Writing Contest Win No. 1

As I mentioned in my last post, I was delighted when this story of mine won the TSS Flash Fiction of the Month for November 2015. I am reprinting it here for those who may not have had a chance to read it.

And in my next post, I will reprint two of my micro fictions that won the weekly Ad Hoc fiction contest in December 2015 and January 2016. Let’s hope I can keep up this momentum!   

On Warren Ward

When I tell my grandmother I’ve been drinking the gin she keeps in her pantry, she squeezes my hand. That’s how I know she’s still in there, behind the ramparts of that twisted body. We both know death is coming. It’s why I’m here.

She sleeps most of the time, but her dark eyes open as the nurse tips her gently to ease the soiled pad from between her legs.

“Hello, Annie, my lovely. Don’t you fret. We’ll have you looking like a picture in a jiffy.”

Bridie in the corner bed died yesterday. Her daughter came out from behind the curtains, a ratty Kleenex pressed to her nose. Her husband nodded at me as they left the ward, “It’s a struggle, int it?”

They are birthing their own endings, these women, in this shabby, beige room, riding waves of pain, confusion, denial. When Ethel needs to pee, she calls high like a bird, “Queek, queek!” From behind the curtain, I hear a nurse say, “Ethel, what’s your hand doing down there?” From the next bed, Clarissa calls out, “I’ve got me boots on. Someone take me boots off.” All day long she drapes her extra blanket over her Zimmer frame, then pulls it off again, over and over.

Doris in the bed beside us broke her hip when she blacked out in her home. Her husband shuffles in every afternoon, the stains of his lunch visible on his tie. He asks her, “Did nurse do your ears for you today?”
“What?”
“I said, did she do your ears for you today?”
“I can’t hear you.”
“Oh never mind.”
A moment of silence.
“She did my ears for me today.”
“You daft beggar, I just asked you that.”

Doris takes a friendly interest in me. She asks where I’ve come from – “Ooh, that’s a long way” – and asks about a husband and children I cannot come up with. She nods towards the bed where my grandmother lies, her toothless mouth open on the pillow. “They get like that, don’t they? They let themselves go.”

If you call two strokes and a long, hard life letting go. A chilblained, gas-masked, penny-pinching struggle of a life. Ninety years, give or take.

Nurses bring me tea in cups that smell of disinfectant. They touch my shoulder as they pass. Under the fluorescent lights, time is transparent. The hands of the clock take forever to move from one black digit to the next, yet hours are swallowed whole in the long pauses between each of my grandmother’s noisy breaths. She is the flesh of my flesh, the bones of my bones. As darkness fills up the long windows, the ladies shift and mumble in their sleep, dreaming of flying, while I sit on a hard plastic chair, keeping vigil for the fallen.

 

Being Heard

Woman writing, Ink sketch by Edouard Manet

The experts say we should write only for ourselves, for our own pleasure, for the joy of laboring to construct a finely crafted sentence, paragraph, or story. And there’s no doubt about the keen inner satisfaction you feel when you sit back after rereading what you’ve written and you think, “That’s not half bad.”

Unfortunately it never lasts long, that satisfaction. We writers are, of necessity, perfectionists, trying to pull off the near-impossible task of capturing in words the visions we have in our heads.

But we are too close to our own work to judge its success. Only by hearing feedback from others can we know whether we’ve come near to hitting the mark.

Besides, words are meant to be read by others. They are a means of communicating our ideas and stories to the world outside our own heads. To quote John Cheever, “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss – you can’t do it alone.” 

Which is why it can be so demoralizing to be a writer whose work is not read. In practice being read means being published somewhere – in print, online, on a billboard or the wall of a bathroom stall – any place where it is accessible to other people.

In 2015, after many years of toiling on two enormous book projects that are still not finished, I decided I needed my voice to be heard. So I changed my focus. I started writing short stories after many years and I began submitting them regularly and systemically to literary magazines and platforms in both the US and the UK. And it’s yielded dividends. I’ve had five stories accepted for publication, while another was  longlisted for a fiction prize, and yet another was an actual winner of a flash fiction contest (it can be read here - feel free to tell me what you think of it).  

How many people will read those stories? I have no idea. Publishing can feel like dropping a pebble in a pool and then hoping the ripples reach the people at the edge of the pond. Sometimes people speak up and let you know they’ve read and enjoyed your work, which is always gratifying, but often they don’t. You just have to have faith that once your stories are out there in the world, your voice is being heard. And get back to your desk and keep on writing. 

The Kindness of Strangers

This week I had a yen to reread something by Jean Rhys. Rhys was an early 20^th-century British novelist who was born on the island of Dominica in the West Indies and is most famous for Wide Sargasso Sea, the story of the first Mrs. Rochester from Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. From among my 1970s Penguin paperbacks of her works, I pulled out After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the story of the sad life of Julia Martin, who drifts between Paris and London, kept afloat only by occasional donations from male protectors, much like Rhys herself had been when a young woman. Julia is a passenger in her own life, driven by whim and mood and too much alcohol, which helps her to forget her fear of the future as her charms begin to fade. A young Englishman takes an interest in her and she tells him about when she’d first gone to Paris when she’d been a regular model for a woman sculptor.  

“And then, before I knew where I was, I was telling her everything… that had happened to me, as far as I could. And all the time I talked I was looking at a rum picture she had on the wall –a reproduction of a picture by a man called Modigliani. Have you ever heard of him? This picture is of a woman lying on a couch, a woman with a lovely, lovely body. Oh, utterly lovely. Anyhow, I thought so. A sort of proud body, like an utterly lovely proud animal. And a face like a mask, a long, dark face, and very big eyes. The eyes were blank, like a mask, but when you had looked at it a bit it was as if you were looking at a real woman, a live woman. At least that’s how it was with me.

Well, all the time I was talking I had the feeling I was explaining things not only to Ruth – that was her name – but I was explaining them to myself too, and to the woman in the picture. It was as if I were before a judge, and I were explaining that everything I had done had always been the only possible thing to do. And of course I forgot that it’s always so with everybody, isn’t it?”

I was familiar with Amedeo Modigliani’s style but did not have any particular picture in my mind as I read the passage about the painting of the woman with the utterly lovely body and the face like a mask with the very big eyes. In fact I assumed that Rhys had made up a generic Modigliani to hang in the Paris studio of that woman sculptor in her novel.

But no more than a day after reading this passage, I saw a news report that a real painting by Modigliani, Nu couché, had been sold for $170 million, making it the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction. And when I saw a picture of the painting (see above), I realized that it perfectly matched Rhys’s description.

I have no idea if Rhys ever saw Nu couché but it would not be surprising if she had. Modigliani painted it in Paris in 1917 (he died of tuberculosis in 1920), and she was living among the artistic community in Paris by the early 1920s so it's certainly possible that the painting was in the possession of someone she might know.  

What did amaze me was that the painting was being sold on exactly the same day (November 9, 2015) on which I was reading Rhys’s vivid description of it. Talk about synchronicity in the cultural universe. It makes me glad to think that sad, lost Julia Martin, and presumably her sad, lost creator before her, was once sustained and encouraged by the beauty of the painting and of the woman it represents.