Unlike most narratives this one isn’t linked by characters or setting. It skips through time from one year to the next, beginning in 1741 and ending in 2020. Each snippet of the story is very brief. We hardly have time to get to know these people, before we are hurtling onwards through decades to the next fragment. The story begins with a butcher’s wife and ends with an old song discovered on Spotify. Like a puzzle, you can’t help searching for a pattern, a connecting thread. In the end you realise it’s about music. It’s the scale of the narrative that stays with you in the end.
First published in We Move, Serpent’s Tail, 2022
A Personal Anthology 