Newcastle Short Story Award 2017

I wanted to know. "Why are its eyes open if he's asleep?"

"Because he's sleeping much deeper than the eyes-closed kind of sleep." He ran his thumb over its eye. "This is how you tell how deep he's under. Count how long until he blinks."

From The Blink Response by Alison Kelly

Winner, 2017 Newcastle Short Story Award

One of the pleasures of judging this year's competition has been listening to a vast rangeddd of those voices, even if it came with a more complicated pleasure: how to measure them ...