@libby
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What’s Brought to the Table
796 words
Grace was sitting on the floor of Lily’s bedroom, leaning against Lily’s wardrobe. She looked at Lily, who was lying on her single bed with her arms spread wide like an act of supplication.
Lily had just said she was aiming for paradoxy. Grace wondered what psychodrama had produced this.
‘Life,’ Lily continued, ‘is more interesting when it’s contradictory.’
Grace remained silent. She wasn’t allowed to sit on Lily’s desk-chair. The desk itself held Lily’s laptop, some books borrowed from her university library and a stack of notes for an essay. Lily had said the essay was complicated and that her desk and chair were part of the psychic space she needed for thinking. Grace knew this meant she, Grace, mustn’t intrude; she was somehow inimical to thinking.
‘Really,’ Lily said now, ‘it’s quite odd that you’re the eldest and I’m the one who’s nearer to having a career.’
‘FFS,’ said Grace, getting up.
#
In the kitchen Grace sat at the table with her palms against her temples and stared at the kitchen sink. Lily was so pompous. On top of that, at university she had a boyfriend, who somehow put up with her.
At the garden centre where Grace worked she watered the plants every day and tidied them into rows on the slatted tables, closing the gaps left by customers who’d lifted out what they wanted. The garden centre had a café whose wooden tables and chairs had rough-hewn legs, meant to look rustic. The café served light meals, ice creams and cakes. Customers paid at the till at the counter’s end. Further on from the counter was the swing door into the kitchen and Grace tried hard never to watch this door. One of the chefs, Amit, wore his beanie low on his forehead, showing off his eyes. He had attractive hands. The thought of them gave a frisson to her view of biscuits and puddings. Grace imagined him feeding her cake with his fingers.
Amit had a girlfriend.
#
A few days later, Grace was in the kitchen at home. Mum had left crumbs round the toaster so Grace wiped them up. Dad had left a coffee mug on the table so Grace put it in the dishwasher. On a shelf beside the cooker a row of big glass jars held different shapes of pasta. She straightened the line of jars.
Lily appeared with red eyes and a puffy face.
‘What’s up?’ said Grace.
‘Jake is leaving me.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lily took a shuddering breath. ‘He said it wasn’t working out for him.’
She gulped. ‘He mumbled then he cut the call.’
She wept and Grace made her a coffee.
#
A week later, Grace listened to Mum saying she was worried about Lily who’d stopped working, wasn’t going out anywhere and sat watching TV. Her university studies were going to suffer.
Grace thought the upset would do Lily good.
#
At work Grace finished watering the bedding plants and went to the café for her break. Lily was sitting at a table.
Grace stood over her. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Mum said I should come out.’
‘I thought you didn’t like this place.’
At home Lily always looked down her nose whenever the garden centre was mentioned. Today she could have gone to a different café.
‘I don’t feel up to anywhere–’ Lily looked round the half-full café ‘—anywhere edgier.’
Amit walked past the tables on his way to the kitchen. Grace saw Lily watching him. When the swing door closed behind him Lily said, ‘You didn’t tell me there was anyone here who’s actually sexy.’
Grace wanted to walk off but forced herself to sit down and have coffee.
#
The following week she was alone in the café when Amit brought her coffee to her.
‘Your sister’s been here again. She’s flirty, isn’t she.’ He still held the coffee. ‘A bit needy?’
Grace studied his face. If Lily was being a nuisance, Grace would murder her when she got home. Or do something – she couldn’t yet think what, not with Amit standing there.
‘Her boyfriend left her,’ she said.
‘I’m going to a new job, in a restaurant.’
‘Oh. That’s… Congratulations!’
She kept a smile going. The worst thing would be to look needy.
He put the coffee on the table. ‘Your refreshment before you go back to nurturing the plants. That’s what you do isn’t it?’ He smiled.
‘I…’ She shrugged and managed to laugh. ‘I suppose so.’
#
The gap Amit’s news had torn was mending, just a little. She’d been seen as something other than incomplete.
She wondered about a new job, in a plant nursery, and perhaps with more demands and responsibilities.
It was as if all she’d needed was a different view.
Thanks, Sandra. I’ve started a story – it probably works better with the After the Funeral theme. I doubt I’ll manage two stories. September is a busy month 🙂 I like it, the busyness and back to school feeling.
Hi Ath, I’d be pleased to read Thirty Days if I’m the kind of reader you’re looking for. My experience of speculative fiction is limited. For instance I loved M John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again but soon gave up the first novel in his Viriconium series. That tipped too far into fantasy for me.
Feel free to see what other offers you receive and then let me know if you think I’d be helpful.
There’s a fabulous selection of entries in the August comp, and again it’s hard to pick one winner!
@Seagreen: This very enjoyable story reveals the rich history of a relationship, shown with a clever use of Elizabeth English and rhythm. There’s a satisfyingly wide range of emotion, including the delicious LOL comedy of “Thine exuberance I shall compare with tar melting in the sun and grant thy beauty, so well-disguised, age shall not challenge.” I couldn’t help but think of Antony and Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stage her infinite variety.” Very entertaining.
@sandradavies: This story was pleasurably unexpected in subject matter: an advertisers’ creative brainstorm. I enjoyed the comedy and the character portrayals. The writing captures the sense of a collection of real individuals – hard enough to do in longer fiction, let alone in flash. And the delightful conclusion that they’d all be back at the table on Monday morning, perhaps being witty again or perhaps finding the uninspiring nightwear dragging them all down in a comic way.
@Athelstone: The ironies running through this story are very enjoyable, including that this is about not changing, though there’s plenty of comparing and some lying about personal change. I’m always fond of successful external narrators and I like how this one takes control to inform and guide us. At the end poor Josh still lacks an audience. The preoccupations and squabbles of the men reveal their rough-edged but ongoing relationship, the thing that I imagine is more important than any of them would admit.@Terrie: This story has a compelling view of change taken from the wide viewpoint of unhuman time. On way there’s the truthful point that we often don’t want change, but no one, human or mythical, can resist it. In the end we must all recognise it as our lot. I like the tongue-in-cheek way Shakespeare is given one of his most famous lines! And how the brief passing of a summer’s day is as capable as must longer periods of revealing change.
Sandra: congratulations! In the end it was those disparate characters tackling a Friday-afternoon meeting that decided the winner.
Reminder! The monthly competition closes at midnight on Saturday, 31st August.
Anyone can enter.
Here’s the task:
Our summer weather so far has been an ever-changing experience, almost one extreme to another. For the August comp please write a story about changeability titled ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ Thee can refer to a person, animal or something inanimate. Max 500 words.
Thanks, Richard! This becomes quite compulsive doesn’t it, a new thread of literature (new to me anyway) to follow and think about.
I’m off now for a few days and will read your post fully when I return.
I replied in a comments box earlier where it may get lost – so I’ve copied my comment here.
***
Definitely good going, Richard. Thank you for this post.
Of these various translations I prefer the ones with shorter lines. They feel more immediate, less worked. That seems to be the magic of Sappho’s lines – the way they leap almost three millennia with apparent simplicity to show that little has changed. It’s a cliche to say that, I know, but it’s the fact they manage this , with so little surrounding ‘stuff’ to get in the way, that gives me a jolt. And the eternal subject matter of course.
The translations Selby Wynne Schwartz used when she was working on After Sappho are those by Anne Carson in If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho. So there’s yet another translation ???? I haven’t read Carson’s book but an Amazon review of If Not Winter is an adjunct to the interesting background provided by Richard: https://www.amazon.co.uk/If-Not-Winter-Fragments-Sappho/dp/1844080811
And basically the reviewer says Carson doesn’t try too hard with her translations.I’m looking forward to reading this, Richard. I became more aware of Sappho when I read Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel After Sappho, which I enjoyed a lot. Before that I’d hardly known who Sappho was.
Thank you, Terrie! This is lovely surprise, and I’m pleased you liked my story.
I really enjoyed Sandra’s and Ath’s stories too. So lifelike. Thank you both of you for being such excellent competitors.
An explanatory note: I saw an exercise which asked for story without verbs and wanted to give it a go, so that’s what I’ve attempted here.
A Delivery
Inside the shadowed arch of a canal bridge: a half circle of water-drips and their echoes, drops and plops, plips, a full saucepan of water on the towpath, someone’s rubbish, new drinking supply for the ease of local rats. And a large upright shape too, a half-hidden man, perhaps also a local rat, his cigarette smoke a grey cloud under the brickwork.
Not yet the rendezvous, the handover. Soon but not yet, minutes not hours for the package. Who the giver and who the receiver?
The man’s hands: empty but for the cigarette in one and a lighter in the other. His breath warm and nicotined on the bridge’s cold bricks. A convenient spot, this, for a puff, for another coffin nail, a layer of tar on the arch, homely like the yellow-brown ceilings of pubs. But no pub gangs for this man, nor wide boys nor spivs. Independent operator. Self-reliant.
Ears open. Footsteps on the road above and their halt on the crown of the bridge. A whistle from on high, tuneful, Greensleeves, and a question inside our man. A tune too casual by half? Too jaunty? Anyhow, a communique.
The packet, a drop, here on a string, a rectangle of newspaper-wrap below the curve of the arch, a dangle against a nearly black moonless night. A penknife from our man’s coat pocket, a snip, a grab of the packet. Footsteps above, then distant footsteps, then no footsteps. Solitude again.
No reflection from the canal; no sound from anywhere. But even so: caution. The packet – now in a coat pocket, now out of the pocket for a check, for confirmation. Inside the cover of tabloid newspaper, a jewellery box. A sleek beauty. And the man’s expectation? Diamond drop-earrings, expensive tickles for some woman’s neck, but not too costly, not rare. Sellable.
In the shadow of the bridge, a flame from his lighter. Vision. What delicate hinges, what soft velvet, a luxury pillow for of a sparkle of– . A dull shine. Paste in a tin setting. The thing of highest value? His fingerprints.
Trinkets in the mud at the bottom of the canal, anger in his chest. The towpath: route to a supposed safe-house, invisible from the bridge but within his reach, his mindset, his circle of choices for revenge.
382 words
These three pieces are all so interesting and satisfying, and such good uses of ‘electricity’ that, as usual, I’ve struggled to decide on a winner because the standard is so high. I’m intrigued by how something as impersonal and powerful as electricity has resulted in intimate pieces, not just in the content but in the sense of including the reader – sometimes through direct address. A huge force translated into human experience and connection.
Terrie, @purplewitch I enjoyed the personal voice of the narrator and the carefully managed move from realism to magical realism, or perhaps steampunk. I don’t know if I’m landing in the right categories here but I liked the control within this piece, the evocative lapidary descriptions and the development of electricity as a character.
Sandra, @sandradavies I liked the personal narration here. I don’t know how autobiographical this piece may be but it has a sense of lives being lived that I much enjoyed. The details felt real and interesting. And what a good interweaving of electricity in its various forms, literal and metaphorical.
Ath, @athelstone another enticing first-person narrator, essayistic opening and a smooth move into story territory. There’s a very interesting sense from this narrator of a life that’s been experienced rather than fully initiated by them, of a love affair that benefitted them unfairly, and a realisation about what they have to do. A very enjoyable read.
Terrie, congratulations, and over to you!
Thank you, Ath! That was a lovely surprise. The standard of the other entries was so high. Thank you to Terrie, Sandra and Seagreen for such evocative and immersive stories.
Phototropism
Suzy and I drank white wine while we sat in stiff, square garden chairs. I hadn’t met Suzy before and admired how she leant back, legs stretched out – lounging and confident. She wasn’t just overcoming the chair’s straight edges; she showed me she knew she had glamour. Her jeans and yellow cotton shirt were years old, threads loosening at the hems, but she was relaxed in them and I guessed those years had been good, that perhaps all her years had been good.
Her eyes twinkled at me, another middle-aged woman. Laughing, she pushed her fingers through her thick hair. “Grey!”
Her hair was three or four inches long. She lifted it. “Don’t I look like a dandelion clock?”
I laughed too, then felt guilty. Carol wasn’t joining in. Carol sat with knees and feet together, spine upright, shoulders straight and, despite the glass in her hand, she looked like a flight of steps waiting to be climbed.
We were in Carol’s garden. I’d met her once, when she came to my door on our newly built road of houses. An invitation, she’d said. A drink in her garden.
So here we were. I wondered if only Suzy and I had been invited, or if no one else had bothered to come.
Carol said to Suzy, “You’re our road’s longest resident.”
“Oh, the day I moved in! All the mud and half-built houses. Scaffolding everywhere. But I raised a glass to my dear dad, may he rest in peace. When I was young he had a low opinion of my lifestyle: squats, communes, crappy old camper vans. But here I was in middle England.”
As if in memory of him she raised her glass. Sunlight spangled it.
I felt awkward. Carol could be a cartoon of middleness, the sort that didn’t want to look beyond itself, and if Suzy was having a dig I’d failed to do anything to stop her. I was too taken with Suzy’s expansiveness.
The wine was going to my head and Suzy’s shirt was deep yellow.
‘You’re still a dandelion,’ I said.
“Yep. Growing anywhere.”
In Carol’s garden the new turf was one solid green, nothing unwanted breaking through. Young shrubs were planted at intervals round its edges, the gaps covered with bark chippings.
“You’ve a real garden,” I told her. “All I’ve done with mine is lay a few paving slabs.”
“I wanted to get started.” Carol looked round her garden for a few seconds. “Parents can be difficult. My mother called me a weed.”
Suzy, about to sip wine, paused. “She doesn’t sound very loving.”
“She wasn’t. You know, I was thinking the three of us could start to meet the other people in the road.”
“You want to meet everyone?” said Suzy.
“They might not mind me looking at their gardens. I think there’s a lot of scope.”
I looked at Carol and for the first time noticed her crisp shirt was patterned with peonies, hollyhocks and lupins, bright and lavish.
499
Thank you, Seagreen, for the competition. Great, enticing stories from Ath, Sandra and Terrie. I enjoyed them all.
I like the bugs analogy, Terrie.
Roughly I do something like this: I plan, though not in great detail – usually the ending and a couple of things along the way. When I start writing the plan doesn’t seem to work so I alter the order of events or cut events. After a bit I give up with the plan and hope the writing will suggest what I need to do with the story. I wouldn’t recommend this method but it’s the best I can manage.
It’s a while since the 1980s
And why come back? Why, exactly, limp along these corridors after decades, and stop to look at dormitory doors and classroom doors all shut for the summer holiday. There’s no one else in this building – a giant bungalow with many arms – except the senior school secretary who has shown me old records and left me to find my way out. I said I could leave by myself. Go out the way I came in, I said. I’d already lied about this being my first visit; now I’m walking round the school, the areas away from her office.
If the teenage me loiters at all on a bed or at a desk, it will be clenched with alarm. When I unpacked the first time, when I was twelve, I hung my blouses and skirts in a narrow wardrobe and tucked my pyjamas under the pillow of the bed which was to be mine, and I moved through this official routine – everything felt official to me, a new girl. Sadness rose and clung, a miasma which I at first called homesickness.
My parents had followed advice. The hospital doctors told them that the school’s architects had thought of everything; flat corridors – no steps! – for girls to wheel and limp along. They didn’t say, because they didn’t know – though couldn’t they have guessed? – that some teachers wore glazed faces as they stood at blackboards and talked at us. We sat in rows, my friends and I, the friends I’d gained here. We were alarmed. Our futures were limited. We sat with knees under old, lidded desks, lids which not every girl could open without help though I was lucky and could open mine for my textbooks, pens, pencils, ruler. We had the props of a useful education though we couldn’t quite believe in it. Nor could some of the teachers. They went through the motions, they received salaries, they wrote on the boards and picked up the board-rubbers and left chalky sweeps where words had been. They didn’t think many of us would earn salaries of our own.
I’m a researcher, here for a project I’m paid to work on: special schools, the history of. I’ve been to other specials schools and could have done my job just as well without this one, but I’d have felt half-finished.
Lots of tech in the classrooms, the secretary had said, and some in the dormitories. That’s why, out of school time, the doors are locked. In the corridors I look at the walls and doors; they’re brighter than in my day. Sky blue, spring green, sunny buttery yellow, and covered with schoolwork and mementos of outings: paintings, photos, cartoons, poems, cheer expressed in smiles and jaunty words. I wonder how deep this enjoyment goes.
It’s a mistake, this coming back. My future turned out alright but history is settling itself, despite me telling it there’s no need – it’s over. But I’m losing perspective. In a cloud I’m isolated.
(493)
Congratulations, Terrie, on your 36k words. And for being successful with notebooks.
Coordination: that’s exactly it. I can’t get coordinated with notebooks. I have one on my desk and it travels to my bedside table and back again. I admire people who make notes when they’re out – they seem more intuitive and open than I am. I think their minds flow more smoothly. They’re even Romantic with a capital R, with all the creativity that implies. A notebook when I’m out means retrieving (lower-case r) the thing from bag or glove compartment, scrawling messily in it, remembering to take it indoors for transfer of information. Doing my filing.
Memorising something brief on the spot and thinking about it later is much easier.
At my desk and in bed I read books and articles and in my notebook I write down other titles I want to read and words I need to look up and – edging towards inspiration – phrases that prompt images and ideas. I note phrases of my own that just might be good enough to turn into something.
I keep a list of books I’ve read.
I enjoyed this prompt @Seagreen . At first I thought I wouldn’t have time to enter the comp this month but being able to work on something I’d already written gave me fresh energy. My piece still needs a bit more work but the exercise you gave us was very helpful and one to be remembered.
Congratulations @Janette . I loved this excerpt. It feels so realistic. I could really hear her voice too in your brilliant dialogue.
This is from my novel. It’s 1937. Hester is shortly to leave school and has asked her father if she can have flying lessons. He’s said no, it’s too dangerous. That’s the novel’s inciting incident. The is the next scene, told from her father’s pov.
412 words
In Worcester Cathedral, Hester’s father Frederick Longley gazed at the vaulted ceiling above the nave. His hat would have been warmer on his head than in his hand but all week the thought of this building had been held dear. The structured ascent of cathedrals: succour for an irreligious soul. Worcester’s east window, five graduated lancets, beautiful and rare. The chill didn’t matter.
He’d left Hester and Dora in a side aisle looking at tombs. Hester’s expression above the marble faces of dead nobles had been thin. How she’d bristled in the tea-room, but she’d probably read some report of an aviator in a newspaper. Even so, turning her down from something she wanted left some guilt.
There was regret for the cathedral too, the garish black and white floor tiles laid by Victorians who’d believed them an improvement. Too much confidence, the Victorians – rather like Hester. He walked towards the choir, took the chancel steps in one stride, raised his eyes again. Here was another reason for this visit, the blind arcade above the choir stalls, the row of arches fronting a solid wall. In most choirs such an arcade was a single line but at Worcester a second course overlapped the first, decoration on decoration, the masons’ self-assurance –
The act of looking up. Those messes of crumpled wood, wires and linen. That’s what Hester hadn’t understood, how survival could be touch-and-go. He should have explained it better, that after their crashes the pilots might or might not survive. But what a subject for afternoon tea.
In the cathedral there wasn’t much time before some official came to usher him away – before choristers arrived for evensong – but the chancel’s painted ceiling still waited. Angels and saints, absurd but beautiful. And then the long transepts to look at, the high windows. Space and light: that vital relationship. His own religion.
Ten minutes later he found Dora and Hester, yet among the tombs. Dora smiled. ‘I think we’ve had enough of dead people.’
‘Then how about a turn round the green?’ he asked. ‘Hester?’
On the green Hester, long-legged, strode ahead as if she were thinking them both numbskulls. His Hester, who dashed across tennis courts, delivered strong backhands, who in winter could cover a lacrosse pitch, stick battling in front, hair and ribbons streaming behind. This idea of hers to learn to fly. She’d once thought to become a horsewoman then discovered horses were dull. Her enthusiasms passed like summer clouds.
Yes, Salter’s detachment. Is that what makes his writing interesting? I think it may be – for me anyway.
John, I wouldn’t press Salter on you, or anyone, but his prose is an example of American spareness if you ever want to investigate same.
@sandra
The short stories are very good, Sandra. I liked a Sport and a Pastime but it can feel dated even though the writing was, for me, compelling. Salter can fall into the trap of his generation. Some of his writing about women can seem as if he didn’t ask the women around him how they thought and felt. On the other hand he’s also a very sensitive interpreter of people.
I posted too soon. My comment may look as though I’m suggesting you don’t, Daeds, which I certainly didn’t mean! Your study of Salter brings a clarity and atmosphere to your writing which I’m sure it would have anyway. It’s interesting to think, in this influences process, how much we’re drawn to authors who provoke writerly neurones that we already possess buried away somewhere.
Of those big American writers from the second half of the 20th century, Salter is my favourite. Richard Yates, perhaps viewed as 2nd tier in comparison, is also great in Revolutionary Road. Much as I love Salter, Yates might be more of an influence on me if I think about it. I love the opening to R Road.