‘Acknowledgements (For the story that you have just Finished Reading)’ by Simon Kinch

Another Simon, this one with a wonderfully Joycean surname. I was hooked immediately by the title and the ‘prosthetic’ technique of turning the acknowledgements into a narrative. It opens with conventional thanks to his parents for their financial support, although it transpires it was obtained by embezzlement, and ends in thanking the reader their support in purchasing the published story. In between lies a literary cock-and-bull/shaggy-dog story of disorientating complexity involving a literary agent who is probably a scammer, lost manuscripts, a visit to the agent’s office in which the narrator is confronted by stacks and cartons of manuscripts and another writer similarly in pursuit of the agent and/or his own manuscript, an ensuing altercation in which the narrator escapes with a box of manuscripts, and the revelation at the end that the said story – “the one you have just finished reading” was published under his name but written by some unknown other.

That hardly does it justice. I had hoped this story would be found in the online edition of Exacting Clam but sadly isn’t. I can only hope it might eventually be collected or anthologized for non-EC subscribers to read.

First published in Exacting Clam N°2, Autumn 2021

‘The Ground Is Considerably Distorted’ by Ruby Cowling

This is a story I particularly wanted to include, but which has now become very topical, even more than when it was written well before 2019 although set in 2020. In fact I wondered if I should leave it out, because it involves an earthquake – in Japan – and a damaged nuclear reactor, presumably as a result, coinciding with a conference in Zurich on increasing world dependency on nuclear energy, and a Westminster scandal over remarks about the effects of the earthquake by the wife of the Foreign Secretary.

A heady mix, and what’s so extraordinary about the story is the structure and the multiple stranding: the first-person narrative of a young female Japanese journalist now in London to cover the political scandal, told partly in her Twitter feeds – one her journalist account, the other her personal account; live television news feed from Westminster; the texted conversation between the Foreign Secretary and his wife, even within their home; a third-person narrative of the scandal from the wife’s point of view.

It could have been a gimmick, it could have gone horribly wrong – although Boiler House have done a brilliant job with the layout, which clarifies it considerably. In fact, it’s virtuosic writing of a very high standard, fully under control, riveting on every level – human, domestic, political. Rereading it has induced an even greater twinge of envy, and I had to include it despite the current bad timing.

First published in Lighthouse, collected in This Paradise, Boiler House Press, 2019

‘The Gatekeeper’ by David Wheldon

I have to again declare a personal interest in this choice, as I was introduced, first to Wheldon’s work then to Wheldon himself by the Irish writer Aiden O’Reilly. Wheldon was a genuine outsider; despite finding fame with a string of novels in the 1980s he stuck to his profession in medical research but continued to write, mostly poetry and short stories, in complete obscurity once the acclaim had died. O’Reilly had discovered the novels while living in London at the time. In the Internet age and back in Dublin, O’Reilly came across Wheldon’s website – used also for his medical writings – and made contact. He decided to help get Wheldon’s short fiction published and asked me to suggest some British magazines; Confingo was one of them. Tim Shearer, the editor, was as intrigued by Wheldon’s work as I was, published several stories in the magazine, then decided to publish a collection. Very sadly, David Wheldon died just as the book was going to print.

His stories are deeply strange in ways hard to describe. The settings are mostly English, but an almost mythical, timeless England which could be Victorian or post-war, but with contemporary details and Continental inflections – Dickens crossed with Kafka, perhaps. But the one that snags my memory differs in being set in China, and in a far deeper past.

The first, and longest, of three subtitled sections is narrated by a candidate arriving by sedan chair, after a six-day journey, to an Examination Station, being assigned his cell (a very monastic yet bureaucratic set-up) and informed of the arrangements for food and facilities while confined for the duration of the examinations.

Opening a cupboard, he hears a girl’s voice – she has discovered a loose brick in her corresponding cupboard against the party wall. This allows us to glean some scant details from their conversation and their own guesswork, but it only adds to the sense of our alienation, as do the hints of an impending apocalypse: both have had some infection in childhood which leaves scars but also gives immunity against smallpox, an epidemic of which has been prophesied. Is that why they were chosen as candidates? They, and we, don’t know.

After a single-paragraph middle section, a meditation on sleep, the final section, a longer single paragraph, offers the reflections of the ageing gatekeeper, himself once a childhood candidate who chose the position instead of whatever other career awaited him; he too protected against the smallpox to come; he too aware only of the essential mystery behind the lucidity of life.

Haunting, that deceptive lucidity.

Collected in The Guiltless Bystander, Confingo Publishing, 2022

‘Hell’ by Paul Kavanagh

Many years ago in a bookshop in Twickenham I was shown a small display of titles by a then-local press. Wanting to support them, I bought the only fiction title, a novel called The Killing of a Bank Manager by Paul Kavanagh, of whom I’d never heard. It proved a hair-raising read: relentlessly slapdash, inventively and wittily anti-stylish, the literary equivalent of Art Brut, Henry Darger in text, a cult novel in the making.

I found out more from the publisher’s website, wrote a review on it, and later wrote at their request an introduction to his second novel, Iceberg. I have followed his work as best I could in its sporadic publication in magazines – I even subscribed to Gorse initially for that reason. So I was delighted to come across ‘Hell’ in Exacting Clam.

‘Hell’ and Hell, however, is not so much a story, more a narrative spew, the fervid antithesis of Beckett’s glacial theses, an animated inferno out of Hieronymus Bosch. There is no way to describe it; I can only quote a few slivers and stand well back:

“I leave the house and there they are lingering apple dappled Eve & Adam blood drenched Heloise & Abelard tommygun peppered Clyde & Bonnie. Recto she lissom short sitting on the wall. Verso he hirsute and burly married to the wall… Dante whispering Virgil pointing. Should I wave. Do not provoke them. I provoke them. It’s going to be a lovely day he threatens. A hot day she condemns… Hell is other people somebody said Kafka Camus Beckett me. I continue. They continue. We continue… I admit it it’s true I… created them gave birth to them but how I did it is another tale all together and as you know or don’t know a tale is made up with a myriad of other tales.”

And now, with a narrative fuse blown, I can only sign off.

Published in Exacting Clam, N° 3, Winter 2021

Introduction

I don’t have a gift for brevity, so I admire it. These are stories that do a lot with a little, that inspire a nip here and a tuck there. I’ve chosen stories that left a mark after I read them – like a pinch or scratch that is felt for days. Some console like a hug, some aggravate like a stone in the shoe. There are many more I could have included, but there is something satisfying about twelve.

‘The Cat who Walked by Himself’ by Rudyard Kipling

This is one of Kipling’s Just So Stories that he wrote for his daughter, Josephine. I sent a copy to a friend when his own Josephine was born and this was the one that came to mind when he said she is rereading it. Kipling’s archetypal Cat is “the wildest of all the wild animals” and refuses to be domesticated like the dog, the cow and the horse. The story treads the boundary between the wild and the homely that could be read as (but not only as) imperialist anxiety. The Cat insists “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me. I will not come” and yet he arrives at the warm Cave of his Enemy to ask for milk. The story is an elusive allegory that teases us to follow as the Cat makes his escape “on moonlit nights he roams the woods or the roofs, walking by his wild lone.”

First published in the Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1902. Collected in Just So Stories, 1902. Available online here

‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield is the superlative modern writer of childhood. Her child characters are not saccharine or tragic, overtly sentimental or unscrupulous. Instead, they are curious, in both senses of the word. This story dramatises relationships between children that are cruelly defined by social class. The well-off Burnells aren’t allowed to speak to the Kelveys, the fatherless daughters of a washerwoman. But the arrival of a doll’s house that is “too marvellous” allows a moment of connection. The house is the talk of the school playground; “four windows, real windows, were divided into panes by a broad streak of green. There was actually a tiny porch, too, painted yellow”. But the object that Kezia (the heroine of many Mansfield stories) adores, “the little lamp”, prompts her to break the rules to show the house to the Kelveys. What I love about the story is the use of the little or the tiny – the replica lamp that looks like it could be lit – to convey not cuteness but the complexity of aesthetic pleasure. The lamp becomes an emblem of the sudden, devastating insight that anyone can have no matter their social standing.

First published in The Nation or Athenaeum, 1922, collected in The Doves Nest and Other Stories and available online here

‘Trio’ by Jean Rhys

This is a piece of what we would now call ‘flash fiction’ that sits alongside Rhys’s more substantial stories, including the masterful ‘Let Them Call it Jazz’ with which it shares some characteristics. The narrator is an outsider looking in (the definitive figure in Rhys’s work), in this case through the window of a café in which a group of three people – a man, a woman and a teenage girl – are enjoying themselves. Rhys was proud of her ability to prune her stories to the bare essentials and here she provides more questions than answers. We don’t know if the narrator is black or white, whether she (I’m assuming) has anything in common with the people in the café or (more likely) desires to be like them. Does “I remember the Antilles” express a longing to return to the Caribbean or a sadness that she knows she never will? The uncertainly extends to the young girl in the story, who may or may not be the daughter of the older man being so affectionate towards her.

First published in Left Bank, Jonathan Cape/Harper & Brothers, 1927

‘Friends’ by Grace Paley

This story is a masterclass in dialogue and an experiment in creating a collective narrator. Paley based the structure on her own female friends whose lives were so intertwined. In the story they exist as a many-voiced entity in which each knows the thoughts of the others, or believes they do. Faith, the first person ‘narrator’, Susan and Ann, are on a five-hour train journey home from visiting their friend Selena, who is dying. The milestones of life are filtered through their responses to Serena’s illness at the end of a complicated life; discovering she was an adoptee, the death of her daughter, the love of a married man. “A few hot human truthful words” are desired by Ann to wipe away the messiness they are left with, but the story doesn’t allow for clean conclusions.

First published in The New Yorker in 1979 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Later the Same Day, 1985 and the Collected Stories, Virago Modern Classics, 2018

‘Dear Life’ by Alice Munro

The final and titular story of Munro’s 2012 collection involves a woman and her mother in Southern Ontario, Munro’s home territory. Munro is known for dealing with the layers that make up the ordinary and this story works with threads of memory to show how perception changes over time. It opens “I lived when I was young at the end of a long road. Or a road that seemed long to me.” Munro said that the final four stories in the collection are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”. Certainly, this story establishes the reflective voice of the author/narrator in tension with her mother who imparts her impressions of the people around them. As readers we have to make our own judgements.

First published in The New Yorker, September 2011, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Dear Life, Chatto and Windus, 2012

‘Maggie’s Day Out’ by Frances Molloy

The comfortable, almost bedtime story-like narration of this story makes its violence more devastating. Family life is a site of drama from the start with “a false report that Maggie had died in childbirth” ironically placed on a par with the mother-of-three going out for the day; “the idea that their mother could voluntarily absent herself from their company, for a whole day, had never ever occurred to them.” The tension and the comedy of Frances Molloy’s style is held in an almost unbearable balance as the children are sent out alone by their father, who rewards himself for feeding them with a quiet afternoon. “Wrapped up in their discovery” they go “searching for treasure” amongst the cornfields while we itch to protect them from every danger, never imagining the awfulness that will mean Maggie “didn’t go away again for another fourteen years.”

From Women are the Scourge of the Earth, The White Row Press, 1998

‘Mermaid’ by David Constantine

David Constantine is a magician when it comes to writing place and many of his stories explore characters’ fears via landscapes that both bewitch and offer solace. In ‘The Mermaid’ a man retreats “gently, gently” from the “sharp little fingers” and even sharper tongue of his wife to carve a mermaid figure from fragrant cherry wood in his shed overlooking the sea. The “trance” of the carving, the melancholy ending of the holiday season in the seaside town, the objects he combs for on the beach and the shouting mouths of his wife’s friends – “as red as jam” – animate his cruel situation. As expected of Constantine’s work there is no resolution, no working through, only the comfort of moving slowly on.

From In Another Country: Selected Stories, Comma Press, 2015

‘The Weekend’ by Makhosazana Xaba

South African poet and writer Makhosazana Xaba often writes with honesty, care and humour about women’s lives and relationships. In this story from her first collection, the trope of a romantic weekend away is overturned as two women, one fifteen years older than the other, arrive at a guest house where they will stay until the younger has undergone a medically induced abortion. The story evokes a kind of heightened perception as the sunflowers on the bed cover and the two toilets in the newly renovated bathroom seem to highlight aspects of the intimacy between the two women. This is a story of loss and grief that challenges the secrecy and shame still attached to abortion. It’s also a story about female strength and solidarity; by the time they leave Zaba, the younger woman, has a face “like the dawn of another day”.

From Running and Other Stories, Modjaji Books, 2013

‘Who Will Greet You at Home’ by Lesley Nneka Arimah

This story grabs the reader from the get-go and won’t release its grip. A want-to-be mother loses her baby and immediately must craft another from found materials (wool, hair, raffia) until one is blessed and survives; “The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it unraveled.” Like all the pieces in this collection the story is both adventurous and almost too close to home in its explorations of the pains and pressures of infertility, child loss and motherhood. Babies that are “pillowy” or “porcelain” cannot become flesh because ‘Soft children with hard lives go mad or die young’. Dreams and emotions are siphoned off and traded in a strangely familiar world and relationships between women take a sinister turn.

First published in The New Yorker, October 2015 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Penguin Random House, 2017