Third Place Winner 2026 Gooseberry Pie Writing Competition
by Kik Lodge
I tell the interviewer the story of the kid on the railway track at Mount Clemens, the little three-year-old Jimmy Mackenzie, son of the station agent, and the fast approaching train, how the father doesn’t see his lad, but a 15-year-old Edison does, and so Edison grabs him, saves his life, and the station agent, ecstatic with gratitude, says what I can do to thank you, and Edison says teach me to use that telegraph you have, plus if I can have my lab in one of your carriages that would be grand, and anyway we all know what happens next. What I’m saying is, I know I don’t have all the qualifications, I know I haven’t saved your kid’s life, and I definitely won’t invent anything monumental, but if you give me a chance, I’ll get the job done, I might even become a whiz. The interviewer has just clicked his pen and sniffed and is probably going to write Loser on his form, but I don’t care, because this loser is on a roll, a roll that’s made of a wake-up call and a slowly growing pizzazz. Why, you might ask— well, because of the old boy on the train this morning with his Have you seen the magnolia? which no one answered, so he repeated it again and again, Have you seen the magnolia?, but people turned away, all awkward, until he arrived in front of me and I said yes, because I’d seen the trees as I was walking to the station when I thought the world was a waste of time, and that was the one thing that gave me enough oomph to go to my fourth interview in a week. Yes, I have mate, it’s beautiful; the purple giving way to pink, just magic. And the man stopped and nodded, looked at me with an incy flicker of light in his old eyes, then out of the train window at spring blooming into something else, and said Magic, yeah, bang on.
Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in France. Her work can be found in some lovely journals and her collection, The Bully in my Pillow, is forthcoming with Stanchion Books in August.
Photo by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on Unsplash
