Some years
ago, I was chatting with a colleague who’d had over a month off work. I knew
she’d been in hospital and didn’t think she’d mind me asking why. She pointed
to her not-insignificant sized breasts, for one so small, and smiled. “These
little buggers,” she said. “Wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known I’d get Pleurisy
and nearly die but,” her glass was always half full, “at least they managed to
save them, cost me five grand.”
It upset me
that this gutsy lady had spent all her savings, and some more, on a ‘boob
job’. It wasn’t on a personal level, I have no interest in what people do and
don’t do with their own money. But as a society, I wondered how we’d managed to
become a country where this was so important?
I stashed the
story away, it was only ever something I wanted to, ahem, get
off my chest but when I was skulking around my old directories recently, searching
for inspiration, I decided to dust it off and enter it into the monthly Writers’
Billboard Short Story Competition. You don’t need me to say how excited I was
to hear that it had won the June competition, its prize being a two month
airing on the host’s website. My eight weeks of ‘fame’ are drawing to a close
so I wondered if I could intrigue you enough to fly over to the Writers’
Billboard site to read the story before it’s released into that place in the
webosphere for old stories no longer required. You can find it here: *Updated: please now access through this link to my website
Many thanks
to the Writers’ Billboard for the opportunity. They host monthly competitions
all year round and I’m sure they’d love you to have a go yourselves!
The Writers' Billboard website
