Over May and June, we held our inaugural Celebration of Words Creative Writing Competition. We asked our radical community to write a creative piece inspired by the prompt 'Cocoon', the namesake of our AW26 Collection.
All we asked was that the piece be no more than 750 words and is human-made. The work could take any form of creative writing, including fiction, poetry, essays, short stories, memoirs, or scripts.
The entries were judged by the Radical Yes team, with the winning entry chosen by author Chloe Elisabeth Wilson.
We received 199 entries, completely exceeding our expectations. We are still in awe of the sheer talent of our community and the shared experiences we all seem to have, expressed in written form.
Our winners' pieces stood out to us early on in the reading process, and here we share their magical and other-worldly stories.
Photos by Lucy Lumen.
1st Prize Winner
Bao by Berlina Yu
Three hundred sixty-eight. Cho gulped at the sight of the steaming bao zi in front of her. Its milky, white flesh glistened as the waitress lifted the bamboo lid. Beads of sweat formed behind her neck.
The bao zi looked delicious, harmless, even. She’d had them countless times and always knew what flavours to expect, but now all she could taste was the sourness of her dry mouth. A flicker of trepidation moved through her.
Three hundred sixty-eight. She counted again.
Three hundred sixty-eight swipes in the last forty-eight hours led her here.
Cho knew life wasn’t a race. Yet she felt she had barely moved from the starting line, while everyone else neared the finish.
Nearing forty, she’d never had a boyfriend, much less a friend that she could message to say, “Hey, guess what? I’m at some dingy hole-in-the-wall in a back alley! I might get kidnapped and have my organs harvested by some guy I just met last night #RIP.”
Apart from her mother, everyone else was an acquaintance. Strangers. They were all strangers, really.
“Quick, have a bite before it gets cold,” Mr Three Hundred Sixty-Nine said.
Looking at his yellow, crooked teeth and severe overbite, Cho felt briefly catfished by his photos. Still, someone had finally responded to her on the dating app.
It didn’t matter that it was a tiny, tucked-away sweatbox, the kind weathered tradesmen ate at.
If it meant taking a bite of this questionable-by-food-regulatory-standards thing in front of her, she would, just to make him see that she was interesting.
Cho felt his gaze as she pressed her lips to the soft bun. She felt a snap and crackle between her teeth as she bit deeper into the filling. It turned elastic and slightly chewy, almost fibrous, with a rich, oily, faintly earthy flavour she couldn’t quite place.
It wasn’t unpleasant. But the way he watched her made it taste something else entirely. Cho felt as though she herself looked edible, worthy of being devoured, irresistible to his attention.
“In many parts of the world, cocoons are a delicacy…”
Cho wondered why disgust never came. Perhaps she was too desperate for it to matter.
Later that night, Mr Three Hundred Sixty-Nine deleted his profile.
Cho couldn’t remember him well enough to stalk him online. Their date was bleak, filled with the sounds of wet slurping and banging pots rather than conversation.
She knew one thing about him, though: he would probably return to the restaurant.
And when he did, she would be there.
And she would be better next time. She would laugh at the right moments. She would marvel at his taste, his edge, his genius.
He would like her.
Cho started visiting the restaurant once a week. Then twice. Then almost every night.
All she ate were cocoon bao zi. She even skipped other meals, as if there had never been anything else. As if she had not chosen it so much as returned to it. As if, somewhere along the way, this had become the only food that tasted sweet in her memory.
But he never came.
Cho scrolled through her contacts, looking for someone to send a photo of her bao zi to, but knew no one would reply, not even with a mediocre thumbs-up emoji. She put her phone down and stared at the bun. Plain. Simple. Boring. Like her.
Suddenly, a rumble moved through her stomach, followed by a sharp pain. Knots twisted inside her. Her belly heaved and shifted in uneven waves, stretching and lifting. Something was pushing beneath her skin, dying to come out.
Cho felt hot. The room pulled inward. The ceiling lowered.
Tiny soft legs wriggled on her tongue, a furriness against her gums.
Slowly, something emerged. A moth lifted itself out of her mouth.
Then another. And another. And another.
Although it was horrific to imagine all the cocoons she had eaten rupturing inside her, seeing them flutter around felt comforting. Here she was, with these fragile, restless things.
Her loneliness faded.
Everything was perfect until warmth touched her face.
Morning light.
Was it all a dream?
She touched her tender belly.
Cho reached for her phone and checked the app for matches.
Zero. Of course.
She closed her eyes and pulled the blanket over her. She curled into herself and lay still as the bed enveloped her.
Suspended in silence, in the soft shell she had made for herself, Cho was sealed away from everything.
2nd Prize Winner
Untitled By Rachael Cusick
I needed a watch. A cheap one. Ideally one made with the kind of plastic bound for the Great Pacific garbage patch had it not found its way onto my left wrist. With a three hour layover at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I went searching.
“Do you sell watches?” I asked the father-daughter duo holding down the register at Hudson News. No, the man said regretfully as he handed me my Tony’s Chocolonely. “Try next door.” Suddenly, I was being ping-ponged from one empty-handed, eager-to-please Texan to another. At the end of the terminal, I found myself in a men’s shoe store in front of someone I imagine was recently voted captain of his high school baseball team.
“I think there’s a Swatch store in Terminal D,” he said.
The airport’s transit system belched me out into the new terminal. I marvelled at the cultural richness. But as it always seems to do, the allure of travel fades. The magnets here were all the same, and there was no Swatch store for miles around.
My chance to find a watch, and now dinner, had closed. I wheeled from shuttered Applebees to shuttered Tex-Mex joints. I was preparing to fall on my knees at the mercy of a Subway footlong when I looked up and saw a freshly printed poster.
“Your Credit Card Lounge™ Now Open at Gate 22.”
I had just opened my first credit card a few months back and vaguely remembered something about lounges. Miraculously, I was already at Gate 18, so I walked a few steps over to 22. Fogged glass doors parted and I was whisked away from the world of the airport.
The elevator doors opened onto a meditation retreat.
“Thank you sir, that was an excellent scan!” said the attendant to the cargo-shorted man in front of me. Then, I stepped forward, curtseying to the woman behind the counter with dreadlocks and a cake pop bouquet.
“Am I allowed to be here?” I asked, sheepish, as I slid my card across the counter. “I’ve never been to an airport lounge before.”
I can’t quite remember if the musical number she broke out into was one from Annie the Musical, or the song the munchkins first greet Dorothy with, but before I knew it, she welcomed me in and answered the only question on my mind. Yes, she relayed telepathically. “Everything is free.”
I found my way to an empty table, then hesitated. I’ve never, not once, left my bag alone in an airport. I go from home to cab to toilet to gate with backpacks gorilla-glued to my body, certain someone is out to steal my dented Hydroflask I found abandoned on a street in Brooklyn. But today, I offloaded my belongings onto a chair next to a man who was sprawled out like a mermaid on a leather sofa, chaperoning a Louis Vuitton purse.
I motored over to the buffet of Texan barbecue, a garden of tiny skillets photosynthesising beneath heated lamps. The lounge closed at 9:00pm. Based on the melting clouds of pink and blue outside the panoramic windows, I figured I was close.
I wanted to consume enough meals for the entire winter ahead. I wanted to know what happened to Amelia Earhart. Instead, I split the difference and checked out the ass of a woman who was no less than 75-years-old.
Her husband mounted her for a kiss, then lost his balance and fell entirely on top of her. They giggled. He wanted more. I wanted more.
The clock struck 9. Loungers closed their laptops and staff circled tables like seagulls at the beach. I moved from denial to anger to the dessert counter for one last round of baklava. I wiped my chin of dignity and honeyed shards, using sticky fingers to return my kn95 mask back to my face. It was time to return to society — the real one, burdened with aerosol particles and plane delays and teenagers who hate their parents and parents who hate their teenagers.
I crammed into the elevator with the other last-minute freeloader, a full-grown man cradling a baby-pink cake pop in his giant hands. We bubbled together in our final silky moments of airport lounge joy and self-dissolution.
Just before the Terminal button lit up, we turned to each other and said, at the exact same moment, “This was the best night of our lives.” And then the metal box cracked open, releasing us to flutter around the cruel, cold world.
