Flash Fiction 1st Place: Ten Things You Learned from TikTok While You Waited for Things to Get Better by Catherine Ogston
- Chickens purr when they are happy.
- A small dog in some American state you know the name but not the location of wears a bowtie, waistcoat and boots and runs circuits on the count of ‘Ready, steady, go,’ and five hundred people leave comments declaring I would die for him.
- The number of times you watch people running down a pier towards their departing cruise ship will not affect the outcome.
- Sometimes a group of three women will buy pregnancy tests, just for a laugh, and go into the supermarket bathroom to take them, and record themselves cycling through shock, hysteria and excitement as one, two or even three tests come back positive.
- Sometimes people on social media make up elaborate videos of complete lies just for likes.
- The kakopa is a flightless owl who has to live on predator-free islands to survive. You will learn this on the thirteenth consecutive day of not leaving your house.
- You learn that GRWM stands for Get Ready With Me and you will watch people applying make-up until it no longer seems like performance art, with contour sticks that your brain refuses to understand the mechanics of, and eyelash curlers that look like torture devices. And while you watch a young woman drop liquid onto her face with a pipette she talks about how not every human is entitled to every human experience and you feel a built-up pressure leave your body like a valve has been turned.
- You watch a woman do a story-time about how she went on a first date even though she was twenty-five weeks pregnant and how her date looked after her when she went into early labour and came to the baby’s delivery and they lived happily ever after and all the comments say, this is the definition of if he wanted to, he would, which feels like an answer to the question that has been tearing you apart for the longest time.
- You begin to hope that the Cat Distribution System has a plan for you.
- A young actor makes a mesmerising short film starring himself in a multitude of roles, a variety of props and professional looking camera angles, and he utters a line about how life is about how elegantly you struggle. You write this down and stare at it until the letters become nothing more than squiggles on the page.
- (Because TikTok has ruined your ability to concentrate on what you are supposed to be doing.) You watch reel after reel of a woman who records a radio segment about dates which never progress into a relationship, and again and again you listen to people explaining away their own bad behaviour and you know you have to forgive yourself for being blinded by that person who lied to you every time he walked into your house. You watch another elderly cat being adopted and let the tears come.
