HONORABLE MENTION, Winter 2026
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

BY T.J. MALASKEE

By January, the town remembers how to hold its breath.

Snow lies in drifts as high as the chapel windows, sculpted by wind into hard, treacherous curves. The sky is the color of old tin. Sound carries strangely here. A slammed truck door rings like a gunshot. A voice across the street arrives sharp. Even footsteps seem too loud, as though the ice all around is listening.

I know the rhythm of this town—the creak of the flagpole rope, the hourly chime of the grain elevator clock—but after what I’ve done, every familiar sound feels altered, edged with intent.

It began with the lake and what it remembers.

Everyone knows what the lake is like in winter: sealed over, a white sheet laid carefully over the landscape. You can walk across it if you know where to step, if you trust the cold. I have trusted it with secrets my whole life.

Tonight, the moon is thin as a blade. The snow squeaks under my boots, that dry, protesting sound it makes at sixteen below. I tell myself I am only going to the boathouse to check the locks. I tell this to myself because it is easier than the truth.

She has been dead for eight years, which in a town like this is no time at all. People still say her name carefully, as though it might splinter in their mouths. Anna Kline. The girl who vanished one winter evening and was found in the spring, tangled in reeds, her coat still buttoned, her eyes still open. They never found her shoes. She wasn’t wearing tights.

They tell each other it was an accident.

I was seventeen. I had wanted her to be quiet. I had wanted, just for once, not to be seen, but maybe to be seen by her.

I kneel over the dark oval where the ice is thinnest. The lake breathes beneath me, a low, animal sound. When I whisper her name, it does not echo. It is absorbed.

I don’t know what I expect—some sign, some forgiveness—but when the ice cracks, it is clean and sudden. The sound travels outward in a perfect circle. I stand and stagger back, heart hammering against my ribs, certain that the town has heard it, that lights will boom on in every house.

Nothing happens.

Until she rises.

Not as a body. Not even as a shape I can name. She is a distortion, a flicker of electric air above the ice, as though heat were rising from something terribly cold. Her face comes last, assembling from my memory: narrow chin, pale brows, the eyes that had always seemed to know too much.

“You took too long,” she says.

Her voice is exactly as it had been, and that is the worst part.

After this, I am never alone again.

At first it is small bumpy things. The sense, walking down Main Street, that someone has just passed behind me. A prickle between my shoulder blades in the grocery store aisle. Reflections in the storefront windows that lag a fraction behind my movements, like an afterthought.

People look at me oddly. Conversations stop when I enter a room. At the café, Mrs. O’Mally crosses herself when she sees me, her fingers trembling like moth wings. Once, I catch my name spoken softly, urgently, in the post office, followed by silence.

They know.

But Anna does not speak to anyone else. Of this I am certain. She saves her words for me.

She stands at the foot of my bed, leaving no mark on the frost-laced floorboards after the heat goes out. She watches me from the far end of the street when I lock up the shop at night. Sometimes, in the dark of early morning, she sits on my chest, light as a thought, heavy as guilt.

“You’re looking at me now,” she says, while my eyes are closed. “You always did.”

The town changes shape under this watching. Windows become eyes. Trees lean in. Even the snow erases my footprints too quickly, or not quickly enough. I stop sleeping. I stop answering greetings. Once, I smash the bathroom mirror because her face surfaces in mine.

The cold grows sharper. The winter has taken sides.

The last time I see her is at the lake. The ice has begun to soften at the edges, though it is still February. I stand where I had knelt before, the wind picking at my coat.

“You don’t have to stay,” I tell her. My voice sounds frail in the open air.

She smiles with a terrible patience. “Neither do you.”

I understand what she wants. Not confession. Not repentance. Presence.

I step forward.

The ice breaks just as it had before, a clean, ringing sound. The water closes over my boots, my knees, my waist. It is unimaginably cold, a shock that steals breath and thoughts alike.

As I go under, I feel all the eyes on me—from the shore, from the town, from beneath the ice itself. Watching, finally satisfied.

In spring, they find nothing but my coat folded neatly on the shore. Another accident. They say winter in this place does things to people.

Sometimes, when the cold is just right, a fisherman walking across the frozen lake feels a sudden certainty of being observed. They will turn, heart racing, and see two sets of footprints beside their own.

Keeping pace.

Never leaving.