FLASH FICTION WEEK 2025
Runner-up
BY JAIME GILL
Previously published in Orca. Copyright is held by the author.
ALIKHAN SITS outside his shack on a chair creakier than his bones, watching the Aral waters he was born beside. The fishing boats have already trawled so far out they look toy-like, merging with the watery horizon and burnished by early sun. The distant purr of their motors is drowned out by the sound of kids splashing nearby. He notices a flash of white amidst the blue — a pelican skimming the waves.
“Do you miss it?” Damir’s voice, close and confidential.
Alikhan replies to his brother without taking his eyes off the waters. “Being a fisherman? Or a kid?”
“All of it.”
Alikhan is mulling his response when he hears a brash “hello!” Timur, district environmental inspector, is hustling towards the shack.
“Were you talking to yourself?” Timur asks in a tone more often used for children playing make-believe. Alikhan reminds himself that he knew Timur as a screaming, red-faced baby.
“Why not? I’m never boring,” Alikhan says. “Tea?”
“No, I can’t stay for long . . .” — meaning he’s afraid to — “. . . but I beg you one last time to reconsider relocating.”
“I won’t change my mind.”
Timur grimaces. “Just visit the housing we’re offering. Please So much more modern than . . . this.” He waves his hand vaguely at Alikhan’s cluttered porch.
Yes, thinks Alikhan, and 40 kilometres from the Aral, in an ugly concrete block where neighbours would sleep above and below. “No. Thank you.”
Timur sighs theatrically and says the offer will expire next month, then pulls out a form. Alikhan has never read Kazakh well, so Timur explains that his signature confirms he’s aware of the health risks caused by pesticide-laced dust storms from the former Aral Sea.
“That means no compensation if you get sick,” Timur says, pointedly. He means well.
Alikhan nods and signs without hesitation. When cancer took Damir, the government pay-out was paltry, but enough to keep Alikhan fed for what remains of his life.
When Timur leaves, Alikhan bleakly regards the true, brute world — baked, salt-caked wastelands, pocked by the rotting skeletons of fishing boats and ringed by abandoned homes. Once, this lake was so vast it was named a sea — the sea of islands. Now the islands are just mounds amid mud. It took five decades for irrigation projects and climbing temperatures to drain the Aral to its dregs, and Alikhan witnessed every moment. Sometimes it felt like it was he who dwindled, not the waters.
“So? Do you miss it?” At the sound of Damir’s voice, the waters leap back to shimmering life.
“Of course,” Alikhan smiles. The Aral is my blood. How could either of us ever leave?”
His attention is snagged by two brothers whooping by the shore as they drag in a net. The smaller boy seizes the large, writhing carp they’ve caught and tries to drag it to land, but it thrashes free and swims away furiously. “You idiot” the older brother shouts, but he’s laughing as much as scolding. He’s not really worried. There will always be more fish.
***
Jaime Gill is a queer, British-born writer happily exiled in Cambodia, where he works and volunteers for nonprofits. He reads, writes, boxes, travels, and occasionally socializes. His stories have appeared in publications including Trampset, f(ri)iction, Phoebe Journal, Orca, Pangyrus, NFFR, Litro, Blue Earth and Exposition Review. He has won several awards including a Bridport prize, and been finalists for the Smokelong Grand Micro and Bath Short Story Awards. He’s Pushcart-nominated and currently writing a novel and far too many short stories.
