some kind of zoo animal and then ask what breed of ‘other’ you are, as though we are not all human.’ Fog-thick cigarette smoke curled around him. ‘It feels like I never left the house I lived in. Though I’m on English soil, thousands of miles away from the Golan, I am still there, and every time I try to leave through the front door, I am led back inside, like some sort of hat-trick. That’s what it is: Some sort of messed-up hat-trick that’s been going on too long and stopped being funny a while ago but won’t end.’ He rolled his tongue in his mouth, half-smiling with the facsimile of amusement like it really were the workings of some cold-blooded magician. ‘The blond-haired blue-eyed white man sends me home with the way he scrutinizes me and, I, too, am feverish to return. I still hear the waves of Galilee and my language, now so far away from me after my many years in English boarding schools. I smell the cardamom coffee and my grandmother’s cooking and the gunpowder. But now there is no home to return to, only the war-torn imitation of it, and I’m in some kind of there-and-here limbo from which I cannot escape. My father is at war; I am dodging conscription with this Oxford law degree that won’t get me anywhere other than at the dog owner’s feet. If it were not for my father…’ He considered the glass of milk, thought better of it, then started to put on his coat instead. ‘Some tent revival of a world we live in—’ he tucked the letter papers into his pocket as he spoke. ‘—some long-running joke it all is.’

In that moment, I did not understand a single thing about him and he appeared to me as a stranger.

‘Where are you going, Taym?’ I asked.  

‘Home,’ he replied, fumbling with his pockets for a cigarette. 

‘But why?’ The words felt stupid as they left my lips. 

He smiled in a way that made me think he found my question endearing. 

‘To finish writing my letter to my father, of course.’ 

There was so much I wanted to ask. He didn’t look at me as he stood but I could tell he was expecting me to say something. What I didn’t know was that this silence of mine would revisit me many years from now—pouring drinks at work, on graduation day, in the company of friends who never filled his shoes—and leave me wondering what might have been if I had only tried.

‘It all comes unstuck.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘Goodnight, Calvin.’

Taym exited through the front door of the pub. It didn’t shut quite properly and so it remained open just a crack. I watched him go, the wind from the door left ajar drifting in my face. 

Winner: “The Ghosts She Felt Acutely” by Polina Kim

Runner-up: “Letter from the Orient” by Dara Mohd

Shortlisted entries:

“SPLAT!” by Sophie Lyne

“A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull” by Jim Weinstein (pseudonym)

“Rhonda May” by Matt Unwin

“Any Blue Will Do” by Kyla Murray

This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots as a literary magazine in the 1920s, when our undergraduate contributors (including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and W.H. Auden) showcased the best of Oxford’s creative talent. We received nearly 30 entries, and they were all of an exceptionally high standard. The judge Dr Clare Morgan, Course Director of the MSt Creative Writing at Oxford, offered her congratulations to the shortlisted entries, including this one.

The one constant has been wealth. We’d get boxes at basketball games, fly first class across  oceans, eat gauche meals at farm-to-table restaurants. Recently, though, we had ascended. My  father got involved with a very hot business, commercializing psychedelics, and we had started,  consequently, to rub elbows with the super-rich, the 5 decimals between 0 and .1% crowd who  were so fucked in the head they needed elephant doses of ayahuasca to moderate their power  trips. But psychedelics are an interesting elite phenomenon because besides the tech bros  breaking in there’s a sizable crowd of old hippies who have lived long enough to see Elon Musk  and Peter Thiel and Sergey Brin pump their cranky nonprofits full of tens of millions of dollars. 

That’s a long way of saying that I’m rich enough to go visit Oxford before attending, and my dad  is well connected enough that one of these old hippies invited us to dinner at her country manor  (I didn’t say some of these hippies couldn’t be rich themselves) on the weekend we visited.  

I didn’t want to go. I was jetlagged and I had just gotten my camera stolen. But my dad insisted it  was for business, and so we all piled into a taxi. We got out of the cab and realized we hadn’t reached our destination: what we had thought was the manor was just the gatehouse. But the cab  driver was already putting off into the distance. I remember, past the gatehouse, a yawning  expanse of English countryside, the early spring not yet broken through, the land unintelligible in  dusk. 

We began trudging through a shallow layer of mud over frozen dirt, down a country road that  looked as if it extended with slight twists for miles. Over it stood oaks which bent over the road  and towards each other to form with the road the appearance of a long, triangular tunnel from the  gatehouse onward. Light refracted between branches that bristled against each other as we  walked. The sound of the trees, shorn of leaves and any sign of life, settled in my ears as  whispers. The three of us – my mom, dad, and I — walked forward and forward, beckoned by a warm orange glow floating in the distance. The glow grew until the windows framed themselves  with the dim outline of an old brick mansion. It was in terrible shape; the roof was in desperate  need of a reshingling and the path leading up to the door was overgrown with thick grass.  

Next to the door (a huge, oaken thing) leaned a red wheelbarrow which seemed to glisten of its  own accord; the image of it burned itself into my eyes. My father, after crossing a wooden moat,  knocked on the door. An older woman wearing a wrinkled white shirt a floor-length flower skirt,  and short grey bangs opened the door. This was Anne, the Countess of Wexley Manor, this was  Anne, my father’s business partner’s mother, this was Anne, semi-famous psychedelic crank or  disruptor or innovator. I remember her eyes, startlingly green. Beside her, watching us with a  beady, serpentine gaze, was a man in his 60s wearing a grey three-piece tweed suit. 

She ushered us in and offered us toast, which the husband, Bertie, slowly twisted over a blazing  fire. The home was sweltering. The walls were covered with baroque paintings, all exhibiting  dramatic uses of chiaroscuro. Shelves overflowed and books piled everywhere a few feet high. A  couple of human skulls were perched on top of an old dresser, next to small bronze statues.  Bertie sat closest to the fire. His white shirt was soaked through with sweat: it beaded on the tip of his nose, below his eyes, and between his mouth and chin. He chewed with his mouth open  while we spoke, taking the pieces one by one, lavishly buttering the blackened crust. She talked  endlessly. Bertie mostly looked at her, nodded with loving, dull eyes, and then looked back at us  and vigorously nodded as if to affirm that he was in complete agreement. After an hour of  conversation, he began to speak. He occupied himself, day-to-day, with family trees and family  histories, but fixated specifically his ancestors’ sexual exploits: he described to us the ways they  secretly documented the number of orgasms they had with illicit liaisons in their diaries. It was  mostly incoherent. 

She, however, was perfectly understandable. This perfect coherence and undeniable charm could  only sustain itself for so long before one a) was completely entranced by her high, almost girlish  voice or b) realized as if a switch had gone off, throwing the room into complete light – that what  she was saying was completely and totally insane. 

In between normal conversation, and tea, and dinner (fish next to a feculent sliced fig) – she’d  find excuses to drop on the middle of the table the strangest facts: telling us, for example, that  she had once read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents tripping on mushrooms (which I  believed, though I doubt she did it with any lucidity). Or that she had once, on an aborted  mission to join her uncle, an MI5-spy-turned-Buddhist-monk in Ceylon, she had lived in a Druze  harem in Lebanon for two years. She could tell us about Lebanon as if she remembered every  detail perfectly: the dryness of the air, the color of the sky, the guttural quality of the Arabic she  never bothered to learn. I noticed that this story began to extend and fold into itself, like a microcosm of her entire bizarre life, taking up room in a way I had seen in meticulously crafted literature but never over dinner.  

By the time the two-year mark approached the letters from her family had long since ceased, but  she was tired of life out there. She gave the chief some advanced notice of her departure and he  nodded and told her that if she must leave to wait until she celebrated her second year: he had  something he wanted to show her. When the day came, he called her into his tent. It was the first  time she had ever been allowed in and found the chief surrounded by his lackeys. The men  strapped her down on the bed. She submitted out of curiosity. Then the chief pulled from his  leather satchel a polished wooden hand-drill. He placed it against her forehead, firmly, and began  to drill.  

She woke up, she told us, with nothing more than a dull pain and an impossible clarity to her  vision and hearing. A dull serenity, without joy, tingled at the surface of her skin. She asked the  chief what he had done to her. Citing mystics and swerving in and out of French, he explained  that his tribe had retained for thousands of years a ritual – only for the favorites of the chief – to  eliminate all empathy.  

She launched into her own research. Humans upon learning to walk had decreased the pressure  of cerebral spinal fluid in the cranium. When they did so, they felt, for the first time, empathy.  With it, too, came the first figurative humans – homo translatus. This marked the beginning of  

representation which produced the Venus of Willendorf, and Lascaux, and in fact all subsequent  art, culture, and history. But, she claimed (and she turned to me, or seemed to turn to me, though maybe it was just the sheer intensity in which she said it), we could lose empathy; we could  discard the pain of simile and regain a primordial unity. All it took was a short, sharp shock to  the skull: a centimeter-wide hole drilled carefully above and between the eyes.  

As she said it, I felt a wave of anxiety. She turned to my parents, and resumed, suddenly, normal  conversation. She asked about what I wanted to study. We spoke about culture shock. We had a  saccharine dessert. As we scraped clean our plates, she turned to my parents and asked if maybe  

their son – that is, me – would be interested in such a procedure. It would be brief, and she said  that it was wonderful for young students who struggled with focusing, and she sensed that I was  the perfect candidate the moment I had stepped through the door. 

My parents looked at me expectantly. They had trudged to the manor weary and tired. Now their  attention was razor-sharp, their backs straightened, their brows furrowed in consternation at the  possibility that I could even deny such an offer from such a special woman. They wouldn’t force me: it was my choice. But what other answer could I possibly give with them looking at me that  way? With the care and eloquence that she had explained her journey with? 

“Sure, I suppose.” 

So the procedure, which I don’t remember, was done. I stayed the night, and my parents picked  me up the next morning. I woke up with a dull pain and overcome with exhaustion, but otherwise  I felt completely unchanged.

Winner: “The Ghosts She Felt Acutely” by Polina Kim

Runner-up: “Letter from the Orient” by Dara Mohd

Shortlisted entries:

“SPLAT!” by Sophie Lyne

“A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull” by Jim Weinstein (pseudonym)

“Rhonda May” by Matt Unwin

“Any Blue Will Do” by Kyla Murray

The author is an editor of Folly Magazine.