One of the three winning Storytellers voted for by the audience at the First Flash Fiction Portrush Event

(held in Portrush, Northern Ireland, on Friday 21st, March, 2025)

Ben Austell is a Bristolian writer and teacher based in Derry. Growing up as a child of the theatre, he learned to appreciate the power of a story, a well-chosen word and a sympathetic audience from a young age. A lack of singing, dancing and acting talent may have scuppered his oscar-winning ambitions, but the enticement to tell stories has never left. Having lived and taught in England, South Korea, China and Colombia, he now finds joy in the methodical process of honing his craft amongst the awe-inspiring splendour of the Irish North-West’s beaches, mountains and (even more splendid) people. An active member of Derry’s This Writing Thing group, he writes short stories about the futility of football, the joy of cats, and the sinister allure of crisp company mascots. He is currently working on an absurdist crime novel set on an implausibly overlooked and unclaimed island of miracles at the mouth of Lough Foyle.

What Counts at Christmas

The box was ordinary, green paper over card, barely large enough to contain a novelty mug. Joan had been required to sink down onto her belly and slither her way beneath the Christmas tree to uncover its intended recipient, recalling her claustrophobia only once she and her pepto-bismol morning coat had become subsumed by the tinseled canopy.
        It was the dregs of Christmas, everyone else sofa bound, awash with Pixar pastel, the silent TV projecting over them and their slumbering, four-pm comas. She could hear them from under the tree, snoring their turkey breath and trumpeting their Irish cream flatulence. 
        Only Gavin was missing. Away for a run. On Christmas Day. Imagine. 
        “It’ll look like we’ve had a fight. “
        “Why would we have a fight?” he had asked, looming over her and the Quality Street, stretching his sanctimoniously sculpted calves against the doorframe.
        Because you'll not even be wearing your lovely new trainers, she had been too stuffed full of stuffing to say.
        It had been a year of gifted disappointments for all, a dud of ceremonial unwrappings. Mum was mortified at the rude chocolates; Dad was offended by the nose and ear trimmer; Lilly was underwhelmed by her husband’s vouchered offerings. Meanwhile, Gavin gushed and guffawed at every tat and trinket he was handed, only to then go quiet when he saw the salmon pink, size-eleven runners Joan had procured in a black-friday bargain.
        “Is there something wrong with them?” 
        “They’re lovely.”
        “Are they the wrong kind?”
        A threat and question combined.
        “I think they’re for trail running.”
        “What’s the difference?”
        He smiled and placed them to one side.
        As for Joan’s presents - a river of shit through which to wade: the presumptuous exercise watch from Gavin, marinating in calorie-counting reproach; festive pyjamas from mum, at best, ironically unseasonal within twenty-four hours; from Lilly, a nostalgic band t-shirt – unwearable in public, given the singer's recent outing as a sexual predator; a miniature fridge from her father, as equally amusing as inexplicable in its redundancy. She tried to design a mental image of the woman for whom these gifts had been well chosen, the woman that might have been left feeling understood by this particular combination of ‘thoughtfulness’. It was petrifying. How had her family mistaken her for this same chump she was being required to conjure up?
        And so she lay, likely trapped, beneath the tree – more of a Christmas bauble than not – turning over the unclaimed, seemingly unlabeled, final gift in green. The sheer unwrappable potential that it held, if it were to be hers. 
        What insights into her unconscious desires could its gifter have divined? What might they have produced from their perfect and creative understanding of her multitudinous interests? Or, failing thoughtfulness, what exorbitant generosity might their unbridled love for her have inspired? It could be anything. It could show her that she was loved, and known and understood, and respected, and thought of, and worth a financial outlay befitting a married woman in her forties. 
        She gave it a shake and heard a tinkle. She held it to the slowly strobing lights above her. She identified a name, carved in biro on its side. It had been intended for the cat. 
        Gavin was coming back in the door, sopping wet and panting. He hobbled through the hall without seeing her pyjamaed legs poking out from the bottom of the tree. She wondered if he had somehow returned with a small cow as a back-up gift, such were the lowing groans he let out as he fumbled to extricate his feet from their trappings. Following two thuds against the tiles, she listened patiently to the sound of his limping footfall disappearing up the stairs towards the guest bathroom. She parted the branches, a freshly-unboxed collar and bell clutched beneath her chin. 
        Rather than the crumbling lime monstrosities she was used to seeing him in, it was the salmon pink Nikes that had been left in his wake. Used and discarded, they oozed and dribbled at the bottom of the stairs – her perfectly thoughtful and expensive gift to him now entirely ruined by the rain and mud.