‘What (Not) to Do with Your Hands When You Are Nervous’ by Eley Williams

This story takes in Keats’s foreknowledge of his own mortality, the term ‘mortmain’ and the history of the Royal Worcester Parian vase depicting the sculptor’s wife’s hands among other related ideas. It flows forth as a series of frantic disquisitions on seemingly loosely connected things as the narrator is stuck on a Tube carriage underground, growing ever later for her job interview. What I especially enjoy about Williams’s writing is the way she often explodes narrative time, replicating the experience of a mind fizzing with ideas and subterranean connections experiencing consciousness moment by moment. There is also an enjoyably smutty undercurrent as the reader starts to realise why the queer narrator has chosen to fixate on hands in particular, even if she disguises it as serious academic enquiry.

First published in Seen from Here, ed. Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, Unstable Object, and collected in Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good, 4th Estate, 2024