Take a Bite: Rhys Davies Short Story Award Anthology

As a genre the short story occupies an ambiguous place somewhere between the novel and poetry, and in the English language, at least, struggles to make its presence felt these days. In Wales The New Welsh Review publishes short fiction regularly and Planet does so occasionally, but that is more or less it, and you would be hard put to get a story accepted that is more than 2,000 words. There is no magazine or journal that would take a longer story, shading into the novella, like Chekhov’s ‘The Steppe’. Publishers, too, are wary of short story collections, which rarely sell as well as novels. Writers are nonetheless attracted to the genre, and anthologies arising from short story competitions, like Take a Bite, serve as a very useful window on what is being done today. On offer here are twelve stories by a diversity of writers, most of them Welsh or with Welsh connections, demonstrating what a malleable form the short story is. Many deal with contemporary situations, like Elizabeth Pratt’s ‘James, in During’, about a young man who is by nature a loner forced during lockdown to come to terms with isolation, or Philippa Holloway’s ‘A Cloud of Starlings’ which takes as its starting point the mysterious mass death of starlings on Ynys Môn a while ago, using it to explore a mother’s relation to her daughter. Sophie is a problem child, shunned at school, who feels her loneliness, turning in on herself, yet she is a gifted child who becomes obsessed with the dead starlings outside their house, reading up on them, dissecting their bodies in an obsessive way which her mother cannot understand. One of the pleasures of the short story for me is the way in which it has many of the attributes of poetry and in fact becomes poetry in the hands of someone like Katherine Mansfield. Space is at a premium in the story, so words cannot be wasted. In Craig Hawes’ ‘Coat of Arms’ airliner vapour trails are ‘like frayed ropes’; in Naomi Paulus’s excellent ‘Take a Bite’ one of the narrator’s aunts enters and is nailed down immediately: ‘…it always mystified Rhian how a woman could have such a massive bust but be so completely not sexual. Just a kind of amorphous, fleshy protrusion from the front of her torso, like a benign cyst’—and there you have her. There is not a weak story in this collection, and it seems invidious to pick out some and not mention others, but it can hardly be otherwise in a short review. Joshua Jones’s ‘Half Moon, New Year’ stood out for me, however. It is New Year’s Eve and the Half Moon pub is packed with revellers, the middle-aged crowding the saloon, the young sitting and shivering in the outdoor smoking area. Then Danny arrives with a mate, dead drunk, with a hard look in his eyes. He exudes the threat of violence and when it is triggered he gives a vicious beating to one of the youths outside. His mate drags him away and they stumble past a chapel. ‘Do you remember when we were kids?’ Danny says, ‘and always had to sing there every Christmas?...Those were the best days of my life. Simpler then, init?’ Danny has been brutalized by life, but it wasn’t always so. -- John Barnie @ www.gwales.com