Dit kortverhaal (lees het onder de foto) won in september 2026 de Postcard Story Prize van Redstone Press en de Britse krant The Observer. Het was een van de drie winnende inzendingen uit meer dan 2.000 deelnemers. Juryleden waren Booker Prize winnaar Julian Barnes (!), auteurs Jan Carson en Ardashir Vakil, en Tom Gatti, literair redacteur van The Observer.
Father built a shutter fast enough to stop a bird’s wings at the top of its stroke. Birds, however, did not take instruction. I did.
The gap was five feet, give or take. Boys from the hotel cleared it for pennies. I had cleared it barefoot, carrying our dog. I had never done so over and over, for pa, who kept saying once more, Ash, the light has moved.
The first plate fogged. The second he did not explain. On the third I landed badly and kept quiet about my ankle. On the fourth a wind rose up the gorge and he kept me on the far rock for thirty minutes, shouting I looked like a boy falling, not a man leaping.
There was a fifth. A sixth. A seventh which he lost to a cloud, and an eighth, to a boy from the hotel walking into the frame.
On the ninth he shouted my name, and I knew he had it.
He sold that photograph ten thousand times. It hung in the parlour until he died. It hangs there still and I am in it, a bird stopped at the top of its stroke.
