"A short affair" by Simon Oldfield (ed) (Scribner, 2020)

Original short stories illustrated by Tracey Emin, etc.

• "The Kiss" (Russell Tovey) - The male first-person character had an unhappy childhood, went to New York, met a man called Cave and wanted to see him again, but didn't until he saw him by chance months later in hospital. Cave had leukemia. They live together until Cave dies. The narrator's suicidal. He sees Shirley daily. He gives her 10 weeks to talk him out of killing himself. She touches him (he's not been touched for a long time) and he's better. He's lasted 5 years in the city.
• "On Heat" (Elizabeth Day) - James (his PoV. 68, ex-Booker winner, adulterer, married to Patsy) is working on his next novel in his house when he sees a dog opposite tied up in hot sunlight. He moves it into the shade. Crossing the road back he faints. Patsy (her PoV) had given up her job for their marriage, could often feel herself adopting her standard submissive role. She recalls that day hearing a noise outside and seeing James lying in the street. She went to him, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, knowing he was dead. She had laced his drink with sleeping pills. She'd had enough.
• "Ms Featherstone and the Beast" (Bethan Roberts) - Stevie likes his feminist teacher Ms Amber Featherstone - she doesn't like Margaret Thatcher and she helps him edit the school newspaper. He's embarrassed by his parents' occasional intimacy. His brother is waiting to be sent to the Falklands. During an editorial meeting at Amber's house he discovers that she has a partner - Barney, who looks rough. He's called in by the deputy head about the newpaper. The teacher wants him to admit that the provocative articles are Featherstone's fault. He takes fully responsibility (which was honest). Next day it's announced that Featherstone is taking the rest of the term off. He goes to her, worried that she'd been sacked because of the newspaper, wanting to tell her that he hadn't said she was to blame. She has a black eye. She's chucked Barney out. He would like to help her somehow. She says she shouldn't be talking to pupils and tells him to leave. [My favourite so far]
• "Didi's" (Nikesh Shukla) - The female narrator, born in New York to Gujarati parents (now separated), has a dog, occasional boyfriends, but only one friend of her ethnicity. She thinks a lot about her mother's food. One night she find's Didi's, a backstreet warehouse where food is sold. She starts going there often, meeting people there. She discovers a photo there of her parents and her when she was 2 (in 1989) - her parents had lived 3 blocks away when she was born but hadn't told her about it. She realises that "This other house, it's always been here for me, home, I just hadn't found it yet"
• "A Quiet Tidy Man" (Claire Fuller) - Mr Grubb fell in love with Marjorie at 17, but she married someone else and had 5 kids. Grubb and Marjorie married when her husband suddenly died and the oldest child was 15. They lived in a ramshackle house, undisciplined, owning 6 horses. He let them get on with things. After a head injury and a coma he woke up a different man, angry and demanding. The kids decide to kill him one night, all jumping on his bed to suffocate him. But the post-mortum showed that he died from being heavily drugged. [didn't do much for me]
• "The lighting of the lamp" (Ben Okri) - 28 little sections. The narrator dreams only with her eyes open. She has many plants in her room. She stares at an abstract painting. Her goldfish dies. "Perched on the toilet seat, she re-reads passages of Hamlet. She intrigued herself by thinking that the death of the goldfish somehow illuminated Ophelia's suicide. She had a herbal bath with the fish in the water. Whn she finished she dried herself and performed a funeral rite over the dead fish, singing a Lou Reed song". She drinks, phones friends inviting them to join her. They don't. She goes to a pub, picks up an older man, takes him home. They have some beautiful moments then he leaves without tell her his name. "She felt that the room, with its potted plants and the flowers and the goldfish bowl, had experienced some kind of meaning with her"
• "These silver fish" (Anne O'Brien) - On Jutland a boy and mother are fishing for mackerel. The father had a heart-attack making a earth bank to obscure from the view a concrete building that neighbours had made. Big trawlers dock in the port nowadays. [I don't get it]
• "Panic attack" (A.L. Kennedy) - Ronnie, 5'6" on tip-toe is at a train station after visiting his mother. The woman beside her seems in trouble. He helps - not too much or little. She's had a panic attack. She and he get on the train in different carriages. We learn that he's been protective to his mother when young. He killed his nasty father, whose body wasn't found for weeks. He wants the women to find him and ask for help.
• "The way I breathed" (Anna Stewart) - an old man has a slow pub crawl in a Scottish town. He can't recall if he'd been married. People help him. He's helped home. Back in his flat he wants to remember how he used to breath.
• "Feathers thick with oil" (Craig Burnett) - The narrator's at an airport. He's a travelling salesman of a dodgy drug. While watching a woman launch her suitcase like an athlete's hammer he wonders if she's on the drug. He leaps to save an old man from the flying case.
• "Heart's Last Pass" (Douglas W. Milliken) - The narrator's escaped from a Californian rehab. He's heading to the East Cost to his wife and daughter who he hasn't seen for years. He hitches and train-hops, takes drinks and drugs, doesn't know where he is.
• "Civilisation" (Will Self) - the narrator has a condition- at random a cupful of smell, silvery goo comes out of a random orifice. He's more or less flat-bound. They he discoveries that there are flecks of silver in the goo. He sells it. It becomes for him a symbol of civilisation.
• "Rough Beasts" (Jarred McGinnis) - "The first monster from the sea was a boar". It rampaged lethally through the sunbathers until it was finally shot. Benign animals had been appearing for years - "They all had the smell of burned paper and singed hair." "As the sea's animal-attacks became more commonplace, the victims faded from our attention." Coastal walls are built. [a tame ending, but it remains my favourite so far.]
• "Under the waves" (Barney Walsh) - Abigail died when she was 6. She can recall it vividly. She'd been with her father, looking for magic stones when she found a green disc (a smoothed bottle-base) and pocketed it. A freak wave swept her away. Her father couldn't see where she'd gone so he went back to their caravan and tried to have non-consensual sex with his hungover wife. She went for a walk in the drizzle, fed up about the holiday.
  It's 15 years later and pregnant Abigail's revisiting the beach with her girlfriend Bex. A lifeboat had saved her. Soon after that, her dad ran off. She takes a green disc from her pocket and throws it into the sea.
• "Paper chains" (Rebecca F. John) - A 6 year old girl makes paper chains in all sorts of shapes (which have symbolic value) when visiting her bald grandmother. The girl's told by grandma that her grandfather died long ago. A local boy goes missing. When she's 10 bones are found. When she's 11, her grandmother dies. On her stone is "Reunited with her beloved Edmund". The girl asks her mother if Edmund is her grandfather's name. Her mother says that her grandfather didn't die - he left because he did something bad. Edmund was grandma's first child. The recovered bones of the lost boy stirred memories in grandma.
• "Brad's rooster food" (Joanna Campbell) - Shy Diane, who's lived alone for 20 years, has been asked by neighbour Brad to look after his rooster while he's on holiday with his wife Wendy. Neighbours have complained about Brad's poultry. While Diane's feeding it, it escapes over the fence into Joy and Ray's garden. Diane knows that Wendy and Ray are having an affair and things are a bit tense. Diane retrieves the rooster. In the night Joy tries to shoot the rooster. She only wounds it. Diane protects the rooster for the rest of the night. She thinks that maybe she'll keep birds and hopes that she and Brad might become friends.
• "Freshwater" (Emily Bullock) - A father plus 4 teenage kids stay in a chalet, drinking and smoking. [I like the details - how the other half lives. The "twist" at the end is ok too.]
• "Morelia Spilota" (Cherise Saywell) - A young male priest gives a hitch-hiking girl a lift on the night. After 30 miles they stop. She's nervous and thinks about running. He's seen a snake by the road - a carpet snake. Morelia Spilota. Correct identification matters - it might be poisonous. He's puzzled how it got there. He thinks it's dead - there's blood. He puts it in the boot. It's not dead after all. He thinks it's bitten him. She sucks at the wound on his finger. They realise it was a piece of glass that caused the scratch. He releases the snake. They drive on.
• "How they turned out" (Lionel Shriver) - Susan Twitchell did some records in the 90s. She got a grammy nomination and 2 ex-husbands. She's mostly retired now, looking up old friends online and reading her old notebooks - lots of anguish, few details. "Let's face it: by sixty, the votes were in. You'd done what you were going to, and at best you would do a bit more of it". When a student she shared a flat with 4 other students, one of them being Grier Finleyson, another budding singer-songwriter. After Susan's first little concert, Grier and her side-kick Myra accused Susan of stealing Grier's style and content. Grier now organises kids' parties and and Myra is dead. They have almost no web-presence. Yet Myra was cleverer than Susan, and Grier had a better voice. Also, neither cheated on their second husband.
• "Sunbed" (Sophie Ward) - Nagel's bat. Elizabeth (55+) and Nicholas (an artist) are ex-pats living on the Brazilian coast. Elizabeth as a young woman on holiday met Ali. Their daughter is Rachel. Elizabeth wasn't happy when Rachel came out. The couple go to a dinner party. The hostess introduces Elizabeth to transvestites, etc. We learn that Rachel's biological father is Ali.

By the end I thought this was a good selection. I recall having read at least 3 of these before when authors reprinted their stories in monographs.