Coffee Ghosts

FIRST PLACE £1,000

WINNER: ALASTAIRCHISHOLM

Alastair Chisholm is a children’s author and short story writer. His latest sci-fi adventure, ADAM-2, is the Blackwell’s Children’s Book of the Year 2021, and his short stories have appeared in various collections. Alastair lives in Edinburgh with his family, and his hobbies include writing, and playing games on his phone when he should be writing. You can find him on Twitter at @alastair_ch.

‘I saw a ghost, once, perhaps.

It was in daylight, right in front of me, in a coffee shop off the high street. There were others around, it wasn’t just me. I don’t know what they saw. I was sat in a corner at one of the fake wooden tables, scattered with tiny crumbs and screws of torn paper napkins, and faint brown circles from the base of my cup, like animal tracks. Janet had a name for them, those circles, and I was trying to remember what it was.

‘Danny? Danny, are you listening?’ I looked up into Janet’s face and saw her expression. It was one I’d been seeing a lot recently, I thought. The one that said she wasn’t