Submission Guidelines
By Kerry Byrne
Listen to a reading of this story by Kerry Byrne:
So I read the guidelines like a good Catholic which state my submission must be a six-sentence story and I try to think of all the things that come in sixes like half a dozen eggs and spiders’ legs and then my six-year-old tells me they have eight actually and I wonder how I never knew that and it makes me think of all the gaps in my knowledge I don’t know about and I call my mother to ask her the extent of what she hasn’t told me but she’s gone out without telling me. So I decide to focus on the word count which seems too long to say what I mean but too little to say nothing at all and I ask my six-year-old what she would write about and she looks at me with a look of mine and says we all have different challenges and this is yours. So I feel both proud and admonished at once and wish for one moment that I wasn’t such a good mother and then I recall the gaps I now know I have and I feel a sense of inevitability that one day she will call and ask me to fill in a few and I can only hope she doesn’t ask about her father. So I smile and say you’re right of course and now I’m thinking about black holes and how I don’t know much about them. So I search on the internet and NASA informs me they are mysterious and not holes at all but vast concentrations of mass compressed into minute spaces and I like this idea and don’t feel so bad about the spaces within me that don’t emit or reflect light making them invisible until they affect others. So when my mother calls I ignore her.
And when my daughter calls I’ll ignore her too.
Kerry Byrne lives and writes in the Fens, with a backdrop of sky-filled water and endless horizon. Her writing has been published by Ellipsis Zine, Lucy Writers, Pidgeonholes and streetcake magazine, among others. In 2022, Kerry received a Masters in Creative Writing with Distinction from Glasgow University. Find her on Twitter @kerry__byrne.