This was my first story ever published. It made the shortlist during Short Fiction Break’s Summer 2016 Short Story contest, and appeared on their website, where you can still read it.
I lived in Spain for seven years, and spent some time climbing the cliffs above Tarifa, looking across the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa. An inspiring vista with plenty of scope for the imagination.
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The scar stands out in jagged relief, a topography of my grief and failure, the shiny pink mountain range trailing from my wrist nearly to my elbow, flanked by faint blue veins like rivers on a map. It is always there, under my gaze, a memento of my guilt. A reminder that I held life in my hands and I let it slip away.
Dag, I was convinced, carried no scar from that day, no physical mark, no
