THE winners and runners-up of the inaugural Farnham Short Story Competition were announced in December - and the Herald is delighted to share two of the shortlisted scribes below.

Launched by Farnham-based writers’ group The Fellowship of the Pen in partnership with the Herald and Waterstones, the contest exceeded all expectations, attracting just under 60 entries of 1,000 words or fewer.

Steve Wheeler, a Cotswolds-based amateur writer, was announced the winner by celebrated author Claire Fuller in a ceremony at Waterstones in Lion and Lamb Yard for his story ‘A Gathering of Driftwood’ - published on the Fellowship’s Facebook page last month. It can be viewed at www.facebook.com/groups/fellowshipofthepen/

Honourable mentions were also given to Julie Evans for her story ‘Awake’ and Jonathan Glade for ‘The Little Blade’, whose stories the Herald can now publish online.

• Julie Evans said: “I have loved writing all my life, but it has always been something I have done alone, not showing my work. This year I have taken creative writing classes, which have given me the confidence to put my work ‘out there’ and not to be afraid of criticism.

“I have attempted a novel, which was an excellent learning experience, but recently have been concentrating more on short stories and micro-fiction.

“I was born in Manchester and went to a girls’ grammar school. I have an MA in history from Oxford University which is where I met my husband Martin.

“After university, I joined a large multi-national company on the graduate scheme and progressed through a number of roles in human resources.

“I have three children, two girls and a boy, who are now 26, 24 and 14.

“I have lived in Surrey for most of my adult life, although we lived in Singapore for two years because of my husband’s work, which was a fantastic experience.

“Now I am no longer working and have more time to enjoy life and indulge my interests. I particularly enjoy walking my dog, Mouse, in the beautiful Surrey countryside.

“In addition to my passion for writing, I am very interested in genealogy and have produced family ‘stories’ for a number of friends, including a complete ‘book’ on the history of my Australian son-in-law’s fascinating family.”

AWAKE

by Julie Evans

AWAKE. Again.

He’s had a dream. He doesn’t remember it, just that it was disturbing. Where did the good dreams go?

It’s too hot. He turns to the left, towards the window, but she’s there, facing him. She’s strayed onto his side of the bed again, so he gives her a shove but she doesn’t move.

She’s heavy now. The mound of her there in the bed makes him ache. He’s inhaling her carbon-dioxide. She breathes heavily, with short nasal grunts interspersed between breaths.

It’s an old lady thing, because when they first met, she was a nymph. Diaphanous and rose-sweet. Her sleeping breaths were pale river breezes that made the pillow frills tremble. He would watch, supported on one elbow, entranced. He smiles in the darkness at the memory.

He turns back the other way, and flips the pillow. For a few seconds, the cool cotton is soothing before it draws the warmth from his head. He thrusts his legs out of the duvet. No, that doesn’t feel right. Legs in. No, one in and one out, to let the air circulate.

He takes several gulps of water from the glass at the bedside. He can feel it going down, sluicing his oesophagus until his stomach greets it with a small growl. How long did that take, from mouth to stomach? Three seconds? Four?

He drinks again. Counts. His digestive system reminds him of the kids’ old game, Mousetrap, where a ball-bearing travelled through the convoluted Heath Robinson apparatus of tubes and staircases and valves to kick the bucket that eventually brought a plastic cage down to trap the little mouse.

Every night he listens to the industrial processes in the toy factory of his intestines. All those peristaltic contractions and squirting sphincters, still doing their work now on last night’s fish and chips under the skin of his flabby belly.

The itching has started. Left, now right buttock. He’s chasing it, across his back up to his shoulder blade and neck, and it’s running away, teasing. Now in his scalp, creeping slowly back from his temples. He’s scratching through his brittle hair and the noise sounds loud in his head, like rough sandpaper on window-frames.

What time is it? Sometimes he hears the church clock chime the muffled hour in the distance, but it’s silent now. She won’t have a clock in the bedroom, not just because of the ticking or humming but because it reminds her of how, once, time was of no consequence. Time once stretched forever along a yellow brick road.

If this was summer, he could have told the time by the light, but it’s early autumn. There’s no birdsong and no hum from the distant A3, but if it’s after five, he’ll get up and take a shower.

Then, by the time he’s finished, the shipping forecast will be over and he won’t feel like it’s just him and the trawler-men in the North Sea who are defying the darkness. After a lifetime of habit, he can’t bring himself to start his daily routines without Radio 4.

He wants to get up now because his thoughts are straying into dangerous territory. The what-was-the-point-of-me questions are circling like vultures, waiting to swoop.

He sits up at the side of the bed, stretches each arm up and over, waiting for the satisfying crack of his shoulder bones. He still sleeps naked and sometimes she averts her gaze when the light is on, as though she finds him distasteful, and she now wears full pyjamas, buttoned up and battened down where once her bare skin had brushed and blushed against the sheets.

The bathroom light is fierce and hurts his eyes. His urine, falling in spurts, dribs and drabs, into the open toilet, is strong yellow. He feels unsteady, standing there for so long, waiting to finish, and has to place a balancing hand on the basin. In the shaving mirror, he examines the moonscape of his face, his hair sticking up in restless grey tufts of tumbleweed. Somewhere half-hidden behind the facade is a handsome man.

There is the sound of a car on the road outside, and then, seconds later, another. It makes him feel better, knowing that there are others up and awake. It’s a normal day. Life carries on. The people in the cars will be going to work early, facing the boredom of a long day at the office or the stress of a big meeting.

At least, for him, those days are past. How he would once have longed for a Wednesday that stretched out before him with nothing planned, a day that promised bright autumn skies and the gold of turning leaves.

It’s getting lighter now. She’s awake. She never sleeps late either.

“Cup of tea, darling?” he says, and she stretches and smiles and suddenly he’s filled with love for her, with gratitude for their life together. How would he ever manage without her, or she without him?

But that’s a question for tomorrow, not for today. Perhaps today he will surprise her, take her out for an impromptu lunch. She’ll be delighted with the spontaneity. They can share a bottle of wine like they used to.

Yes. For once, they will ignore the dire warnings on the labels of the his-and-her pill bottles lined up on the kitchen counter, and get just a little bit tipsy.

• Jonathan Glade is a lifelong poet, and has only turned his hand to prose in the last few months.

“I’ve been working on a collection of poems called ‘Love Songs’,” he said. “There were some ideas I had that didn’t work as poems, so I thought I’d try them as short stories. But when I sat down at the keyboard, what came out was murder and mayhem – honestly, I have no idea where it came from!”

Jonathan grew up in Surrey, and has lived in London, New York and Bordeaux. He now lives in Woking. He has a grown-up daughter who he describes as “the wisest person I know”, and is wildly and passionately in love with a Spanish woman from Galicia. Although he’s made his career as a management consultant, he says he’s “currently plotting a major change of direction”.

THE LITTLE KNIFE

by Jonathan Glade

DANIEL had bought it from the kitchen shop in January, months before he’d need it.

He’d chosen it carefully; not obvious, not what you’d expect, but functional, reliably functional.

Design mattered to him. ‘Form and function,’ he thought to himself. The man in the shop said that it was for splitting very hard cheese, so it was usually called a Parmesan knife.

But then he explained that because of the shape of the blade it was sometimes also known as a half-heart knife. That made Daniel smile.

It wasn’t really a knife at all. A bulbous, polished wooden handle with a stubby, broad blade, more generously curved on the bottom edge than on the top. There was a slight edge to the blade, not sharp enough to cut or slice anything; it was the tip of the blade, needle sharp, that did the work. It was no more than 10 or 12 centimetres from end to end.

It felt small, so very small, too small to be real, in his hand. But held in the palm, the bulb of the handle sat tight, and the thumb and forefinger naturally rested on the smooth, cool blade.

He had originally intended to hide it when he brought it home, but then he had another thought; he put it in the kitchen drawer with the other tools and utensils. ‘Hidden in plain sight,’ he thought himself. He smiled every time she went to the drawer. She never noticed it was there, never commented.

Sometimes when she went out, he took it out of the drawer. He held it, felt it, experienced it; he needed to know it existed, that he had it, that he was prepared. He took pleasure in it. He loved wrapping his fingers around the fat wooden belly of the handle. It looked smooth, but in his hand, he felt the grain; rougher under the finger tips than you’d expect. And he enjoyed the contrast with the polished steel.

‘It disturbs,’ he thought. ‘I know it’s a domestic object, I know it’s purpose, but it looks wrong – a knife that isn’t. Too small, too round, no edge where the edge should be; the point as sharp as a needle.’ He said it out loud. ‘It disturbs.’ He savoured the feel of the dull edge when he scraped it across his palm; and when he closed his eyes and pressed the fine, cheesesplitting point into the tip of his middle finger and drew blood, he felt something close to ecstasy.

He’d planned to get rid of it after he killed her, but when the moment came he couldn’t part with it. He’d thought of the dishwasher, but then remembered that you shouldn’t put knives with wooden handles in the machine. ‘I’ve told you that a thousand times,’ she’d said.

He smiled. ‘You won’t be telling me again,’ he thought. So he’d wiped it carefully in the sink with a damp cloth and some washing-up liquid. Then he’d dried it carefully with paper towel and taken it out into the garden.

The summer-house had been one of his projects. He’d built it himself, with his own hands. He hadn’t cut any corners. The wooden shingle roof overhung the walls, and it had proper soffit-boards, with vents, under the eaves. For a moment, before he put the knife away, he’d touched the steel of the blade against his cheek. It had only taken a second to slip the blade into one of the vents. He knew it would be safe there.

It seemed he was right. The police had searched the house and the garden, but they saw it as a disappearance, not a murder. The fuss had gone on for months, but eventually died down. And even then, he’d waited. He’d waited through the long summer and autumn, deep into winter, thinking of his little friend hidden away under the eaves.

It was a cold, evening in the new year, after dark, before he eventually allowed himself to put on his wellingtons, walk carefully down the path and along the side of the summerhouse, and put his hand up under the eaves and into the vent.

When it wasn’t right there, under his fingertips, he froze. A wave of panic hit him. His fingers scrabbled left and right in the slot, even though he knew he’d left it front and centre.

The base of his hand was wider than the slot, but he forced his hand hard up against the opening, pushing, stretching, desperately reaching, scrabbling for something that wasn’t there. He could feel his heartbeat accelerating, pounding, and he realised his breath was coming in short gasps as he tried to fill his lungs.

Suddenly his strength melted. His legs gave way. He dropped to the ground, landing awkwardly on the frozen earth. He sat there, his forehead resting against the shed. It was five minutes or more before his mind cleared and he began to think more clearly.

While he knew it couldn’t have moved – why would it? – he knew he had to look for it. It was too dark now though. That was a job for the morning, for daylight.

Back in the house, he put the kettle on. Waiting for it to boil, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a deep, sweeping wave of loss. It took him by surprise. He realised he was grieving for his little friend. For what felt like an age, but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, he stood quite still, eyes closed, allowing the emotion to wash over him. Then he breathed again, opened his eyes, and turned. He opened the kitchen drawer and took out a knife, a little paring knife. It wasn’t the same thing. The straight black handle was made of resin, not wood, and didn’t nestle itself into his palm as his little friend did. But as he felt the blade slice across his hand, felt the blood come, he started to feel better.