Cate Carlow

The Competition

Here’s the tourmaline water shimmering with an oily iridescence. Here are gelatinous tufts at the embankment edge littered by Styrofoam cups, green nylon netting, rusting trollies, plastic bottles and shopping bags, broken glass and disintegrating debris. This right here is the river. This right here is the time I can never get back. It’s easy, my sister said, to make some money when you’re clever. Just enter a writing competition. Just imagine pawning the heart-shaped locket your ex-girlfriend gave you. But the truth is, I don’t have a heart-shaped locket. I don’t have an ex-girlfriend. I’m not even a fully fleshed out human being at all. I’m just a quickly made-up character created to try and fulfil the needs of an imaginary audience. The strange thing is, there isn't any audience here, only a big market shaped hole where you put the words in and wait for the money to come out. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no need to create anything imaginary. I just need to walk right out of the compound and onto the street. There’s a pigeon whose crunched beak is baking in the November heat. That pigeon was alive yesterday and now it’s dead. Maybe it couldn’t find food. Maybe it couldn’t afford to live. Maybe it got hit by a car and wasn’t able to afford a trip to the vet. No biggie though. It’s just a pigeon, right? It’s just a pigeon whose crumpled face is squished in, whose intestines are sizzling on tarmac.