Tim Collyer is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight‘s 2025 Flash Fiction Contest

Career Day smells of bleach and gravy. Wrong and familiar at once, like medicine in birthday cake. Margaret sits on a child’s blue chair, jaw still tender from yesterday’s biopsy. The scarf over her scalp isn’t a statement, just warm. Emma twists her book bag strap round and round, marking time with what they don’t discuss.

A builder talks about bricks. A paramedic shows a stethoscope and every child leans forward. Margaret once wrote columns about the sound of crisp pastry giving way, about wine that tasted of wet stones and thunder. Now toast is just heat and effort. She hasn’t told Emma. Not here, not under strip lights that make everything look undercooked, that turn skin the colour of old milk.

“Next up—Emma,” says the teacher.

Emma stands, cheeks pink. “My mum’s a food critic. She can taste things other people miss.”

Forty faces swing to Margaret. The dinner lady lifts a rectangle of Thursday’s meatloaf that slumps onto a plate with the sad flap of a wet envelope.
“Go on, Mum,” Emma says, handing it over like a medal. Or evidence. Margaret can’t tell which.

The fork is heavier than it should be. Margaret places a corner on her tongue. Nothing. Then less than nothing—her mouth a room after a party, confetti swept, noise clinging to corners but no one left to make it.

She chews anyway. “Surprisingly . . . adventurous.”

A boy snorts. “It’s meatloaf, miss.”

“Yes, but listen.” She taps the plate, summoning a string section. “Hints of playground gravel. Notes of lost pencil rubbers. A finish of forgotten homework. Is that . . . yesterday’s carrots trying their best?”

Laughter breaks like applause. Margaret rides it: “There’s radiator dust, a swagger of gravy that thinks it’s a sauce.” The children howl, banging tables.

Emma doesn’t laugh. She watches her mother’s hands. The tremor is small but there, turning the fork to a tuning fork, making a thin song in the bright hall.

Margaret swallows, mouth clean as paper. She looks at Emma and finds eyes wider than usual—not scared. Witnessing. The room narrows to the space between them, to the clock above the serving hatch.

“Food,” Margaret says softer, “isn’t just taste. It’s who you sit with. It’s the story you tell when you say, remember the terrible meatloaf?”

The teacher nods. The children nod because she does. Margaret takes another bite she can’t feel and finds, in the act, something unexpected: a prickle at the back of the tongue. Sharp, bright, metallic. Not flavour. Nerve. A blade, a coin under the tongue on a dare.

Courage, she realizes. Like copper pennies. Present the whole time.

She lowers the fork. Emma slides onto the tiny chair beside her, shoulders knocking her sleeve. No ceremony. Just a small, certain hand curling into Margaret’s.

“I can taste it too, Mummy,” she whispers. “The brave part.”

Margaret believes her. Wordlessly, completely. In the cafeteria where futures are served on plastic trays, where clocks count time nobody wants.

Tim Collyer is a British Wiltshire-based writer of speculative fiction, literary drama, and darkly comic tales. He won the New2theScene Flash Fiction Competition, was Runner-Up in both the Pokrass Flash Fiction Award and the DuMaurier Literature Award, and published three consecutive sci-fi stories in Andromeda Magazine. When not writing, he brews craft beer, grows chillies, and ponders unruly characters.