Spectator competition winners: short stories narrated from an unusual perspective

In Competition No. 3282, you were invited to submit a short story narrated from an un-usual perspective.

The seed for this challenge was Kim Stanley-Robinson’s cli-fi novel Ministry For the Future, described by the New Yorker as ‘both harrowing and heartening’. One of its chapters is narrated by a carbon atom, another by the market; a literary device informed by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (the idea that non-human entities have agency).

Honourable mentions go to Bob Pringle, Joe Bogle, Martin Leigh, C-A Herstedt and Frank Upton. The winners, printed below, are awarded £25 each.

When first I began to clear, Haggie realised he was – somehow – still alive. Very little else was, so it seemed. The landscape was upended, stripped, preposterous: decorated with stifling puddles, split duckboards, and the usual human detritus, over which I am sometimes draped by the artistic.

Haggie patted himself down, hunting through his uniform for injuries, or perhaps for one of his infernal cigarettes. He hadn’t smelt me coming, it seemed, but then men in his situation are often deprived of their senses, one by one. I was ever-present, I expect, too common to be counted. Haggie put down his rifle, out of harm’s way. It rested on a muddy shelf, perfect and useless.

Unsettled, lifted slightly by a gust, I divulged young Hofheinz, also intact, from Marburg, face charred by the same fires that produced me. A slight puff from his gun. Later I merged with the local mist.

Bill Greenwell

‘Animism,’ Bertrand Russell declares, ‘is absolute nonsense.’ Though not animism or absolute, I am nonsense; the word, or at least this particular vocal iteration of it, originating in Russell’s larynx and aided by spittle in my journey across their shared Cambridge rooms to the ears of Ludwig Wittgenstein this gloomy November Monday afternoon in 1911. I am both what Russell is saying and the refutation of what he means.