Shortlist – 2026 Gooseberry Pie Annual Writing Competition
by Mileva Anastasiadou
We should have known better than to wake up and start the day, but that’s what people do all the time, they wake up and have a shower and have coffee and go to work. We knew about Mercury retrograde, and the full moon last night, and a storm on the way, and ignored all the signs that we should stay home and have more coffee and kill time until the storm passed.
We should have known better and stayed in bed and forgotten about the outside world, we should have stayed cozy in our warm home, and maybe then we wouldn’t have argued about the traffic on our way to work, and we wouldn’t be moody for the rest of the day, and we wouldn’t have avoided each other while we worked on our laptops, and we wouldn’t have exchanged hostile glances, and then we wouldn’t have crashed into that tree, and we’d still have our car.
We should have known better and avoided all this awkward stuff, and maybe then we wouldn’t have been abducted by aliens in the midst of the storm, and we wouldn’t have known about black holes, and the greedy people playing war, and about how near the end is, and the aliens wouldn’t have entrusted us with the mission to save the world, and we wouldn’t have landed back on the planet, wet to our bones, because the storm wouldn’t stop, not until we entered the house.
We’ve taken a hot shower and we’re now crashing on the couch wondering if we stand a chance, and about how we should have known better than to go out today, and now we are burdened with a huge task, as if we didn’t have enough problems already. We miss everything we knew or didn’t know before the day started, our car, a safe world, we miss us, but we turn on the TV and we watch a movie about a house renovation in Tuscany, about an old and deserted house that comes back to life, about how it’s filled with people and joy and love again, and we make love and fall asleep in each other’s arms and we dream the same dream, we fix things in our sleep, we play games but we don’t play war, in our dream we are wizards, we play Lazarus and we rise, and that’s hope.
Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of “Christmas People”. Her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
