Flash fiction by Kerry Byrne

Second place until you’re not

The race starts in 10 minutes or thereabouts. 

It’s an event she never thought she’d take part in, and Ned’s still not back from the toilets.

When she calls his mobile, he says he’s bumped into Jay—Look behind you—and gives her a tight smile from the water station before hanging up.

She waves him back. 

Ned stays where he is and says something to Jay. They glance at her as though she’s unpredictable, like a wounded animal, then slowly make their way through the crowds lining the track.

Her husband is quiet, his micro-aggression loud. He hates it when she isn’t ‘right.’ Especially in public. Jay overcompensates, making a gag about running at their age. 

The joke is on her. Ned and Jay met at the cross-country club last year, bonding over the abrupt departure of their first wives, the pros and cons of death vs divorce, only to discover their daughters were in the same class at St. Nick’s. 

She’s never been sporty. 

Once, when she was ten, she closed her eyes and manifested Asthmatic Aisling’s face so lucidly in her mind—the cobalt tinge to her lips, her saucer-wide eyes—that she collapsed on her bedroom floor, gasping for air, frantically pocket-searching for an imaginary inhaler, knowing that one day an attack might come in useful. 





The tannoy announces the race, calling the runners. 

You’re up, her husband says, but she’s not sure it’s her place anymore. If it ever was. She’d never wanted a child, and then she met Ned. In his baggage, five-year-old Freya, a mess of September curls and grief. 

She watches as mothers stride across the field to take the lane positions they’ve earned, their casual sportswear concealing stretch marks their babies etched into their skin, high-end trainers signalling their intent to win. 

Looks down at her battered Converse, too narrow really for her wide feet. Her legs sausaged into jeggings. 

There’s no shame in sitting it out, Jay says. Ned nods, too quickly. 

Perhaps, they’re right, she thinks. Competing with a dead mother is exhausting enough. 

Then she hears it, the chant indecipherable at first amidst the whistles and cheers for the tug of war, the heartbeat of two syllables whispered and repeated, over and over, swelling in volume and clarity as their childish courage grows, her name a tsunami through the rows of pupils sitting opposite the track, Freya smiling and waving, her mother’s hair too wild to tame under a sunhat, her best friend waving, too.  

Turning back to the men, she sees so little of their daughters in them. So little of herself in their version of her. 

Toes off her All Stars and runs barefoot across the neat white lanes to her start line.