Read the winning entry of our 2024 short-story competition
The theme for this year’s short-story competition, held in association with Montblanc, was 'the experiment', which gave rise to highly original narratives. As a result, the judges – Bazaar’s Lydia Slater, Helena Lee and Erica Wagner, the authors Maggie O’Farrell and Kaliane Bradley, the super-agent Caroline Michel from PFD, and Montblanc’s brand director Georgia Noutsi – were entertained, moved and impressed by the calibre of the submissions.
The top accolade was unanimously awarded to Stephanie Y Tam for her powerful and elegant tale 'Bird Bones', exploring the silence between intergenerational relationships, which Bradley described as "exquisitely considered, flawlessly balanced and astonishingly confident". O’Farrell called it "a beautifully assured and heart-rending story, with an arresting voice, about the desire to remember and the need to forget", while Michel praised its "ambition". As Wagner observed, "It’s a reminder of what can be achieved in the space of a short story." Tam wins a Montblanc Meisterstück 149 pen, which celebrates its centenary this year, as well as a two-night stay at Chewton Glen in Hampshire.
Read her story below, and in the forthcoming July/August issue of Bazaar, out on 13 June. Additionally, you can read the three runner-up stories here.
‘Bird Bones’ by Stephanie Y Tam
It began with the sparrows. Remember this: they were the first warning.
For ten years after the war, we lived in a red state of fantasy.
In the eleventh year, a word came from Beijing.
Sparrows, the Chairman declared, are the public animals of capitalism! They eat what they do not earn; they steal from hard-working peasants. They bring disease and disaster.
Down with the birds, down with the pests!
The Great Experiment was launched. Throughout the countryside, peasants rose up and shot the little creatures out of the sky. The air thickened with the frenzy of wings. When the birds landed on the great banyan tree that sheltered your great-grandmother’s grave, our neighbours beat gongs and pans until they fell out of the branches. When the avian refugees fled to foreign embassies, our mothers, fathers and grandparents circled the perimeters and pounded drums. By the end of the second day, the embassy workers had to remove the feathered corpses by the shovelful. It was the first time we learned that a thing with wings could drop dead of exhaustion.
Nowhere to fly, nowhere to land.
The air hung with a heavy stillness. Then, at the end of two years, a low vibration rose from the earth. Locusts. With no birds to keep the insects in check, their hungry, clicking mouths devoured swathes of farmland, down to the very rice straw that lined the roofs. Millions of your ancestors, aunties and uncles, parents and grandparents, began to starve.
In the days of the Great Experiment, my mother once told me, chaos consumed us.
When you said goodbye to your father, your mother, you never knew if it might be the last time you saw them. An elderly couple, rumoured to have hidden grain, vanished from their bed; an uncle discovered the hut pillaged, the earthen floor dug up. A three-year-old cousin went missing; a flutter of yellow cotton on brambles was all her parents ever found of her.
We started to whisper of flight across the waters, even as all around us, friends and relatives dropped to the dust in the fields, the roads, the village.
Nowhere to fly, nowhere to land.
*
When I asked my mother for stories as a child, she gave me tea eggs.
‘Here,’ she said, rapping one on the countertop. Fractures spread across the stained shell. She picked at the broken crater. Flicked a piece of shell away. ‘This was my childhood. Your grandmother, Poh-Poh, would give me this when it was my birthday. We had so little growing up in Taishan. Once a year, a single egg.’
It was beautiful, in its way – a mottled spiderweb of tea-coloured cracks where the liquid had seeped into flesh. Yet something about the intricate patterns sent a shiver down my spine. It looked diseased, like the age spots on my grandmother’s hands.
‘A boiled egg for your birthday?’ I creased my nose. My brother Kai and I had eggs every weekend.
‘Yes.’ A curt nod. ‘We were always so grateful.’
I rolled the tea egg she gave me between my palms, meditating on my mother’s childhood. The egg left a sticky residue, the faint smell of star anise and soy sauce.
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘My childhood was not like yours, always playing. Or Kai, chasing little things. Better off forgetting.’
‘But you must remember more than a single egg?’
‘I remember very little these days,’ Ma said. ‘And even that’s too much.’
Over the years, my mother dropped traces of her early life. The night that Poh-Poh passed away, she woke up screaming about a boat. Sometime later, I heard the sound of her voice, speaking in hushed, urgent Cantonese, at night. At first, I thought she was speaking to some relative from Hong Kong on the phone. But then I heard her address my grandmother. Nei gei si fan lai, aah? Her insistent tone suddenly cryptic, unsettling. I followed the patter of her words, each syllable a talisman glinting in the dark. When I turned the corner, I found her at the kitchen table. The tin circle of light overhead swayed, casting crazy shadows. Starkly illuminating my mother, shivering alone, in that small tidy space.
I sank to the floor. The tiles cold and hard against my knees.
‘Nei heoi zau bin dou, aah? Nei gei si fan lai, aah?’ she shouted, interrogating ghosts.
And I echoed her, softly: Where have you gone?
When are you coming back, Ma?
‘The boat,’ she muttered. ‘The birds. So many bodies…’
I gathered her words like the bones of small, dead animals that my brother collected. Cleaning off the wishbone, studying its intricacies. Carefully, curiously laying out the incomplete skeletons, the ribcage where a heart once beat.
In the hollow spaces between her silence and her shouting, I searched for the answer to where my mother went, when she disappeared while sitting right in front of me, her eyes glazing with distance. As my mother was transported back across the waters to her girlhood, I trailed her from the shore, struggling to find a way across.
In the nights that followed Ma’s episodes, I was restless, unable to sleep. When I closed my eyes, I had the curious sensation of being at sea. The mattress transformed onto a raft that bobbed on dark currents. The few times I did manage to drift off, I woke gasping for breath.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Kai hissed. ‘You’re so twitchy.’
‘Nothing,’ I said, embarrassed. At fifteen, my brother had grown out of nightmares and was indignant at having to share a bunk bed with his twelve-year-old sister. ‘I think I’m seasick.’
Kai thrust a pillow over his head. ‘Stop moving so much. I’m trying to sleep.’
But I wasn’t moving – it was everything around me that was in flux. Ma, leaving me and Kai for hours at a time at night. Locking herself in the bathroom. Her voice a muted murmur, a string of jumbled words like a prayer or incantation. Ma, by the door at first light. Her beautiful dark eyes worn at the rims. Saying: ‘I just need to go away for a little while.’ Her gaze blank, spirit already wandering.
*
On the fifth anniversary of my grandmother’s death, my mother gave me an origami boat.
It was modelled on the old junk boats from her childhood, the flat sails folded into four clean ridges, the bow crisp and upturned. It was the last thing that her fingers, then rapidly losing motor control, were able to shape from the enveloping chaos. My brother was finishing university; I was just starting. The three of us sat together folding colourful squares of paper into different shapes – silver cranes, hopping frogs, purple crickets – as our world collapsed around us.
In those final months before disease ate away the rest of our mother’s mind, the patterns that had started with Poh-Poh’s passing accelerated. Cities and oceans and years collapsed; she lived almost entirely in the neighbourhood of her girlhood. A dam broke, and stories erupted from her mouth; she leaked names, relatives, places. Eventually, she no longer recognised us. She was constantly distressed to discover that she was no longer in Taishan.
Each morning, she woke up freshly displaced; until one morning, she didn’t wake up at all.
When I was a little girl, my mother tells me at the end, Poh-Poh and I made a great journey.
The two of them shared a bunk in the hull of a fisherman’s boat. Tossed by turbulent dreams, the lap and lick of waves. Crash and coil, crash and recoil. The groan of wood bracing itself. She moaned until Poh-Poh shook her awake, and she surfaced gasping for breath.
Baby Girl, wake up! Poh-Poh’s knuckles rap her shoulders. You’re safe. We made it.
The boat, the girl gulps. Waves, endless waves.
Remember this, Poh-Poh says. There are many ways to interpret the runes.
Poh-Poh strokes the nape of the girl’s neck, where the hairs are feather-soft. Waves do not need to be evil things, she says. If you listen carefully, they can also be music for the soul, mirror the rhythms of the body. They can draw sleep to you, instead of chasing it away.
Poh-Poh teaches her daughter to breathe to the rhythm of a slow tide: an exercise in stilling the storm inside. It’s a lesson Poh-Poh learned from her own mother, even as she instructs her daughter to pass it on to her own children: a family heirloom, a story for sleep.
So, the girl times her breath to her mother’s, buoying her up from below. As she listens to each rattling intake, then shuddering exhale, she spreads her arms and lets herself be towed to sleep by her elder.
She remembers this lesson, the night that her mother leaves her for the last time.
She remembers it to me, years later, before she leaves me for the final time.
After her funeral, Kai and I spend a week at a bungalow on the beach. The first night, we struggle to sleep, so we play cards, trade stories, shift blame – anything to dull the roar of grief. Eventually, he drifts off; the room fills with the hush of his breathing. But my mind keeps circling, circling, searching for something or somewhere on which to land. Praying for the kind of sense that sleep makes. A way to structure the storm.
I start to write down everything she told me: her childhood, and ours. The memories lap up, like water smoothing jagged stones. In the Sailor Moon comics that my brother and I used to read, there was a character, Rei Hino, who flung strips of paper with words written upon them as weapons. AKURYO TAISAN! she cried, as she hurled the thin, white slips inked with signs and symbols at monsters. We had always been puzzled by such a flimsy form of attack; surely, the lamest superpower of all. None of us wanted to be Rei when we played Sailor Scouts.
And yet the tools of her rage were powerful. Her words fluttered on a wind of their own, labels slapped onto the foreheads of demons. For what else are words on paper, but symbols thrown against an absence, an abyss? An experiment in categorizing, then mastering, pandemonium.
I take out a pad of paper. Start with the villagers who killed the sparrows, the locusts who drove away our ancestors, then move onto the sea over which my family fled. I assemble my mother’s memories into stories, each sentence a notch of vertebrae. Trace out the spine of their meaning. It begins with the birds, but it ends with us.
As dawn breaks, I inscribe our enemies.
The sky lightens outside the window.
I leave my brother sleeping and slip out the door. Pale layers of mist shroud the beach. The receding tide is quiet in the early dawn, even as the gulls begin to squawk and squabble. When I approach, they scatter, reeling upward, like a sudden squall.
Kai used to joke that we all had bird bones. A family history of lightweights: built for flight, not for battle. We always had our own strategies for survival: creativity to counter chaos.
There are many ways to interpret the runes. The gulls return, dropping down in clusters along the coast. In the distance, the retreating waves froth under a slow, grey sky. And then, as the sun rises and the mist burns away, I see what the tide has left behind. All the glistening, white shells the sea lost: clean and pure as bones.
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