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.

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 lock-keeper faced them with his hands outstretched. Short and skinny, he had a diminutive stature, but his life jacket puffed out his chest. 

‘It’s been here two months,’ he said.

The younger of the two canal inspectors took a pen from his pocket and scribbled on his clipboard.

‘Two months,’ the lock-keeper reiterated. He pressed his boot demonstratively against the hull of the narrowboat. ‘It needs towing. That’s what I’ve been telling you all, but none of you will listen. I pay my fees to the Canal and River Trust and this is the service I get, it’s –’

‘With respect, sir,’ the older of the inspectors said, ‘we are here now.’

The inspectors looked from the lock-keeper to survey the narrowboat. Faded red paintwork and a cracked window on the stern, with a planter running along the top, in which the flowers were now brown and stick-thin. The front of the boat had begun to sink, causing it to develop an almost comical slant.

‘Take all the time you need,’ the lock-keeper said. ‘As long as it’s gone by the end of the week, I’ll be happy. I’m losing forty pound a night from the moorings it’s blocking.’

They watched him return to his cottage and then the older inspector said: ‘You fill in the safety checks and measure the boat’s dimensions. I’ll look at the engine, and after that I’ll catalogue what’s indoors. God, I hope she wasn’t a hoarder. And apparently somebody from the Bodleian library is coming down this afternoon to take her books and manuscripts for some exhibit.’ He paused. ‘What did you say her name was? The lady that died?’

From his clipboard, the inspector read: ‘Rhonda May.’

‘The famous poet, right?’ The older inspector pointed his finger at the side of the boat. Along the side, written in careful dark green letters, were the words ‘Rhonda May’.

‘I’ll be damned.’ The older inspector shook his head. ‘Who names a boat after themselves?’

###

Around midday the clouds cleared and the canal water began to shimmer in the sun. This was the young inspector’s favourite time of day, when the water gleamed in perfect stillness like a mirror. Not that his older colleague was around to experience it: he had left half an hour ago to get lunch at a café in Iffley, with vague promises of returning with a sandwich for the younger inspector. The younger inspector knew from experience that he wouldn’t be back for a further half an hour at least. He imagined the older man sat at a table by a window of some quaint little family café, with a napkin tucked into his shirt, leisurely eating his sandwich and sipping a steaming cup of tea. It was just like him to make him do all the work. 

And so the younger inspector sat on a bench, inspecting his clipboard, noting down measurements and staring out at the Rhonda May, until he was interrupted by the sound of a passing narrowboat.

This one glistened white, with two jet-black solar panels on its roof, and it cut through the water slowly and methodically. It looked a world apart from the corpse-like thing now beginning its slow descent beneath the water. 

An older woman in a pink cardigan leaned over the back of the craft, and as she passed, the boat slowed. 

‘How is Rhonda?’ she called to the inspector.

‘I’m sorry to inform you, ma’am,’ the inspector said hesitantly, ‘but Rhonda died two weeks ago.’

‘Are you a policeman?’

‘No,’ the inspector replied, slightly embarrassed, ‘we’re from the Canal and River Trust. We’re trying to see about getting her boat removed.’

‘Regardless, poor dear. She was only in her fifties. Still working at the university, a professor or other I think.’

‘I wouldn’t know ma’am.’

‘Such a sad affair. You know, she moved into the boat after she split up with her husband. I suppose they’ll never reconcile now.’ She paused. ‘Do you know what she died of?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t ma’am, we’ve not been told. I can give you the number of her sister, if you want to know.’

‘I’ll bet it was emphysema, or something like that. We used to know it was her boat because there’d be two plumes of smoke. One from the engine, and one from her.’

The inspector tapped his clipboard impatiently. 

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I really must be getting on with work.’

###

With still no sign of the older inspector, and with the younger inspector having finished his jobs, he decided he would start cataloguing the items aboard the boat. He always hated doing this. It felt like rifling through someone’s personal possessions, like voyeurism. 

Climbing aboard, he tried to prize open the faded oak door at the back of the craft, and after a few quick shoves there was the sound of snapping metal. With a gentle tap, the door yawned open. 

Inside the cabin, thin beams of sunlight pierced through gaps in the curtains, dust motes hanging in the streams of warm gold. He went along the boat solemnly opening the curtains until once again light returned fully to the interior.

It was the book open on the table that caught his attention first. A biography of Larkin. Gently, he closed it. 

He tried to imagine Rhonda living inside this two metre by fifteen metre space. Tried to imagine this enigmatic figure sat on the squeaking swivel chair in the corner of the room, hunched over the table trying to read, half her face illuminated by the warm glow of the industrial lamp fastened with a vice to the desk. 

A thick smell of smoke lingered in the boat, and an extinguished cigarette remained in the ash tray. He was always surprised at how much could fit in a boat so small, how much of life could be preserved with so little space. Shimmying past a plush red sofa, on the far wall of the room he found a small white bookcase, packed tightly but neatly with books. Each shelf had two rows to it. Hardcover novels and poetry pamphlets. Flicking open several of the books revealed they were full of neon sticky notes, carefully annotated with pencil. There was a neatness to the whole boat that he hadn’t expected. The precisely regimented books, an attentively stacked manuscript on the sofa, a folded pile of laundry by the door.

He passed the bathroom and looked into the bedroom. A carefully made bed, with a table next to it. In the far corner, a stagnant pool of dark black water had begun to fill the room. It reminded the inspector of the Charles Forte books he’d devoured as a child, and he imagined the boat being pulled into some other plane where all missing boats go.

On the bedside table he found two photos: a woman that he assumed was Rhonda with two older adults that he assumed were her parents; and another of Rhonda and a second woman embracing. He placed the photos back down on the table and wondered absently if the people from the Bodleian would take these photos for their exhibit as well.

###

He didn’t have long to wait, soon a man in a long overcoat came cycling down the towpath. He rested his worn-out bike on a nearby hedgerow and introduced himself as a professor at the university.

‘I’m here to collect the books for the exhibit,’ he said. Pausing, he added: ‘I was told there would be two of you. What happened to your colleague?’

‘Lunch,’ the inspector replied morosely.

‘Rather late for lunch isn’t it? It’s almost two.’

‘I know.’

They set to work clearing out the boat. 

‘I was very sorry to hear about Rhonda,’ the professor said, arms laden with books. ‘She was always so happy, such a warm member of the faculty.’ He paused. ‘What, you seem surprised?’

‘I heard she moved onto the boat after her divorce.’

The professor began to laugh. ‘Oh no! She left her husband quite happily, always found him quite boring. Never was interested in men, but she had to keep up appearances, such was the time. She may have lived alone, but she certainly wasn’t lonely. She was just different.’

It took them an hour to carry out most of the books and manuscripts and lie them on the towpath, and when they were done they stood in silence watching the boat drifting on the water.

‘Have you read her poems?’ the professor asked.

‘You should,’ the professor said, ‘like gold spun by some mad genius.’

He handed the young inspector a book, a first edition of one of Rhonda’s poetry collections. He could hold it in one hand, it had no more than twenty pages. 

The professor said, ‘That, in there, is Rhonda.’

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

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

Shortlisted entries:

• “A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull” by Jim Weinstein (pseudonym)
• “Rhonda May” by Matt Unwin
• “Any Blue Will Do” by Kyla Murray
• “SPLAT!” by Sophie Lyne

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.

301:301

My opponent stands behind the line, darts in hand. What started as a bustling bar, a cacophony of cheers, has fallen into pin drop silence. Sixteen competitors became two. 

Three darts fly in quick succession.

15, 10, 17

259:301

I step up, not making eye contact with my competitor. I’m not playing her; I’m playing the board.  Staring straight at the 20, I aim and shoot.

5

I attempt to steady my hand. I throw again.

5

Damn it.

12

259:279

I step back to my teammates. “You got this.” Whispers Jen. I return a half-baked smile. Her words normally reassure me, but here they give no relief. As much as she tries, she can never understand. This is my last chance.

8, 7, double 8

228:279

My turn again. My heart is racing. I need this win. 

Treble 7

The pounding in my chest lessens. My opening darts were just a fluke. If I can hit a treble 7, I can hit a treble 19, and if I can hit a treble 19, then treble 20 is within my reach. 

19

The dart lodges itself up against the wire. It’s close to the triple, too close. I need to shift my aim down and right.

3

228:239

Winners don’t throw 3’s. The match is basically over, may as well go home now.

I’ve been watching this girl play and she is nothing if not consistent. My darts style is a little more… sporadic. At my second session with the team Jen called me a “wildcard” and I burst out laughing. Back then, the title felt completely antithetical to how I saw myself. Now I have to embrace it.

Because I need this win.

11, treble 8, 7

186:239

She’s playing it safe and running away with it. If she’s aiming for 16 then her misses are 8’s and 7’s. We’ve all seen how badly my gambits are paying off. My 20’s become 5’s and my 19’s are 3s. It’s a poor showing for a final. I aim again.

12

When I used to run my mind would go blank during competitions. I’d disappear into myself until I crossed the finish line. In darts, my mind wanders. I’ve learnt to allow the tangents to occupy my attention. If I overanalyse my throws it puts me off even more.

I used to pretend the dartboard was Marcus’s face. His perfect, sculpted, posh-boy central London face. Although I’m less over the break-up than I pretend to be, my need to imagine repeatedly firing darts into him has lessened. Until today, when I saw a photo of him for the first time in months.

Treble 5

She was one of his friends from sixth form. Long dark straight hair and supermodel legs. I never thought much about her until I saw those legs wrapped around him in that scantily clad beach pic that graced my home page.

“It’s basically pornographic” said Jen when I showed it to her “Don’t these people’s parents follow them?” 

Double 20

186:172

I’m back in the game. I can hear Jen’s relief as she grabs my arm and squeezes tightly. Other than myself, this win would mean the most to her. Varsity Darts is her baby. She created this club in her second year and has dedicated most of her time to it since. She wasn’t even doing it for a Blue, she just loves the game. It was Ben, with a friend at Cambridge, who suggested the competition. From then on she was a woman possessed to get Darts Society to Blue status. It always makes me giggle to imagine her standing in front of a bench of actual athletes, reciting her impassioned speech. Their answer – “sure, whatever.” 

I feel guilty in a way, she’s been working at this for ages and I only joined at the start of Michaelmas under duress from my mother. Before I went back to Oxford she sat me down and told me the time for moping was over. She pulled out her laptop and showed me her picks for clubs I should join to “Get back out there.”

I chose darts to appease her, largely because it was the only one of her suggestions you could drink at without looking like an alcoholic. I used to play with my grandad on family holidays so I knew I was decent. I never expected to end up here.

11, Double 14, 10

151: 172

10’s an odd choice, can’t be deliberate. Have I shaken her? I got tops last round. If I can get a treble 20 the game is mine.

My summer after finals was more subdued than my coursemates. Kicking off the long vac by getting dumped wasn’t particularly pleasant. I got none of my top choices for my fourth-year project and the physio said my ankle still couldn’t take enough weight to start running again. My finals results arrived unceremoniously, a low 2:1 put the final nail in my coffin.

1

There’s playing risky and then there’s playing badly. I don’t yet know what sort of player I am.

I don’t even know who I am.

1

There’s an audible inhale from the Oxford side of the bar. 

My mum has a photo on her fridge of me on matriculation day. It’s not an official one, my best mate Sarah took it on her phone. I looked at that photo a lot this summer, wondering what first-year me would think of my life now. She’d be baffled as to why I wasn’t running, embarrassed that I wasn’t anywhere near the top of my class, and confused as to where my friends had gone.

20

151:150

Ex-best mate is probably a more accurate term for Sarah. We haven’t spoken in two years. I’m aware she graduated last summer. I should have sent her a text but I feared the inevitable “I told you so” about Marcus.

My opponent throws her darts. Before I can comprehend what’s happened, I hear cheering from the Cambridge team.

16, 16, Double 19

81:151

Sarah dropped the criticism after she realised Marcus wasn’t going anywhere. She was always judgemental, yet principled too. She lived within her means and never forgot where she came from. When I told her I was going on the Ski trip, she laughed.

Double 11

“But you’ve never skied a day in your life. Skiing isn’t for people like us – it’s natural selection for the rich.” She smiled like she was joking, but I knew she believed it.

14

After I fell skiing, after I broke my ankle, after I had surgery, after months of pain, after I had to give up running, I phased her out. I could feel the self-righteousness hiding behind her concern. Marcus told me he never liked her anyway, and that was that. 

Triple 8

81:90

I miss Sarah, I miss Marcus too sometimes, but the thing I miss most is running. The serenity of it, the peace that I could only find by myself. I think I would have gotten over losing it much easier if it was just a hobby but I was good. I was so good. I was on track for a Blue – a near miss at varsity in first year but I was confident about second year, everyone was.

Triple 7, 19, Double 18

35:90

It’s all over, she can win on her next throw. For me to have any chance I need to get Triple 20.

12

After I aced my prelims Marcus joked. “Look at you – on track for the triple threat.”

A first, a blue, and a spouse. They say everyone leaves Oxford with at least one. I could have all three. I was going to have all three. 

18

Then I broke my ankle. My degree got difficult and the work piled up. To top it all off, Marcus broke up with me because our “trajectories didn’t align.”

So here I am in the last chance saloon, also known as the Brasenose college bar.

18

35:54

She’s going to win – she knows it too.

15

Your last dart must hit a double. If she hits the double 10 it’s over.

10

I can feel the tears swimming in my eyes. This was my last chance. My last chance at being something, at leaving this god-forsaken city with something to be proud of.

5

5:54

She blew it. I have three darts. I can salvage a win.

I need this win.

14

I aimed for 14 without really thinking. I’ve got tops before and I can do it again. If I was being logical I would have gone for double 11, but I have no logic left, only hope.

I need this win.

Miss

It lands just above where it needs to be. 

One dart. I aim again

I need this win.

Double 20

5:0

And the crowd erupts.

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

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

Shortlisted entries:

• “A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull” by Jim Weinstein (pseudonym)
• “Rhonda May” by Matt Unwin
• “Any Blue Will Do” by Kyla Murray
• “SPLAT!” by Sophie Lyne

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.

At the base of East Gate, on the High, rests a broken man. He is illiterate, but quite the talker. I, however, am a talented writer, if I do say so myself. Oxford educated, although I wasn’t always the most studious. But I’m as qualified as any to put pen to paper, and he asked me to tell his story. Destroyed as he is, brain totally scrambled, he can barely scrape his thoughts into order, but he told me his tale in splishes and splashes. Allons-y!

The poor man is in tremendous pain, unlike anything you or I could comprehend. It’s hot, strangely metallic, and so agonising that he thinks nothing could ever be worse. And nothing is, until the next moment, and the next, and the next.

He feels cold, too, frozen from deep within his gooey insides. It’s a wonder he remains in the liquid state in the winter months. A dribble of remaining spirit must be enough to keep him animate, and warm. 

Above all, though, he’s lonely. He has no family, no friends. At first, locals came and tried to squeeze him back together; they scraped his guts back inside of him and bundled him up in Sellotape until he was fully mummified and practically spherical. Once term started, student activist types had all sorts of theories of how to fix him, but their theories lacked practicality, of course. Dreaming spires, sure, but not one person in this majestic city could put a man back together. After all sorts of city planning debates, it was decided he would remain in place.

Remembering the worst of it can’t help him now, so he stares, unblinkingly, into the sky (which you can never quite have looked at enough). The High has plenty to distract him: twinkling bike bells, the inane chatter of young lovers, the smell of food, the clamour of Covered Market sellers. And people avoid stepping on him, for the most part. He cherishes the promise of summer, some warmth to thaw the frost on his shell. Generally, adults avoid him (out of sight, out of mind), students sometimes say hello, but the little ones from the local school come and peer at him, and engage in small talk.

“It was nice,” he gurgled to me one morning.

“Nice?” I asked.

“It was nice,” he clarified, “Up on the wall.” He could see the whole city in its glory, sprawling and crawling wider by the minute. The evening light was bright in his eyes, but turned the Oxford stone golden, and gave the Church spire a long, spindly shadow which looked almost like a man, he thought. He looked down on the tiny townsfolk, going about their days like robots, with a sense that he ruled the world, perched above it all as he was.

And they really did try to help, when he fell. When he tumbled all the way from the top of the city wall to its bottom, where he went, for lack of a better word, SPLAT!

Humpty Dumpty can’t really move, and so he remains, still, after all this time, at the base of the high stone wall, which stands as an unpleasant reminder of his hubris (and a useful protective barrier on windy days). He doesn’t feel abandoned exactly, but he does feel forgotten; on top of the wall, he had dreams, and the fall woke him up in the middle of a really good one.

I don’t enjoy telling you all of this, but Old Humpty asked me to. I went to visit him for a final time a few weeks ago. I was his first visitor in months, he said, although he admitted that he loses track of time sometimes. He’s not much, anymore: little of the yolk and white remain, and the stone beneath him is discoloured, a mark of where he’s begun to decompose. But he’s still recognisably him.

An eggshell, almost pure calcium carbonate, will take a long time to biodegrade. When he asked me, “How long do I have?” I told him I did not know. I wanted to console him, but I didn’t know what to say. I’ve never liked talking to the dying.

Over the course of my shamefully infrequent visits, Humpty shared with me his past and his present, which I have told to you in its entirety. His future, I knew, was up to me.

I went to three Colleges before one took the bait, and agreed to fund some sort of memorial for the rotting man on the High. The Master suggested a statue could be placed by his body, I whiningly pushed for Radcliffe Square, but Humpty, wheezing in my ear, asked us to place his likeness on top of the wall, where he sat on that damning day.

And so, a bronze egg sits on a City wall, directly above the decaying man it was built for. The locals have come up with a rhyme about him, inspired by the imposing figure which shines orange at sunset.

I don’t know it exactly – something about the wall, the fall, the horses and men, back together again. It’s just a brief little ditty, quite light-hearted, for the children. It makes Humpty happy, so I approve, of course. Perhaps you’ve heard it.

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

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

Shortlisted entries:

• “A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull” by Jim Weinstein (pseudonym)
• “Rhonda May” by Matt Unwin
• “Any Blue Will Do” by Kyla Murray
• “SPLAT!” by Sophie Lyne