2026 Fast Fiction Winning Entry

Prompt: ‘Something unexpected washed ashore on Whitehaven Beach…’

Winning Story by Natalie Stockdale

Something unexpected washed ashore on Whitehaven Beach.
I noticed it at low tide, half-buried in the white sand. At first glance, it looked like driftwood, or the bones of an animal long gone. But the shape wasn’t right. Too straight. Too deliberate.
My name is Sinclair Bradshaw. I was born in Zimbabwe, and I knew what it was before I touched it.
The sea had taken its time.
I crouched and brushed the sand away. My hands are steady now. They weren’t back then. Metal showed through. Rusted, worn, but still whole. A rifle. My rifle.
Rhodesia came back, not as pictures but as a feeling. Heat. Tension. Young faces with hollow eyes that had no place being there. The silence just before things broke loose.
I carried that rifle through all of it and lost it crossing a river. We were moving fast, taking fire, boots slipping on rock. I went down, and it disappeared under the water. I told myself it was gone, that I was gone, too.
But there it was. And there I was.
I sat with it for a while.
People passed behind me, chatting, taking photos, wrapped up in their own easy days. No one noticed what I held.
To them, it was nothing.
To me, it was everything I had tried to leave behind.
I stood, walked into the water, and threw it back without ceremony.
Some things should never return to land.