Short Story Competition

The Ministry of Culture Award – Overall Competition Winner

‘The Rock In My Teacup’

By Daniel Francis Brancato
The photo trembles in my hands – me, nineteen, on Arthur Avenue in 1933, flanked by my older siblings. My coat was too thin for the Bronx cold, my smile hesitant. Now, decades later, my grandchildren press close, their sauce-sticky fingers smudging the glass.

‘Tell us the bakery story!’ one urges, voice shrill with excitement.

I set the photo down, wiping at a smudge with my sleeve. My granddaughter, twenty-one, peers at me over the rim of the cup, eyes clouded with doubt.

She thinks love is something you chase, something you map out like a route on a city grid. She doesn’t yet know that love finds you where you least expect.

Above us, the Rock of Gibraltar looms in a painting on the wall, cliffs etched in oil. I hum Llévame Donde Nací, soft as a prayer, feeling the weight of my past settle over my shoulders. I close my eyes, and I’m transported back home.

It was 1932, and the Great Depression had hit Gibraltar hard. The docks, our lifeblood, slowed to a sickly pulse, and hunger gnawed at our streets. Gavino’s Dwelling, our humble abode, swarmed with families like ours. Too many mouths, too little bread.

New York glowed like a mirage of opportunity, just across the Atlantic. We considered Argentina – our Spanish suited its streets – but the Big Apple promised more. We boarded the ship, and I stood on deck as the Rock shrank behind us, the Moorish Castle faded away like a ghost as the levante crept in. My fingers clenched the rail, dread and hope warring in my ribs.

My father, a policeman, refused to leave. His badge still gleamed, but his face grew gaunt, eyes shadowed with the weight of duty – but duty does not fill bellies.

We landed in the Bronx, swallowed by tenements and trolley bells. Our Sicilian blood tied us to the Italians of East 187th Street – Catholic, olive-skinned, loud – but we weren’t quite them. Our roots were Sicilian, but our family tree had blossomed on the slopes of our beloved Rock.

We blended in where we could, yet we stood apart. Gibraltarians have always been that way – survivors, merchants, wanderers. We slip between cultures like water through cracks in stone.

New York stunned me, skyscrapers slicing the fog, Fordham Road pulsing with hawkers’ cries and horns. Yet I longed for Mother’s calentita, Europa Point’s briny gusts whipping my hair, summers at La Caleta. Central Park is wonderful, but it’s not the Alameda on a spring afternoon – that’s where I had my first kiss. Gavino’s chipped
halls crept into my dreams, the creak of floorboards a ghost’s lament, leaving me hollow – but New York demanded me to keep moving, so I did.

Then 1934. The Market was bustling on Eat Tremont Avenue when suddenly I flinched. Gunfire barked as Mafiosi began spraying lead. A man staggered, blood blooming on his shirt; another fell, his hat skittering across the pavement. Screams pierced the din, sharp as shattered glass. A bakery door loomed through the haze; I stumbled in, breath hitching, the scent of flour and anise wrapping around me like a shield.

The ovens roared, steam curling from racks, dough thumping under deft hands. ‘¿Estás bien?’ a voice soothed – deep, warm as the crusts cooling nearby. I glanced up. A man stood before me, his eyes like polished jet under lantern glow, his hair tousled with flour, a small smudge of it on his cheek. His face was striking, angular, with a strong jaw and a smile that crinkled at the corners, disarming yet steady. My heard knocked against my ribs.

‘Si, todo bien, thanks’ – my Llanito slipping through.

‘Soy de Gibraltar’, I declared.

His smile widened, a Spaniard in this Italian haven – his accent a familiar melody. Bullets whined outside, muffled by brick; we spoke, tethered beyond words, his presence a quiet anchor to my trembling.

I returned – bread my pretext, but it wasn’t just the ovens’ glow or the heavenly aroma that lured me back – it was him. The load slipped into my hands, still warm, his steady voice rising over Arthur Avenue’s clamour, his welcome of my strangeness my in-betweenness. Love rose, soft as dough under a cloth. We wed in ’36, Belmont Avenue bells tolled, Coney Island was calling.

Life bloomed – children, a home, a rhythm of days. Still, the Rock remained in my heart. That girl on the ship, gazing back at the shrinking coast, cross the ocean only to find love amid chaos.

I filled our home traces of my homeland – postcards, calendars, a chipped ceramic macaque. I made calentita – the Genoese call it farinata – its scent lifting memories from the stove. And of course, my cup of English Breakfast tea. Even when all around me drank espresso, bitter as regret, for me, nothing will ever beat a good cup of tea – with milk and two sugars, please.

Years blurred into decades. I watched my children grow – their voices laced with the slang of the Bronx streets. My husband age, our children moved upstate, but the painting of the Rock never left my wall.

Now, my granddaughter exhales, cup unsteady in her grip. I meet her eyes, thumbing my rosary. ‘Love lurks in odd shadows’, I say, tea steaming beside me. ‘Mine sprang amid bullets and bread’.

She half-smiles, uncertain. I nod to the Rock’s painting. ‘The Lord will provide’, I assure her.

I raise my cup, staring into the milky whorl, the surface trembling with my breath. ‘Look’, I murmur half to her, half to the air. ‘Can you see the Rock in my teacup?’

It floats there – jagged, eternal, sharp as the day I left. Hope sparks in her eyes, fragile but true, a flicker against the dark. I smile, knowing the past lingers, waiting to shape the future in ways we never expect.

Judge’s comments:

‘The Rock in My Teacup’ is a tender story that weaves migration, memory, and love into a rich tapestry of identity. This story’s lyrical prose moves seamlessly between past and present, grounding personal history into a classic New York immigration tale. The writer has managed to capture the soul of Gibraltar, and the ache of leaving home that never truly goes away. The writer pinpoints the strength in sharing tales of our culture cross-generationally and completely captures the spirit of being a Gibraltarian abroad: ‘We slip between cultures like water through cracks in stone.’ A well deserved winner and an exceptional writer!

Adult Story in English Language winner

‘Calypso’s Loch’

By Colin Golt

I have waited too long.

The loch heaves with my breath, sluggish and heavy, and the reeds shiver with the weight of my watching. Mist presses itself against the dark water, thick as wool, winding through the broken ribs of the old castle behind me. The stones remember everything: the men who walked these shores, the oaths they made, the way they sank without sound.

The loch is my prison, and my home. The water is cold, but not unkind. It has held me through the long years, through the silence, through the forgetting.

But tonight, something stirs.

A figure stands at the shore; small and uncertain. He does not see me watching as he steps into the boat and crosses. I close my eyes. I see it in the tilt of his shoulders, the hunger that men carry when they have lost too much.

I know this hunger well. I have held it in my hands before.

At first, I do not go to him, letting him wander the ruins, tracing the carvings in the stone with his fingers. He rests for a short while; I do not wake him when he turns in his dreams as the loch murmurs to him in its many voices and the wind presses itself through the broken windows. When he wakes, he walks to the shore.

"Hello?" His voice is rough, hoarse from disuse.

I do not answer. Not yet.

He crouches at the water’s edge, stroking his fingertips along the surface. The loch does not take him. It is patient. Like me.

I take a single step forward, making sure my feet make no sound on the damp earth. "You should not do that," I say softly.

He turns so quickly he nearly loses his balance. I watch the flicker of instinct in his hands, the half-formed motion of reaching for a weapon. He has been a soldier. I have known many like him. But there is something else in his face, something young that has not yet hardened into stone.

"Who are you?" he quivers.

I tilt my head.

He hesitates. His eyes flicker over my face, then my hands, and finally my tangled hair.

We walk along the water’s edge and find a place to sit. It begins to rain and I feed him. Not food, but stories.

I tell him of the island before it crumbled, when the chambers were warm with firelight and the air hung sweetly with music. He listens closely, wrapping his hands around his knees, his gaze slipping toward the water as if he were looking for something. He asks about the ruins, about the carvings in the stone, about the way the loch never stills. I let him ask. I do not always answer.

In the night, we sit by the water’s edge and something shifts. The loch exhales, slow and deep. The air grows thick with the scent of pine and salt.

And the ruins behind us also breathe.

The crumbling walls stretch toward the sky, stone smoothing itself into newness. The broken towers mend; their jagged edges knitting together. The flickering sprites of torches glimmer to life, lining the halls and the barren courtyard bursts into bloom with vines and heather. Music rings in the distance, soft and sweet, echoing times gone by.

He gasps. I watch his face; the widening of his eyes, the way his fingers twitch as though afraid to touch anything, afraid to break the spell. He turns in place, drinking it in. And then he laughs; soft and breathless, disbelieving.

"How is this possible?"

I shrug, though the weight in my chest is unbearable.

The loch hushes. The castle glows. The illusion thickens.

He follows me through the golden halls, past the rooms draped in silks and shadow, past the ghosts of men who once walked here. He does not see them. He does not yet understand.

But I feel them.
Suddenly, he stops in front of an alcove, shrouded in silk bedding that now hangs like gossamers. Why here? I catch myself asking.

“What is this?” he says.

“A memory once shared with O-” I pause, the name catching like bile in my chest, “a sailor I once loved.”

Suddenly, his hand reaches over to the other, feeling something on his finger that’s not there. He hesitates and the illusion shivers, nearly imperceptible.

"I need to go home," he says softly.

The words land like a stone in the loch; small, but with ripples spreading outward. The castle falters, a tremor running through the walls. He does not seem to notice, but I do.

I grip the edge of the table. "You all leave, eventually."

He shakes his head. "Something isn't right. I remember," his breath hitches. "I remember..."

The loch stirs. The candles gutter out. And then he looks at me. Really looks at me.

"Who are you?" he whispers.

The illusion shatters. The castle crumbles, stone and ivy tumbling into darkness. The torches die. The music stops. And suddenly, we are standing in the ruins once more; cold, empty, bare. The loch is still. The ghosts are gone.

He staggers back.

I look at him then, really look at him, the weary slope of his shoulders, the war still clinging to him, a shard of something softer buried beneath it all. He makes for the shore, without a word, without promising to return. His hand caresses mine, briefly, before turning toward the boat.

I do not stop him.

But as he reaches the water, the loch stirs.

It does not want him to go.

A ripple. A breath. A hand, unseen, curling around the wood. He hesitates; the loch rises.
I open my mouth to call out, to warn him. But the loch is my home, and my prison. It is the only thing I have ever known. And it is hungry.

His name catches in my throat as the water closes over him.

The loch stills.

I stand alone. And I wait.

Judge’s Comments:

The story has a beautiful and distinct voice. Its mythical atmosphere and otherworldly elements, transports readers to Calypso’s Loch. The reader is drawn to a world where memory, reality and illusion collide together to create a haunting tale. The narrator’s voice is both mournful and poetic, you can feel her sense of longing right through the page. With vivid imagery, the writer is able to perfectly capture the feelings of isolation and desire and the dangers that can coincide with those feelings.