I am a huge fan of Prototype, one of the most impressive independent publishing houses of this era in which there are so many brilliant independent publishers. Even what they have published by Jen Calleja alone is quite a remarkable body of work, starting with this excellent collection, published just as the world shut its doors in March 2020.
This is an unsettling story, which, coincidentally, starts with a character reading from Leonora Carrington’s The Debutante & Other Stories. Specifically, the character reads a line within the book in which one character tells another to leave their husband. Reading this, Calleja’s protagonist sees this as a sign, and decides to leave not just her husband but her entire life. She finds a small, barely habitable room above a shop on the other side of town, and slowly moves there in secret, finally leaving a note to her husband one day saying that she is gone, with no explanation, and warning him to not come looking for her. She eeks out a living in the room above a shop on her dwindling savings, before getting a part-time job in a local bakery. Years pass. There is something incredibly stark and brutal about this story – a character wilfully untying the threads of their existence, a process of life transformation that is somehow quite shocking in its detachment from emotion – but it’s completely captivating. Calleja is a great writer. Read this then her novel Vehicle.
Collected in I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For, Prototype, 2020
A Personal Anthology 