Delighted that ‘The Siren Squad Tries a New Flyer’ was Highly Commended in this June’s Bath Flash Fiction Award — a story about American cheerleaders, electric eels and the cruelty teenage girls can dress up as loyalty, which was such fun (and slightly chilling) to write. It’ll be appearing in a Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, forthcoming in 2027, so more news on that in due course. Thank you to the BFFA judges and team, as ever.
When I first started this piece during Smokelong’s March Micro Marathon, the electric eel came to mine as an image for what a cheer squad could seem like on the inside. Electric eels don’t just stun their prey — their shocks stimulate the prey’s own motor neurons directly, so the eel takes remote control of another animal’s muscles from a distance. It’s less predator-and-prey than puppeteer-and-puppet: “it can use its electrical system to take remote control of its prey’s body,” as one researcher put it, forcing hidden fish to twitch and reveal themselves, or freezing a target mid-motion.
That was how I imagined the Siren Squad to be: a single nervous system, moving girls’ bodies in and out of formation whether they chose to or not. Real competitive cheerleading has a dark side and the brilliant and ever-inspiring author Megan Abbott has spoken of her fascination with cheerleading as a “brutal, extremely dangerous sport” hidden behind a permanent smile, which fuelled her cheer-noir novel Dare Me. In one notorious case, Wanda Holloway, a Texas cheer mom, was convicted in 1991 of plotting to hire a hitman to kill a rival squad member’s mother, convinced grief would clear a spot for her own daughter.
The Siren Squad isn’t murderous – yet – but its team members swim in that same electric river, an apex-predator pack that glows and moves as one, where every girl is both the current and the thing it runs through…