This gorgeous, lyrical, visceral flash fiction won first prize at Janus Literary in 2021, and no wonder. This story of loss and abuse focusses on a young teenage daughter whose mother has disappeared – murdered maybe by her abusive father. It reads like a twisted fairytale – set in an unspecified past but full of modern, feminist undercurrents. Gaynor often writes about young women and teenage girls caught in the process of negotiating dangerous worlds where default-setting opinions are apt to cast them as bad, but you want this protag to be bad, to fight back, to have had enough, and, come the end of the story, you are not disappointed. Dark, beautiful, twisted, genuine, this story blew me away.
First published by Janus Litzine, 2021, and available to read here
A Personal Anthology 