1. When Mary leads the four-year-old child, wrapped in a shawl he singed the edges of when he started a fire in the kitchen, with a bracelet around one wrist printed in shaky letters the name Fergus, to the steps of the orphanage, kisses the small exposed brow and walks away without looking behind her, to what degree will the guilt eat up her insides?
Multiply the number of pinches by the number of tantrums and subtract from her love.
2. If each boy in the orphanage receives seven ounces of potatoes, and seven ounces of potatoes cannot fill Fergus’ belly, how many boys must Fergus beat up to grow to his father’s height of 179 centimetres?
3. When Fergus steps out through the workhouse doors at sixteen and three months, subtract from his feeling of elation fourteen rainy nights spent on Dublin streets, when he tracks down his mother to a crumbling tenement on Dublin’s northside, and remaining in her cupboard are four teabags and one and a half biscuits, and she justifies giving him up with seven anecdotes of his difficult behaviour, as she bites her lip and tears spill between her fingers, till she admits she has not heard from his father, or where to find him, calculate the depths to which Fergus’ mood will sink.
4. Take the number of nights spent in fields, moors and the back of carts staring up at the sky and multiply by the number of stars visible on a clear night in Tipperary to find out the degree of yearning of Fergus for his father.
5. Take twelve rabbits, stolen, killed, boiled and eaten, twenty pickpocketed wallets and four dozen pilfered apples.
How many wrongs must Fergus commit to fill his inner abyss, formed by the feeling that nobody loves him?
5b. Calculate the square root to find the number of hearts he will break.
6. If Fergus has eyes like moss on an oak on the north side of a glade in Kilkenny, freckles on his cheeks equivalent to the number of sunny days he spent slacking off from farmwork (subtracted from an average of 168 rainy days in county Leitrim), has a laugh two semitones higher than the pitch of his father, is able to fire off three self-deprecating jokes a minute, and plays the fiddle at over 320 beats per second, how quickly will the average shopgirl fall for him?
7. If Fergus romances Brenda on the flowering cliffs of Howth, leads Molly into the grocer’s storeroom, catches Louise behind a haystack and Evelyn in an orchard, multiply by three and divide by two outraged fathers, armed with pitchforks, who succeed in chasing Fergus away, how many cousins will Fergus’ grandson discover in Galway?
8. If each child sired by Fergus grows up not knowing their father, three quarters of them are boys, and each boy starts a family of his own that he later abandons, how many pub fights can be traced back to Fergus?
9. If, on a rainy night in County Roscommon, Fergus walks into a pub and hears a man, twice his age, boasting that he knew how to deal with troublemakers since he sent his own son to an orphanage, and Fergus, upon asking the age of the son and adding the moss of his eyes and the freckles on his creased, ruddy cheeks, understands he is facing his father, and his anger can be calculated as the cumulative effect of thirteen years confined behind stone walls plus five years and seven months of ranging down muddy tracks, sleeping in fields and living off goods bartered and stolen, compounded by the rage inherited from his father who grew up without knowing his own father, and multiplied by four pints of Guinness and two shots of Locke’s Special Edition, what is the likelihood that Fergus will punch his father in the face?
Write your answers on the answer sheet provided.
Answers left blank will be penalised.
On the one hand, a unique structure can feel gimmicky and overwhelm the story. On the other hand, you get a story like this. Here, the hermit crab form and the white spaces are used to brilliant effect in this stonkingly good piece, which tells the colourful story of a young man called Fergus. This is an intimate, yet expansive piece that covers an entire lifetime (and more), and the prose is inventive, layered and full of heart. Bravo!
Farhana Khalique
This clever and ingeniously-structured story fits in a novel’s worth of drama, and does so with wit and humour. The form lends itself to narrative traction, and to speed, but it’s beautifully-handled in the way the story moves between what ‘happens’ and its various emotional, social and generational ramifications. It’s funny and sad and above all done with lightness – the narrator has been sufficiently distanced by the choice of the form to leave the reader on their own in all the best ways.
Patrick McGuinness
Malina Douglas is inspired by the encounters that shape us. She was awarded Editor’s Choice in the Hammond House International Literary Prize and longlisted for the Reflex Press Prize and the Bath Short Story Prize in 2022. In 2023 she was longlisted for the Bristol Prize and made the top three of the Leicester Writes Prize. Publications include the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, WestWord Journal from Retreat West, Typehouse, Cast of Wonders, Wyldblood, Ellipsis Zine, Teach Write, Consequence Forum, and Because That’s Where Your Heart Is from Sans Press. Her shortlisted writing was published by Blackwater Press and Desire to Escape from Four Palaces Press. She is an alumna of Smokelong Summer and can be found on twitter @iridescentwords.e after an early story was a winner in CityTV’s Vancouver’s Story Initiatives. Works include two short-listings for the 2022 Masters Review Anthology and Masters Review flash fiction prizes, a finalist for the 2022 Tobias Wolff award, and a long-listing for the 2022 Bath Flash and 2022 Fish Flash Fiction Prize, while two were given honorable mentions in the Lorian Hemmingway & Writer’s Digest Short Story Competitions. Her writing has been or will be published in the Bath flash-fiction anthology, ScribbleLit, Recalling the Journey Anthology, 101.Org & Blue Mountain Review.
She can be found at @meaning_filled on Twitter.
Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 
A snowball of years wrapped up so perfectly. Loved this emotional ride with Fergus.
👏 Conhratulations