Volley of Pinecones by Charlie Turnbull
Runner-up in the third Lunate 500 competition
‘Headlong and heart-borne, Volley of Pinecones invokes the fleeting and the inexorable. How a loved moment becomes a memory, and then is gone—that’s the rub, here, flash fiction ideally suited to the narrative task. Our narrator, her partner, and their three children prepare to drive home after what was seemingly a pleasant family hike; the boys wrestle, fling pinecones, the mother scoops up the toddler, and the father intervenes. Can all of this be remembered? The lovely language here seems to answer the question demonstrably, the narrator pleading, “and please a paper and pen.” But maybe nothing’s retrievable: maybe “It’s already gone,” as the eight-year-old already knows. And maybe memory itself is simply a volley of pinecones.’
Alan Michael Parker (judge)
***
‘There’s a buzzard hovering over the tor. It’s beautiful.’ Late August and I, too, drift in white blinding dusk over the valley, and my eight year-old, so thoughtful he is a tight plug of fear in my gullet, shields his eyes and we stare at the sky together, after a walk, waiting by the car for everyone to catch up, and the hot quarrels of bedtime are a cautionary tale I must have told myself once, and a pinecone bounces from his forehead, and he yelps, putting his six year-old brother, irrepressible in pursuit of hedonism, into a headlock, and the brother laughs, and their three year-old sister, who always knows what she wants fiercely, crawls onto the knot of them, and I pull her up to me simply because I still can, and the car beeps to unlock, while they invent a game where they throw pinecones at each other but mostly their father, waxing bigger in every sense than when we met, waning twenties, and sometimes I don’t recognise him, or do I, and he slowly opens a pantomime maw to bellow, and the brothers charge screaming to jump and cram pinecones into his mouth, and I scrape curls I won’t cut from eyebrows snaking with anger, and she leans away until I let her go, and a threatening draft from the moor rattles callow leaves from a beech, and my husband’s tread crushes them as he chokes on laughter and desiccated seeds, and please a paper and pen because my rib cage strains with this weight, and can I slide the fresh pitch of these voices, the heather pink cheeks and reaching sapling arms mistaking me for sun, can I slide it all between degree essays and rejection letters I can still quote by heart in the attic, slip it between friends I loved and miss, smooth it a sedimenting night-cream into the creases, brush it into granite-flecked hair, use it to stop eroding grain-by-grain, here, where I have emerged abruptly from these hills, a monolith for them – and the eight-year old is back again moments later, shielding his eyes next to me.
‘It’s already gone,’ he says, crumbling me into the wuther.
But when I look up, they volley me with pinecones.