THE MOON AND MAGDALENA by Chris Cottom (3rd place, Flash, Nov22)

It was the morning of our Moon Landing Party and Mum was in orbit herself. She’d loaded the icebox with Zoom lollies and beeswaxed the rosewood sliding doors of the black-and-white television we rented from Rediffusion in Reigate High Street.

‘Just us and next door,’ she said, spraying enough Pledge over my Thunderbird 3 to clog its rockets and imperil the sinuses of astronaut Alan, alias me.

‘Are they all coming?’ I asked casually, positioning my special edition of Look and Learn on the sofa for handy reference.

‘Ken and Stella and the two youngest. I told you Susan’s in Munich.’

‘What about their exchange student? Heidi or Helga or whatever she’s called?’

‘Magdalena. I expect so. Why don’t you go round and ask her?’

But our temporary neighbour had to be at least sixteen. As I knew from my vigil at my bedroom window, she was no blonde-braided Bavarian farmgirl with cattle-width hips and big bazookas, but more like a dormouse with short red hair, so a bit less scary than the hard-faced hussies adorning the crumpled monochrome pages of the Men Only beneath the Scalextric set in my wardrobe.

When the doorbell dinged at six-thirty, I was deodorised and nervous.

‘Can you let them in?’ Mum called, priming our de-nested trio of occasional tables with lunar-white cocktail onions and dark-side-of-the-moon Maltesers.

‘Hello Nigel,’ said Ken. ‘This is Magdalena.’

As, through the evening, I regaled our guests with fascinating Moon facts, Magdalena smiled encouragingly. But it was a long night. We cheered as Armstrong and Aldrin touched down soon after nine. Mum did bacon and eggs at midnight, while the astronauts presumably scraped a lunar lunch of something dried and weightless off the walls of their module. As we waited for them to lace up their space boots, we tired of the BBC’s excitable Patrick Moore and switched to ITV’s Moon Party where David Frost interspersed the space bits with songs from Cilla and Lulu and sketches from Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques.

The sky was dawn pink when I woke on the sofa. Mary Hopkin was singing but somebody had turned the sound down. Everyone was slumped and sleeping: Mum snoring and Dad dribbling on the other sofa, Ken and Stella in the armchairs, and their kids under eiderdowns on the floor. I started to reach for the last Malteser but something was pressing against my shoulder, something that turned out to be someone who stretched and yawned and opened her green eyes and smiled and took my hand and led me to the kitchen and closed the door and asked for a glass of water and said ‘thank you, English boy’ and shared it with me before snuggling into me in front of the sink and standing on tiptoe to let me kiss her before taking my hand again to return to the telly where apparently someone else had just done something almost as extraordinary, like walking on the Moon.