WINNER, Summer 2025
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY ROBERT GARNER McBREARTY

We were all starving. The Old Lady in charge was only serving a thin soup, twice a day, hardly more than water. There were twenty of us girls left in the home, and there was no heat now in the dorm room so night and day we lay shivering on our hard mattresses, covering up as best we could, holding our stomachs as they cramped with hunger. Many of the girls were coughing with wet, croupy sounds. Mary Kate was coughing up blood. The older girls had left, set out on the street to take their chances, so that left Girty and me, both thirteen, to look after the younger ones who called out for their mothers, but of course we had no mothers that were any use to us, or we would not be here, and yet there was the thought of mother, a mother somewhere.

Girty and I huddled on one narrow bed, her head pressed against my back, her arm around me. I liked the warmth of her and the smell of her hair, which somehow stayed clean and fresh in these squalid conditions. But we were in a fury at the Old Lady now because of the starving and the cold and the way the younger ones were getting sick.

Girty said, “You’re the strongest of us. Go tell the Old Lady we’ll kill her if she doesn’t thicken up the soup.”

Girty may have thought me the strongest, but I really wasn’t, because I would usually do whatever she requested.

I stirred myself. Even in bed, I wore my wool sweater, the warmest garment I had, and fleece trousers that had been donated. The evening meal, such as it was, was coming soon. I put my slippers on and went down the stairs to the kitchen. The Old Lady would have us serve but she never wanted us in the kitchen when she was cooking, afraid we’d steal food, if there was any to be stolen.

The Old Lady stood at a long wooden table, her hands covered in flour, holding a butcher knife, which she pointed at me as I came in the kitchen. Steam came off a large boiling pot behind her. There was one thin chicken breast on the table. One breast that would be shared by twenty. The Old Lady had never been kind, but she hadn’t been cruel either, and in the past she hadn’t starved us.

I had nothing to lose now. If she threw me out, I’d go out on the streets. Girty would come with me. We’d make our way. But I would feel badly for the little ones left behind.

“If you don’t thicken the soup,” I said, “we’ll kill you.”

She wagged the butcher knife and laughed in my face. Then she handed me the knife. “Go ahead,” she said, “run me through.”

I held the knife. I could do it, I thought. Just plunge the knife across the table. Then I’d have that chicken breast all to myself.

I set the knife down on the table. She picked it back up, but didn’t aim it at me now.

“No, I didn’t think so,” she said. “You’re hard. But not that hard.” She looked at me, a bit softer. I thought she said next, “You see, we’ve lost our doughnut.”

“Our doughnut?”

She actually smiled. “Our donor,” she said, speaking especially clearly. “We’ve lost our donor. I’m doing what I can, but we’ve lost our donor.”

She coughed, the same wet sound as the girls upstairs. “I eat no more than the rest of you. Sometimes less. I sleep in the same cold.” She stared at me. “It will be up to you. If I die, it will be up to you to look after the little ones. You will become the new Old Lady.”

I looked at her more closely then, and I realized she was not really all that old. Her face held few lines, but her cheeks were tightened from the starving.

“Do you know how I became the Old Lady?”

“No.”

“I came into the kitchen, just like you did now. And I said, more or less, what you said, and the one who was the Old Lady then said more or less what I just said, to go ahead and kill her. And I did. I ran her through three times with the knife, and I became the new Old Lady.” In the air, she displayed the way she’d thrust the knife.

I was no longer shocked by most things, but I stared at her in a kind of horror.

She sighed, lowering the knife. “I’ll do what I can. I’ll try to thicken the soup. I’ll look for a new donor.”

I left her to her steaming pot and chicken breast, and my legs trembled as I went up the stairs. I didn’t really believe her about killing the previous Old Lady, but I didn’t entirely disbelieve her either. I knew that I would never be as strong as she.

I got back in bed with Girty. I felt the anxious way she waited. I sensed the little girls listening too.

“What did she say?”

“She said she would try to thicken the soup.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good. You did good. Anything else?”

I laughed. “Something about losing our doughnut. She meant donor, but I thought she’d said doughnut, that we’d lost our doughnut.”

Girty repeated “lost our doughnut,” and laughed too. Some of the little ones had overheard us and they giggled and passed around the story about how we’d lost our doughnut, until our thin blankets rose and fell as we laughed, and for a few moments the room warmed as if our mothers had just walked in to take us home.