Highly Commended
Over 18s Category
By Louisa Adjoa Parker
In the end, their daughter, their girl, was nothing more than a bag of bones; a skull and pelvis, picked clean. Bones like bleached driftwood. They wanted to tip the black bin-bag she’d been found in upside down, shake out every last splinter of bone. They wanted to look for her in there – surely she must be hiding somewhere in the folds of black plastic? They wanted to fill the empty spaces in with her. She had been rubbed out like a pencil drawing – there was nothing left of her. Not a trace of that toothy smile, not a strand of her white-gold hair, not a single peal of her laughter clung to the bones. They wanted to fill the bag with years of questions, tears kissed from the other’s cheek. It was an ending: the end of years of waiting, not knowing. It was the beginning of a lifetime of knowing what they had waited so long not to know.
