MAniFeStO by Oliver Juggins (1st place, Flash, May24)

I was born of the Inner Voice. The voice that sometimes tells you, contrary to all evidence, that everything will be okay. The voice that provides comfort in the dark; company in the lonely abyss of modern life.

But it has a darker side.

Sometimes that voice is harmful. It’s violent.  It shocks us as civilised people, living in a peaceful society. It suggests dark behaviours – behaviours of which we would be thoroughly ashamed.  That are out of character. We have thoughts that are better buried than discussed. But worse than that; sometimes it asks ‘what if?’

It’s the voice that tells you how you could’ve avoided that mugging by being more aware, more aggressive.  It’s the voice that provides a snappy retort once your interlocutor has already turned and walked away, smiling, as you stand like a fish out of water, gracelessly and silently flapping your mouth.

The French call it l’esprit de l’escalier – “The wit of the staircase”. A pretty phrase describes an ugly shame.

And as you report your loss to the police, as that brilliant retort eventually arrives, it’s this same voice that replays the situation to you, makes you live the failure over and over again until you’re so thoroughly sick of it that you seethe with impotent rage. Makes you see yourself winning if only you’d…

To win is so simple, in your beautiful, high-fucking-definition, 3D hindsight. The pettier the situation, the more helpless you feel, the more times that voice will replay it to you: that’s one of the evil secrets of the Inner Voice that’s never discussed.

And the more times it’s replayed, the more significant each failure seems. God help you if someone cuts into a queue in front of you and you don’t speak out; just stand there fuming. It’s so unimportant, but your inner voice will replay it dozens of times. It gains weight in your consciousness until it feels like a defining life event. So you see: how can this voice be anything but evil?

But sometimes, if a person isn’t in quite the right mental shape at the time of this intense repetition, a person may come to believe that her esprit did arrive in time. That she dropped her attacker to the floor, swiftly and expertly.  She might revel in the imagined shock and awe of witnesses, absorb that most beautiful of things: the admiration of strangers. She can feel special, like a hero, even.  Sometimes a person desperately needs that feeling in order to go on. Sometimes, their fabricated reality might become their lived reality in a seamless and deadly transition from the real to the imagined. They might snap, in other words.  And would it really be their fault? Can we blame the falling tree for the damage it does? Sometimes circumstances control us more than we like to admit.

And as surely as I was born of that dark voice, I shall die by it.

But not before everyone else does.