12 stories chosen from 463 entries. In the introduction Kate Ellis writes "Repeated themes included homelessness, violence, dystopia, anxiety, online dating, misogyny and escape".
- "A body is a empty vessel" (James Mitchell) - Connie (15?) is at Ruth's wake in the USA. They both belonged to a strict religious organisation. Ruth was new and rebellious They sat together in Cry Booths - like photobooths but they induce crying. Pastor John had said "every tear is a messenger dove flown from the soul". They binged, using up their lifetime of tears. Ruth had overdosed in a booth. At the end, everybody gone, Connie lies in the coffin beside Ruth and cries. The corpse cries too.
Yes. - "Life with animals" (Rosanna Hildyard) - A female I/we PoV. It's February. Lambing time. Blood in the fields. All the girls bleed sooner or later. The hikers only see the picturesque fields. The thin female jogger is watched by her ex classmates (who work in Tesco or the army). "There are two ways to go: a slut or boring". When she slept with nice Lewis, she bled. She has osteopenia (too little food?). Her dad shoots pheasants. When the jogger gets home there are gibbets at the back door. Surely she will normalise sooner or later.
Male/Female. Internal (blood) vs external (fake tans). Nature/Towns. Yes. - "Hot butter on repeat" (Judith Wilson) - May '72. Mixed race Brian, 14, had black and white friends, but is closest to black Ruben now (who fancies him?). Single mother Bernadette doesn't want him to go out, and barricades herself in their flat. He goes out. A new PC is on duty, his wife about to give birth. He asks his colleague to explain the background again! Brian's white ex-friend throws a brick which Ruben intercepts before it hits Brian. Fighting breaks out involving the knife Brian had taken from their kitchen. Next day the PC turns up at the flat.
No. - "The girls" (Isha Karki) - 1st person PoV. From 5, two girls become Best Friends. "When one of us is desperate for the bathroom and told to wait, something hot dribbles from both our seats, a shared rush of belief, pools of golden light merging, chairs clattering across the classroom as other children recoil". The narrator gets pregnant, the other goes to Oxford university. They lose touch.
- "The four kind women" (Melody Razak) - The 1st-person young female was raped, brought across the border, and is being looked after by the man's four chadored wives. She can read. She fakes mutism. She becomes married to the man's simpleton son who never has sex with her. She befriends the garden boy. She's pregnant. She initiates sex with the boy, suggesting that the baby could be killed.
- "The weight of nothing" (Toby Wallis) - Sophie and Will have a dead baby son Oliver. They'd prepared the nursery. Will finds early morning jogging helps. Sophie revisits the chilled body, has imprints of the feet taken. Will cried more than she did, but is managing to shop and cook. She returns to Oliver alone, says "I wanted to show you the ducks. I don't know what else. All of it. I wanted to show you all of it." Then Oliver was still, and she was still. It was everything else that turned and moved.
No. - "Open house" (Emily Bullock) - Freddie's PoV, third-person - he's childless, retired, 5 months a widower. Through a misunderstanding he visits the for-sale London flat where he grew up. He recalls the moment when his father (who barely spoke English) picked up the phone to hear that he'd become a widower. Freddie locks himself into the flat. He wants to be held by his mother, by his late wife. He sees a plane leave a trail. The final paragraph is "Life has a way of flying away, leaving you dispersed, insubstantial as vapour trail, and there isn't any way to gather all those tiny particle pieces together again", which is, I suppose, Freddie's thought expressed in words he wouldn't use, though "a way ...away ... way" and "particle pieces" sound clumsy.
- "Lowenna's Mother-in-law" (Holly Barratt) - 4 pages. Lowenna, pregnant with her first child, is sick when her mother-in-law guts a chicken. She likes fish and salt. Once the baby starts moving she will return to the sea, becoming a queen if the child survives. If it doesn't, she will try again with another man because her species is dying out.
- "One for Sorrow or, In the Garden of Wasted Things" (T. Schroeder) - A troubled, superstitious person takes a break from work to stay in an isolated cottage. Magpies crash into the windows. Gifts from nature appear. They phone their superstitious, traditional Chinese mother, who didn't change her ways much when she came to the UK. At the end they imagine "Hundreds of magpies falling from the skies to form bridge between me and my mother". They phone their mother, but can't get through.
- "The Littoral zone" (Sylvia Warren) - Anna looks after Sara, her older sister. They're 20-50 years old. Each day Anna goes for an hour's walk by the sea - therapy/escape. We get a sample day from each of the 4 seasons. Sara had an inspecified accident. There is friction between them, but they cope. At the end Anna doesn't want to take Sara to "her" beach, but she carries her there anyway. The final sentence is "They lie together, with the tide coming in."
- "Black gull beach" (Ellen Hardy) - It begins with Do you remember the storm?. In the second sentence the children were going down to the beach almost every day. A group of 10 year old, living on an island. Peter was new and shy, a loner who liked nature. One morning there were 1000s of stranded jellyfish, like a single giant beast. He walked on it, to its centre. Years later, still living on the island, his marriage failing, he recalled that calmness. Walking by the sea he finds a dying seal. He recalls seeing his father when he got the news that Peter's grandfather had died - "Well that's it then", he'd said, the same words used by Peter's wife when she walked out.
- "Olive and Red" (Kerry Hood) - Olive and Red, an oldish, eccentric married couple with a daughter in London, live in a bungalow on a Dorset cliff top. Sections are entitled "Olive, thinking about the beach hut", etc. Red wheelbarrows sand from the beach into their house. A boy comes in with his mother and has fun making sandcastles.
Stylish
Many of the stories concern teenagers finding themselves, or dying babies, or beaches. Many good stories.
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