The UCL Publishers’ Prize was set up to promote and foster new writing talent. Each year the best entries inspired by a theme are published in an anthology. The theme for 2016 is ‘realism’.
Here, The Cheese Grater presents one of the succesful entries, My Father’s Broom, written by second year Geography student Thierry Ennui.
Let me tell you about the finest buffet this side of Havana. We were 20 clicks off the Amazonian Coast: Crusoe, Cortez, Miss Rabinowicz, Long John Silver, and, of course, yours truly, me. The year was unimportant, what matters is that the night was old, visibly wrinkled, and our vessel was veiled by a silky gloom. ‘Long’ was at the helm, and I was on navigation, following nothing but the cold glimmer of the stars, the childlike adventure in my heart, and an insatiable lust for glory. Harpoon, net, blunderbuss, and cutlass in hand, I stood photogenically at the prow.
Six years we’d been on its trail, the kraken, famished scourge of the seas – more squid than man. Six years with its tentacles fondling Davy Jones. I’d been alone for so long, with nothing but the rats, our vast provisions, my own thoughts, and the crew for company, when, all of a sudden, I saw it clearly for the first time! But Alas! By then we’d already crashed upon the rocks! Crusoe was killed instantly by the harpoon I fired, and the rest, myself included, made our way onto the shore.
Crusoe was killed instantly by the harpoon I fired, and the rest, myself in- cluded, made our way onto the shore. Cortez began to say something about an abundance of wild boars, but by then I’d already decided, having remembered a documentary I’d recently watched, that there was only one escape from this dire moral quandary we found ourselves in. We’d have to draw straws, I told them, and whoever drew the short straw would get eaten. Nobody else was particular- ly keen to try this, so I handed out the straws myself. By a great stroke of for- tune, everybody but I got a short straw. The rumbling of my stomach louder than all of their screams combined, I devoured them within a few hours. As I was chas- ing Esther through the undergrowth for dessert, a ship was spied on the horizon. I realized I had no time to lose if I were to chow down before rescue arrived. You know, they say that human flesh tastes like pork, but it’s hard to tell when you’re guzzling it so fast that your tongue can’t keep up with your teeth. Before long, a middle-aged man with a trim moustache and white naval suit stepped off the steamer, and with a concerned eye, called out to me. “Yummy!” I exclaimed, as I consumed him and his crew.
Upon polishing off the last cabin boy, and hungry for seconds, something oc- curred to me. The tentacled horror of my obsessions had been nothing but a meta- phor all along, a manifestation of my in- ternal darkness and desperate hunger for human flesh. “Cool!” I thought, as I sped back towards civilisation.