Taking honorable mention in the 2025-2026 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers is “The Brothers” by Clare Fielder. Through the use of second person as well as vivid descriptions of the isolated landscape, the reader is delivered to a monastery in the ancient past. As one brother seeks to obtain Divine recognition through his representational drawings, the other brothers grow old and weary. We are left to ask: Is perfection what will save us? When does dedication become obsession? When is faith the very thing that will be our undoing?
The page gets wider and wider, as additional leaves are affixed to all sides, gummed down with tar. It is larger than your desk, then larger than all the desks pushed together. You work by folding sections strategically. It’s better anyway, not to have the whole thing visible at one time. You’d rather not have all the animals able to look you in the eye at once. They so outnumber you. Eventually the page is larger than the floor; the edges of the paper break against the walls of the scriptorium like waves.
* * *
The brothers who came before you had hewn the stone from the cliff and built the monastery atop it. They’d whitewashed the cells and hung the driftwood crosses on the walls. They planted the garden and laid the first fires and looked out of their empty windows at the same sea you look out at. The monastery was already a whole world before you arrived, before you were ever thought of. When you arrived you were a young man with no wherewithal and nobody to feed him. You stepped into the life that was waiting for you like a foot into an old, familiar boot.
Your monastery is small and remote. You live close to the weather. All winter long the wind beats you down until your backs are parallel to the clifftop; in summer there is no shade and the long grass is so full of crickets that they pop and spit out of it like oil jumping around a mackerel in a pan. The cliff path leads down to a small headland, and that is what makes the monastery unique and what makes the pilgrims brave the distance, because the headland is where the first brothers constructed the spiral. The spiral is what it sounds like. A shape made from heavy stones laid upon the grass. Whatever responsibilities the brothers have, they each have the duty and the privilege of walking it daily, inwards and outwards. Each brother does this alone as the waves beat against the rocks beneath them in grays or brilliant blues, depending on the season. When you finish walking back towards the monastery you are always thankful that you have been allowed to make your life here, in this harsh and wild place.
You are walking the spiral when the idea of the catalogue first comes to you. Like a rip current it pulls you under and tosses you about and lands you again on the grass, changed and certain of your reason for being. In the grey twilight, with lungs full of salt, you watch as gulls trace circles around each other in the air above you. You feel your blood pumping a circle around your own body. You walk your widening circle and imagine it spreading to meet the edges of the flat circle of the world. It is winter, and the air is damp and bitter, but the idea you have warms you so that you are able to walk the spiral once, twice, three times until the catalogue is solidified within your mind and you are ready to turn back up the cliff path to where the brothers are waiting.
* * *
It begins with a circle on a page. You set out to realize your vision with an ordered mind and a steady hand. In the center of the circle, you draw the sea creatures, then move out to insects, then the larger land animals. The outer edge of the circle is reserved for the birds. You have a list of all the known animals. The brothers work on it with you, relying not only on your own memories but also the precious books in your modest library. You send brothers to monasteries along the coast, in both directions, where the libraries are better stocked. They return after many months, and add their animals to the list. You are moved by their support of your vision. An illuminated catalogue of all the animals, the brothers believe, is a worthy cause. What better way to honor His creation, His boundless imagination and finesse? And so you scour texts, you walk out onto the moors, you hover over rock-pools, you speak to pilgrims from beyond your boundaries.
You compile the list together, and then you set to work alone.
* * *
Your project is an excitement to the whole brotherhood, and every brother has a part to play. There are the brothers who keep you in paper, soaking and mashing the rags then stamping them down and nailing them to the monastery roof to dry in the sea air. There are the brothers who carefully tie hairs plucked from the goats and wild ponies into brushes. There are the brothers who pluck the hairs.
Brother Clem grinds down stones and earth and plants into pigments. Brothers Herry and Judd collect eggs from the chickens you have bought, and add the whites to the pigments with precise drops. The scriptorium is a bustling place, and you feel like you are the center point of a great shoal of fish, always moving in the same direction and flashing silver with each mystically communicated, perfectly synchronized turn. It is the happiest time of your life, when the book is a shared, private dream. You dutifully draw your beasts of the field, your crustaceans and your shore birds and with each stroke of the brush you think yes! This is my purpose and it is possible.
As you work the brothers chant around you, and the drone of their music is like a heavy blanket that envelops you and keeps you diligently in your chair. When the sun begins to set you sit back from your work, stretch until your neck pops and pick your way down the cliff path to walk the spiral. The waves below you sound like an echo of the brothers’ music.
* * *
It doesn’t take long for news of the catalogue to spread beyond the monastery, and the pilgrims start coming to tell you of the animals they’ve seen. They tell you about spots and stripes and that is well and good. You can make peace also with shells, armor, beaks. But then they begin to speak of protuberances none of you have names for. They gesticulate and use strings of clumsy words to describe horns that split and twist, skin like bark. They stop speaking of animals and speak instead of things: glowing things, many legged and many eyed things that move seamlessly between land, water and sky, and it is difficult to conceive of such things. Their words do not translate easily into pictures in your mind. How could you draw what you cannot imagine? When the pilgrims retire, you sit with your knuckles grinding your eye sockets, feeling bleak.
It is Brother Clem who helps you. He takes you out into the garden. He bids you crouch down among the plants and he gently folds back the lowest leaves and shifts the seaweed that is laid upon the soil to reveal the insects beneath. He points out earwigs and cutter ants and worms. He talks of crickets and the transformation of caterpillars.
Think of the grasshopper, he says, with its backward knees. Think of the stick insect. You need not look beyond the beasties to understand the vastness of what is possible. So many bodies assembled so many ways, just here in our own garden. And the world is much wider than our garden. Who is to say what is possible out there? Allow yourself to believe in the animals people bring to you, even if they sound strange and devilish to our narrow ears. Allow Him to be the artist, allow yourself to be the brush.
* * *
You walk the spiral until it is too dark to see the stones. You sleep still as a mollusk in your cell and wake up determined once more. Your limbs are possessed with energy, as if the sea wind has entered into them and you are animated by gusts propelling you towards the scriptorium.
You give up on circles. Instead, you decided to organize the animals by number of legs. You’ve learnt from your early mistakes. You leave empty spaces for the animals that will no doubt be discovered and brought to your attention. You do not feel regret that your first attempt was not successful. It is right, to practice, you think. Who but our Creator can achieve perfection without rehearsal?
But the pilgrims continue to come. The second, then the third and the fourth attempts are not so easy to abandon. You are years into the project, and have lost count of the number of drafts you have laid aside when you choose not to start from scratch any longer. You ask Brother Clem to investigate the possibilities of birch sap, so that you might bind papers together, growing the catalogue as and when is needed.
* * *
The brothers do what they can to nourish you. They say you must keep up your strength. They know better than to suggest you abandon your task, even when your hand knows no other shape but the grip of a pen, and you must prize it open and massage the joints until you are able to pick up the bowl of broth or cup of milk they are pressing upon you.
They are good brothers, and you wish you had the time to know them better.
* * *
Brother Michael sits up with you some nights, when you work late. At first you thought this would be a distraction, but he surprises you. His conversation keeps you alert and you find that some of your best drawings are made when your mind is on his questions and your hand carries on the work unsupervised.
Do you think He struggled through the creation? The way that you struggle? Brother Michael’s voice is careful and quiet, always.
No, you say. I believe He did it joyfully. You can see it in the stranger animals. It must have felt like play to make them up. They are so unexpected, yet lovingly complete.
Like play, muses Brother Michael. Yet it is work for you? Why is that?
It would be wrong, you say. An act of disrespect.
You think so?
You don’t know how to answer. You don’t know how to say that you don’t remember how it feels to play. You must have played as a child but you can’t recall what that looked like. You haven’t seen a child since you were one.
* * *
The pilgrims keep coming, and each tells you of some new creature. Is the world so much larger than you thought? You feel as though you are being tested and falling short. Your gut churns with guilt as the brothers work harder to keep up the production of materials you need. They sleep on bare straw now, for the sheets have long since been torn into rags for paper.
Just a little longer, you tell them. A few years more and we’ll be done and He will bless us for this work.
You say this even when you are struggling to imagine that you matter to Him, that He can even have an eye on you when there are so many animals to oversee. Some days you feel as if you are choking when you look at the list and think of how many animals there are to go, or when you worry about how many you still might be ignorant of. When the worry overtakes you, you walk the spiral and breathe deep breaths until breathing is easy once again. You remember your path and you allow your brothers to hold you up. You frequently wake before dawn to set to work, to show them their sacrifices will not go to waste. They do not waver in their industry, and neither shall you.
* * *
On the page, all organizational systems have broken down. Birds plunge to the depths of the sea; fish lie amongst the hooves of cattle. The work in the scriptorium takes place in silence now. You didn’t notice the day when the brothers ceased their chanting.
* * *
The next obstacle is the color blue. There is too much of it. There is so much more in the sea than seems possible. Of course, living where you do, you knew that it was vast. You have seen how far the horizon is, and in your younger days you had been known to swim beyond your depth in the summer months. But you had not imagined that it could grow deeper still, that there were depths—or so the pilgrims said—that never warmed, not even on the hottest of days. There were depths that the sun never reached, and yet life still thrived there.
You sometimes dream with fear about the depths that go down and down with no end in sight and you look up to see a ladder of fish, their silver bodies stacked on top of each other, showing you how far you’ve fallen.
The color blue is a problem for it needs stones and plants that cannot be foraged or grown in your vicinity. They must be bought, and they are expensive. First you sell a manuscript, then your small collection of gold and silver, then your one and only relic—a knuckle bone from the hand of Saint Just. Brothers must be sent away, further and further afield, to source more lichen and hematite. You cannot grow madder fast enough. There is talk of slowing down, of pausing in your work. You refuse to hear it.
Soups become thinner until they are more water than vegetable. There is rarely meat at table. The brothers become thinner too, in size and in number. You have to scrounge for paper, and when you call for colors you sometimes wait days for your demands to be met. Brother Michael says to be patient, the brothers are doing their best, but when a hole appears in the scriptorium roof and is not immediately fixed you fling a bowl of milk at Brother Herry’s head.
How am I to work like this? you rave. How am I to create anything with the rain coming in?
Brother Herry scurries away, looking at you over his shoulder. You do not see him in the scriptorium again.
* * *
It is upsetting, exhausting in fact, to have what you know about the world so frequently upended. Sunlight is not necessary to life; there are creatures that live lifespans within the bellies of others, and are designed to do so; there are instances when you can cut off the head and the beast still lives.
It happens, now, that you look up and do not know the face that is before you. It feels as if, each time you look up from the page, more years have slipped by and new brothers have joined the order, young and strong. You wonder what ideas, what visions these new initiates will have. What will consume them? You wonder how long the brotherhood, that is so much depleted by the book, will be able to sustain itself.
* * *
You begin to turn the pilgrims away. You are afraid of them. You don’t want to know how much more you don’t know. There isn’t the space. Your faith wavers. Eventually, the pilgrims stop coming.
* * *
You stop eating with the brothers at all. You cease going to morning and evening prayers. You do not help in the garden or the kitchens. You keep your own hours. The only thing that remains of your routine is your evening walk of the spiral, the headland is your only destination. You find yourself walking more slowly down the cliff path. You fear falling, and your body holds a tension it never used to. In the winter, you wrap several blankets around you before venturing out, and still it takes almost an hour by the fire before you have thawed enough to return to work after your circumnavigations. Your body is getting older, and you resent it.
Brother Michael intercepts you on your way back up from the headland. The dark and the wind means he has to put his face close to yours to be seen and understood.
Will you not come back to us? he says.
I am here, I am always here.
But you are not whole. You are shedding too much to carry out this work.
You sigh. You care about Brother Michael, you do, and you would like for him to understand you.
When I first had the vision, you say, I did not think this task would be easy. Neither did I realize it would be so hard. I cannot give into despair, and I try to be strong, but it is difficult. I need focus if I am to finish it.
Haven’t you done enough? You have honored Him.
I have not done what I set out to do.
You should accept that it may never be finished.
You recoil, as if he has struck you.
I cannot accept that.
Why not?
Because I will have failed.
This was supposed to be for God, not for you.
Can’t it be both? you say.
Brother Michael hangs his head and moves to overtake you on the path, headed for the spiral. He squeezes your shoulder as he passes and you take it as a sign of his acknowledgement.
* * *
Theoretically, the spiral is designed to give you time for dedicated contemplation and prayer, to bring the brothers closer to God. This is a story. In reality, it is designed to prevent you from murdering each other. When you live closely and tightly the way you do, when you see the same faces day after day, decade after decade, you need a means to forgetting how infuriating everyone is. You walk clockwise and breathe out Brother Clem’s constant narration of the weather, the drag of Brother Judd’s right foot and the sound of Brother Amis biting his nails, a sound that pains you physically when it resounds in the scriptorium. It makes you want to break each of his fingers with a rock; a specific rock which you identify in the garden and on a dark day have to hurl over the cliff to remove temptation. Still, by the time you have walked the circle clockwise and breathed and turned widdershins, even Brother Amis has become bearable.
* * *
There are times when you remember yourself as a young man, walking the spiral and feeling like you were walking a prophecy into existence. You brush up against the clear-headedness of your youth and in these moments you commit yourself once again. You promise the air around you that you will work harder, that you will be capable of the miraculous.
* * *
Brother Michael keeps your body working. When your eyes are bleary and the animals on the page take up more space in your room and are more solid than the furniture, he prizes the brush out of your hand. He rubs almond oil into your knuckles and the calluses that have formed on the insides of your fingers. He cuts your hair, and his hands on the back of your neck are hot and rough, like bread freshly toasted over a flame.
* * *
Since the day you began your life with the brothers, you have walked the spiral every day. There is nothing remarkable about the day that you stop. It is spring, and for the first time this year the breeze that whistles through the scriptorium window is pleasant. The scriptorium is quiet. No one else comes in, now, aside from Brother Michael. You have been drawing a great beast of the sea which a pilgrim once brought you the story of. You have followed their description faithfully—a bulbous head and fins like spades, the doleful eyes of a cow headed to slaughter. You don’t know whether what you have captured on paper is correct, but it will suffice. It is dusk, and normally you would stand up now. You would stretch and step outside. There is no reason why today should be any different, but somehow when you think of walking across the room and opening the door to the world, you are detained by fear. You can hear the rush of the sea, regular as breathing, and it is horrible. The relentlessness of it. The nearness. Was it always so near? It has been the backdrop to your days for as long as you can remember, but it has crept, over the years, from a comfort to a haunting. No, you will not walk the spiral today. You will not go out and look upon the water, or worse, have the water—with the millions of eyes you now know exist within it—look upon you.
* * *
Things begin to fall out of your control. You do not have the colors you require. There is no new paper. Your hand cramps as you are forced to retrace parts of the page you have already worked upon, conjuring animals into the tight spaces between other animals. The page has become too large to fold, so you bare your feet and crawl upon it. You work until your back is sore and your knees are bruised and you are close to weeping. You are a fool, and you are lonely and you cannot stop. You are in a trap of your own making. You are a creature in the middle of a page, with box after box painted around it with not a single unclosed line.
* * *
Brother Michael puts one hand on your shoulder and with the other holds out a bowl of tea.
Drink, he says. And you do.
* * *
Your work will never be finished. Life is not long enough. You try to wring all the minutes you can out of a day. Your hand is articulated by some combination of fear and shame and habit, for the catalogue has been your entire life. It is all you have to show and all you are known for. If you were to stop now, to admit it will never be complete and to allow that to be acceptable, what would that mean for your life? You cannot allow the brothers to know that you are aware of what you have wasted. It is too late now, for you to offer them anything beyond the page. It is all you know how to do.
* * *
After missing the spiral once, it becomes impossible for you to return to it. No one has said this, but you feel it. You are no longer one of the brothers. You are an oddity. A burden. You shut yourself in the scriptorium, refuse to venture out even when Brother Michael reassures you that you are still welcome amongst them. Your cell remains empty and you prefer to sleep curled beneath your table, the paper rising and falling with your breath.
Come back to us, Brother Michael says again.
No, you say, there is too much to do. I must work.
You do not say that you are trying to save them the embarrassment of seeing you, and trying to save yourself from their pity.
Are they angry? You ask once, when you are tired and vulnerable.
No one is angry, said Brother Michael. The few that are left are sad. The monastery is not what it was.
He does not blame you, and that is a kindness.
* * *
Let me ask you, says Brother Michael, how long has it been since you saw a real animal?
* * *
You are aware, dimly, of the brothers leaving you. Brother Clem takes a fall over the cliff and has to be put out of his misery, like a lame horse.
Even the paths are not safe now, says Brother Michael. They’re half overhangs, the cliffs scooped out from beneath our feet. There have been rockslides.
You grunt and think, all the more reason not to venture out of doors.
After Brother Clem, it’s Brother Amis who’s next to go. No accidents befall him, he simply wrapped a hunk of bread and two pieces of kipper into a bundle and walked away. You can’t say you’re sorry.
Perhaps he heard the call, said Brother Michael. Perhaps we should be listening out for it too.
He says something about the walls, but you’re not listening. Other brothers leave too. You don’t know by what means and their names, when Brother Michael utters them, are unfamiliar to you.
* * *
Brother Michael’s face is that of an old man, but because of his familiarity you can still see the youth he was within it. His hair is still thick, and white as surf. His face is weathered. When your hand develops a tremor he steadies it, and helps you draw shaky lines across the page. He helps you still, when you no longer deserve it. He still believes in you, perhaps.
Do you still pray? He asks you.
You answer him truthfully.
To honor Him, you say, I have had to cast Him aside. I had to cast everyone aside. The catalogue was so important. It became so impossible that to succeed, to even stand a chance, I had to be alone. There wasn’t space for another, not even Him.
And when you are finished?
I will invite Him back in. He will still be there. He will forgive.
And me? Will I still be here?
It is my dearest hope.
You had wanted to make him proud. You wish you could tell him what you mean.
When you are finished, he’d said. Not if, but when. So you cast aside your doubts and work. When you feel tired, you tell yourself no. When you are hungry or thirsty, when the weather comes in from outside and the ground trembles you say not yet.
* * *
You have brought the world into the scriptorium with you, one animal at a time. You have drawn the world into existence. You wonder if the reason the pilgrims came for so long is that creation continues. You wonder if, once He began, once he saw that it was good, he also found that he could not stop himself.
* * *
Brother Michael brings you a meal—you no longer know which meal it is and it doesn’t matter.
Your face, you say. What happened?
I fell, he says, his eyes downcast. I was attempting to repair the roof.
What were you thinking? You admonish. That is a job for the young brothers.
Look around you, says Brother Michael, almost speaking over you. There have been no initiates for many years now. There are no young brothers left.
It is the first time that you can recall that Brother Michal has treated you with something other than gentleness.
* * *
Shapes float across your vision and you cannot tell whether they are marks you have made on the paper, or some defection of your body. You do not know whether the marks you are making are still discernible to others. You do not think you could call them drawings any longer. You scratch away with what you have: a burnt stick, stewed leaves and, when your knees begin to bleed, you make use of the blood. You do not consult the list. You rebel. You draw monstrous amalgams of animals and feel sick, light-headed with the joy of it. Who is to say these animals are not out in the world somewhere? Perhaps, you think, these are not lies but divinations.
The wind howls and the rain lashes horizontally, coming straight in through the window and dampening the page. You ignore it.
* * *
The animals rise up and drag themselves towards you, bearing teeth and claws and suckers. They are getting closer and you do nothing to push them back. You cannot stop. You will not.
You see Brother Michael’s face in front of you. You see his mouth moving. You hear sounds but not words. He has a hand around your wrist, your drawing hand. He tries to force it away from the page. You will not yield. He points to the window and opens his mouth wide, but you will not fall for tricks. You look away from his face and down at the page. The page is always there. You must attend to it. You see the years of your life written there, in a language you have invented for yourself and illuminated with your own hand. Is it enough? You cannot see whether it is or not.
What you do not see is Brother Michael sitting on a bare floor with his head in his hands. You do not see him look up when he realizes the grinding sound he can hear is not the restless movement of his own jaws, but something external. You do not see him go to the window and stand there until there is no window anymore. You do not see the sea drag him by the ankles. The waves are crashing against the scriptorium door. It’s time to look up now. I’m telling you it’s time. Look up look up or you will lose him! Look up, what are you doing? Look up, the sea is coming for you. Look up, before there is no ground left for you to stand on.
Clare Fielder is a writer and artist based in Sheffield, UK, with an MFA from Columbia University. They were a winner of the CRAFT 2021 Creative Nonfiction Award and longlisted for the 2021/22 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. Their work has appeared in Oyster River Pages and The Rumpus.