The photograph by Louella Lester was the main prompt for the competition Find out more details about the prompt and Meg’s general comments here. Meg’s comments about Susan’s piece are at the end of the story.

Susan Wigmore

LORCA THOUGHT THE DEAD IN SPAIN ARE MORE ALIVE THAN ANYWHERE ELSE; HE DIDN’T KNOW MY SISTER

Three people have died in our house, my dead sister tells me when she moves back home. But she’s the most tragic. Italics spike her voice now as if I’ve grown stupid in her absence. Granted, the couple who died together in the back-room bed win hands down for romance, but they were old and died last century so don’t count. She says this while scrutinising the height chart in pencil marks made by our mother on the kitchen wall. She’s lost none of her competitiveness: hers stop at 4′ 10″. Sometimes we play Scrabble and I let her win because she’s prettier when she doesn’t sulk. This is one thing I’ve learned. Another is not to talk of smartening up the place, which sends her into a tizz and we have to batch bake to calm her down. But she’s not afraid of the dark any more. In fact, lights are such a bone of contention you’d think hers was a lone crusade to save the world, all the fuss she makes when I leave one on. She’s right at home with on-demand though and watches David Attenborough all night on iPlayer in the greyish glow of the screen. I lie awake in milky-blue moonlight and listen to the hills moan. In the morning, I find her slumped on the sofa. The teeth grinding is new. And her favourite film now is ‘The Amityville Horror’, which she watches by candlelight (for atmosphere, stupid). When I say she’s too young, she just snorts and tells me to get a life. She practises hiding sometimes even though she’s a dab hand already. Visitors are rare but one day a neighbour turned up as the plumber arrived; it was all I could do to cope with raffle tickets and dripping taps let alone a dead sister so I told her to make herself scarce. Now she ups and disappears for days just to make a point and I never know when she’s coming back. She gets shirty when I ask where she’s been and reckons I can’t have my cake and eat it. She says she’s cool with the whole death thing really, but I don’t believe her. Yesterday I found her trying on my bras, pushing up the buds of her breasts as if they’d fill the cups. I think she was crying.

Meg’s Comments
“LORCA THOUGHT THE DEAD IN SPAIN ARE MORE ALIVE THAN ANYWHERE ELSE; HE DIDN’T KNOW MY SISTER” is a darkly surreal ghost story about the dynamics of a sibling relationship which, even after death, refuses to change or heal. This is story of a very deliberate kind of haunting and the author’s work with emotional observation about sibling connections won me over.

Susan’s writing has been published, placed or listed by Reflex Fiction, Oxford Flash Fiction, the Fish Short Story Prize, Mslexia, Retreat West, the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize and The Daily Telegraph Short Story Competition. She won inclusion in the first Fractured Lit Anthology chosen by Kathy Fish, the Fish Flash Prize 2023 and the Globe Soup Short Memoir 2022. A flash non-fiction piece was shortlisted for the 2022 QuietManDave Prize. She is delighted her novella-in-flash was longlisted for the Bath Award 2024.