"Faultline” grabbed me from its very first lines, where we see a car stopped at a field full of empty houses, three siblings spilling out, and a mother and father clearly distanced from one another, but there, together, chasing a dream of home. The details in this opening — from the backseat of the car littered with “cracker crumbs, cat fur strands, rust-coloured pine needles” to the chewed-up ear of a stuffed bear “who by now had the appearance of a used rag” to the smallest of the siblings who “was often red as a tomato, mucus down his face. Like he’d been born crying and no one had ever taught him how to stop” — begin to paint an evocative picture of the children at the heart of a fracturing family. The prose blossoms throughout the piece, showing with devastating clarity and deep emotional resonance the series of events which has brought this family to this field, to this moment. A sense of impending crisis hovers at the edges of the story, revealed through the rich interiority and vivid sensory experiences of the main character. The tension between past trauma and precarious present is palpable throughout; any movement may reveal new rifts, or cause the old ones to finally, irrevocably come apart. Altogether, this is a skillfully crafted piece layering memory, imagination, and the jagged desperation of broken things that cannot be fixed.
— Anuja Varghese
Contest Judge
