FIRST-PERSON SHORT STORY COMPETITION WINNER

Deborah is a specialist teacher and mediator working in London. Her favourite place to be as a child was the library. She was encouraged to study English literature and to write by a teacher at secondary school although it took her decades to believe that she could do it. Previously she has been longlisted in a poetry competition and placed second in a recent writer’s weekend event. This is her first win, and she is delighted. She is currently working on the final edit of a young adult novel and very much hopes that it will be published.

My Mum’s last spoken word on this earth was ‘lovely’. Her eyes had suddenly opened despite the blinking monitor which insisted her oxygen saturation was just 40% - a level at which the trillions of synaptic connections in her brain were curling up, drying out, switching off and so quickly like fireworks: brilliant and then gone. All that knowing and thinking and feeling and making and doing and mending and caring and loving and hating. Just erasing. The numbers on the monitor