It’s obvious to me, and became even more obvious as I compiled this personal anthology and so made it obvious to you, that I don’t really read widely enough. I could blame the publishing industry. I could blame my semi-advanced age (things have got better, perhaps… slowly). But really I must blame myself, and my personal taste. I tend to stumble upon short story collections and anthologies rather than seek them out, often finding them in second-hand book shops, and the bias encoded therein, plus the even larger bias of the more distant past when I first began consuming them, means that white, dead men predominate, especially in the first half of this personal anthology.

So, I’ll readily admit, I went on the hunt for a new story for this anthology, to try, in some small way, to address the imbalance. I picked another book off my TBR shelf, ‘The Penguin Book of International Women’s Stories’. I’m only two-thirds through, and they’re all perfectly good stories. But, with the possible exception of Mary Flanagan’s ‘Cream Sauce’, I don’t think they’ll stick with me, and that, ultimately, has been what my personal anthology is all about.

And then I remembered this short story, another from Liars’ League. For the past six years they’ve run an annual Women and Girl’s theme, stories by women, read by women. A story about a victim of abuse might normally make me rather annoyed, not because it’s not a terrible thing, it is, but because it starts depressing and ends depressing, and you want to scream at them to ‘get out, RUN!’, but they oh so very rarely hear you. I’m afraid I’ve read enough of them that don’t do anything particularly new, except to remind us of an unpalatable reality. Which, for me, a lover of speculative fiction, isn’t what floats my short story boat.

But in this story by Cathy Browne, tables, improbably, are turned. And in a way that isn’t overly fantastical, though it obviously is. Despite the bleakness of the scenario, it’s funny. Empowering, which is a strange thing to say when the victim is dead (to begin with). It brings to mind Hallie Rubenhold’s ‘The Five’–telling the untold story of Jack the Ripper’s long misunderstood victims. Because no-one should just be a statistic, and because the least you can do is get their favourite breakfast right.

So there it is, my twelve. Whether in style or in content, and whether I came across them a year ago or forty, they linger in a way that truly makes them personal. For me they stand the test of time, echoing down the ages and never quite going out of fashion, and what better criteria can there be for something that might take you no more than a dozen minutes to read?

Performed at Liars’ League, 2021 and available to read and listen to here