This photograph by Louella Lester was on of the prompts for the Pokrass prize. Find out more about Meg’s promptand her general comments about the winners here. Her comments about Anika’s piece are at the end of the story
Anika Carpenter
The Best Friend I Ever Had
I’d hoped Stacey would be at the school reunion. Seeing her by the drinks table, it made my heart want to pickle itself. She had a pixie cut when we hung out. She looked just as elfin with a shoulder-length bob hanging across half her face, echoing that house, the one on her street with ivy growing over the windows. The one that other kids said was haunted. Stacey told me that was bullshit.
‘The woman who lives there is more alive than any of those losers. She has a brown bear in her bedroom. They’re lovers. She grows creepers up the walls to keep the light out so he can sleep through winter.’
But that’s just the kind of thing you say when you’ve been given Marian Engels to read before your thirteenth birthday. At least that’s what mother told me.
‘If you think I’m lying,’ Stacey had said, ‘come and sit on her front steps. I’m there every night, listening to them fucking.’
Our clothes got dank sitting straining to hear low, earthy lovemaking. Streetlights cast an orange glow across Stacey’s cheeks. It got brighter the quieter we were. ‘Stacey,’ I’d said. But she’d shushed me before I could ask if she thought there was a tree big enough to trap a person in its resin, to perfectly preserve a feeling. Then the groaning began. Not ecstatic, not the sound of all consuming abandonment, but the grunting efforts of the old woman who lived in that house, struggling with a bucket of cold water to throw over us.
We drifted apart after that night. After I told other kids all of Stacey’s crazy stories.
I thought Stacey being at the reunion was a good sign, thought I could make up for everything by telling her what I’d found out about the old woman, how she was a widow with two sons living abroad, how they organised, but refused to attend her funeral. But Stacey turned greyish, said, ‘It was a trick. No old lady in this town could ever be that fierce. It was the bear that drenched us. He’d taken on human form. Those two would’ve done anything not to be separated.’ She shoved her empty glass at me and left.
On the drive home break lights were scarlet fireflies I wanted to plough into. Just to have someone scream at me, at my unforgivable carelessness.
Meg’s Comments:
‘The Best Friend I Ever Had’ is a dark and unsettling piece about a ruined friendship featuring a hallucinogenic, life-changing flashback and misunderstanding between 2 best friends. I love the way the story seamlessly zips backwards and forwards in time—so hard to pull off in a tiny story.
Anika Carpenter lives and works in Brighton, UK. Her stories have been published by The Disappointed Housewife, Gone Lawn, Fictive Dream, and others, and have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Prize (twice).You can find her via her website, www. anikacarpenter.com
