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An unnamed teenage girl finds escape from the pressures of her day to day life in the swimming pool… but the pool is also a source of tension; her mother is determined to transform her into a world-class swimmer. The girl doesn’t care about winning medals, though – she’s more concerned by a transformation of her own that’s been taking place for years.
I was delighted when this story won the Bare Fiction Prize in 2015. It was later published on the Bare Fiction website. Bare Fiction is a literary magazine which publishes some really excellent poetry, fiction, and theatre from living, working writers.
A little later on, the story was anthologised in Best British Stories 2017, published by Salt. This annual collects the best short stories published in the small press each year.
As with a lot of my short fiction, I have released this story into the public domain. This means you can use it any way you like, including making a profit from it. Let me know if you do anything interesting with it!
Here is the text of the story in several common formats: