In Competition No. 2594 you were invited to submit a short story beginning ‘It was the wrong number that started it…’ and ending ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise.’ In case you were wondering, the first line is the opening of City of Glass by Paul Auster and the final one is the conclusion to Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Both rank in the American Book Review’s top hundred first/last lines of novels.
The comp generated a gratifyingly weighty postbag in which transposed digits, con artists and murderous spouses featured strongly. I liked Keith Norman’s snapshot of salad rage, and was equally impressed by Sid Field, Rosemary Fisher and Eric Grunwald.
The winners are printed below and are rewarded with £25 each. The extra fiver goes to John Samson.
It was the wrong number that started it. Bless those crossword compilers. Nothing to do with telephones. ‘Number’ meant that jab done by dentists. Solution was ‘cocaine’. I was clueless. She had been right. In this correct light, May’s eyes positively glistened. Kinsey should have researched the value of cryptic clue-solving as foreplay. Before long, we two were down and across. That’s how the Acrostic of Ruislip began. We recruited similar-worded people; those prepared to put the sin into synonyms. Anagram nights were especially popular; rearranging wives and husbands into rhyming couplets. Simile-only sessions were like fancying like. The image-conscious attended our Wit Watchers evenings and several puns were shed. Inhibitions were dropped along with typographical case. As I said in a thank-you letter to the host of an alliterative saucy spouse-swapping soirée, ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise’.
John Samson
‘It was the wrong number that started it, that Dardanelles shambles.
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