Spectator competition winners: Monosyllabic short stories

In Competition No. 3237, you were invited to submit a short story using words of only one syllable.

This challenge produced a delightfully diverse entry with echoes of Dr Seuss, Hemingway, Kafka, Shakespeare and Beckett. The winning slots were keenly contested and I regretted not having space for Frank McDonald’s meditation on St Paul and the nature of love or David Shields on Kant and sense perception. Other strong performers included Richard Spencer, Gail White, Peter Mullen and Gillian Gammon, but it’s high fives all round and especially to the winners below who nab £20.

To hear a rare tale, weird yet true as I stand here, just take a drive out to our inn on the moor. We keep a good pint and, in the snug by the fire, you will meet Old Seth. As he tells it, a George was King when he was born. How, mad for some wench now so long dead her grave has quite gone, Seth sold his soul to Old Nick, is the crux of his tale. That Old Nick will not take said soul is the twist wrung from it: Job must live his life — a span of years far too long, as you shall see — and his mad lust these days is for nought but the trip to Hell. Want proof? Knock him flat with your car as you leave. He will not want to rise, nor do so with ease, but rise he will.  Adrian Fry

It is a truth well known that a man of means is in need of a wife. But the man is proud and when he meets a girl of wit and good sense with fine eyes and falls in love she spurns him. She would as lief flirt with a man in a red coat who tells her that the proud man wrought him wrong.