‘The Danger is Still Present in Your Time’ by Robyn Jefferson

From a well-established short story author, let’s turn to a young, exciting, twenty-first century writer. Since 2022, Robyn Jefferson’s work has been being published in journals and highly placed in competitions.

‘The Danger is Still Present in Your Time’ is Lauren’s coming-of-age story, but she lives in a village where everything is overshadowed by the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old girl ten years before.

“Maybe Meggie’s expression in the picture on the wall in the Queens Head will become a cipher she can solve, as if the commonality of their newly shared age will shift them sideways onto the same transcendental plane.”

Jefferson captures the universality of being a teen girl, as well as Lauren’s unique experiences. She also describes well the current which runs under communities where a major crime remains unsolved (in York, we have Claudia Lawrence). When Lauren and her friends experiment with Ouija, it is Meggie they try to contact.

But then, the action moves on and beyond in a direction I was not expecting, but felt I should have been, given the extent to which Meggie’s mystery has been woven into Lauren’s upbringing.

Published by MIR Online, 18 April 2022, and available to read here

‘In The Field’ by Tim O’Brien

Leaving Lauren and her friends partying in a field behind a pub in southwest England, we move to a very different field, in the Vietnam War, where the mud is even worse than that endured by Chekhov’s soldiers in ‘Dreams’.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is my favourite linked story collection, and one of the most effective of all fictions I know at conveying the experience of war.

The protagonist of ‘In The Field’ is an entire platoon, up to their thighs in excrement, in continuous heavy rain, searching for the body of one of their number, Kiowa. 

“He was under the mud and water, folded in with the war, and their only thought was to find him and dig him out and then move on to someplace dry and warm.”

Their reluctant First Lieutenant, Jimmy Cross, is mentally composing, editing, and rewriting a sanitising letter to Kiowa’s father. He has been ordered to think of the men under his command as “interchangeable units of command”, but prefers to see them as human, which makes this more painful.

As is pointed out by one of the soldiers, the “shit field” is a metaphor for the war they are all moving through, or trapped in, like Kiowa, or floating on top of, like Cross does at the end, contrasting his stinking present to memories of a golf course.

“But they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance.”

First published in Gentleman’s Quarterly, 1989. Collected in The Things They Carried, Penguin Books, 1991

‘The Undertaker’s Apprentice’ by Hana Gammon

Following the deaths of Kiowa, Meggie, and Kathy, we will now consider their corpses:

“He explained to us at various street corners and crossroads, gesturing with his long, thin hands, how he stitched the lips of the dead and cleaned their flesh of its blood. He told us how he washed their faces and their hair, and how he folded their hands over their hearts before sending them down to be cradled by coffin wood in the dark, warm earth.”

The narrators of ‘The Undertaker’s Apprentice’ are a town’s children, the central figures are an undertaker, who exchanges objects with them for symbolic equivalences, and his apprentice, who always carries a large, shiny black, unadorned box. It might or might not be a coffin; all of the symbolisms are kept vague, making them more haunting.

None of the characters have names and their physical descriptions are scant. Hana Gammon is from Cape Town, so I assume the “little town” in which they live is in South Africa, but it is so lightly sketched that it has both a universality and a rootless, mythological unreality. Objects, textures and moments, however, are minutely described, like this dead bird:

“The splinters of bone ground against each other under the skin, which I remember felt so soft and thin that my shaking fingers seemed to pose the danger of unwittingly pulling it apart.”

The result is an unsettling read, the sensation of which lingers.

First published at Granta online, here, 12th May 2023, and anthologised in Ocoee and Other Stories, Paper & Ink, 2023 , both as a result of winning the Africa Region of the 2023 Commonwealth Prize

‘Ghost Kitchen’ by Ross Raisin

I was lucky enough to be mentored by Ross Raisin on the Jerwood/Arvon scheme. I learned an enormous amount from him. His writing is always pure, his phrasings imaginative and his stories give voices to those who need them.

The protagonist of ‘Ghost Kitchen’, Sean, is a delivery cyclist, his job, in some ways, the 2020s equivalent of Harry’s post round in ‘The Fishing-boat Picture’. Sean’s precarious freelance status contrasts with Harry’s twenty-eight contracted years. They both avoid prolonged human contact as a result of loss.

Sean takes a few shifts in a dark kitchen on an industrial estate, where he encounters Ebdo, an immigrant, who, unlike Agata in ‘Dancing In The Grass’, is in the UK illegally. “[F]ar as anyone else is concerned, they don’t exist. Just ghosts.” With no access to protection, Ebdo is bullied by the managers in increasingly violent ways.

“How easy it was, to do nothing; to let it become normal. But every night, when Sean pedalled away down the lane and through the dark industrial shapes of the buildings, a rekindled feeling of guilt would cling to him, as he replayed each incident, and imagined all the ways that he could have stopped them.”

This reminds him of the incident he is trying to hide from, and eventually leads him to befriend Ebdo. By the end of the story this has subtly changed his life.

Anthologised in The BBC National Short Story Award 2024, Comma Press. A reading by Ashley Margolis is available here and the text of the story is available here

‘Household Gods’ by Tracy Fells

‘Household Gods’ pulls together several themes from previous stories. I don’t want to say too much about its plot, because part of its power comes from how it skilfully leads us to discover what is going on for ourselves. Tracy Fells has the captivating ability to hold a reader inside someone else’s reality, whether their truth is entirely grounded or contains elements of magic.

“Multiple prayers to multiple deities distributed your fielders across a dangerous pitch.”

The central character, Mo, is easy to like. He works at a plant nursery, is polite to his elderly neighbour, cares for his incapacitated mother, his wife, and a baby in Intensive Care. “A nappy hung off the baby’s bony hips. From her nose, protruded a plastic tube, taped across her tummy. She wore one pink, hand-knitted mitten, on her right hand.”

Mo gradually offers truths about his life, until we are completely absorbed, possibly to the point of weeping. I could have chosen any of the stories in Fells’ collection, The Naming of Moths, but ‘Household Gods’ was the one which made tears run down my cheeks, which is rare for me when I am reading.

Anthologised in Unthology10, Unthank Books, 2018. Shortlisted for the 2014 Commonwealth Prize. Collected in The Naming of Moths, Fly on the Wall Press, 2023

‘Physics and Chemistry’ by Jackie Kay

We come to the final story in our anthology, the bookend which circles back to Ernestine and Kit, those older ladies who seemed so respectable when we started reading, a dozen stories ago. ‘Physics and Chemistry’ is about two women who are referred to by the subjects they teach, but are entirely individual characters. Physics, particularly, may appear stern, but their relationship proves the depths of her emotions.

The lives of most LGBT+ people in the past had to be habitually secretive and repressed.

“Sometimes they had two teachers from Lenzie High School round – Rosemary and Nancy, PE and music, who also, like them, lived together and bought each other comfortable slippers for Christmas. Neither Rosemary and Nancy nor Physics and Chemistry, ever, ever mentioned the nature of their relationship to each other.”

‘Physics and Chemistry’ centres around one day when everything changes for them. It is not a long story, but Kay manages to sketch out the two women’s histories, their daily normality, what happens to change that, and what the results are, without it ever feeling rushed.

So this anthology ends. The reader looks up, feeling in a particular way because of the final paragraphs of that last story, and the end sentence: “It could always change colour.”.

Then, I hope, you sit back and take a moment, thinking about your journeys in time and place through all twelve stories, about their common themes and their contradictions, and all you have been told about human experiences. And I hope that you will be glad to have read them.

Collected in Why Don’t You Stop Talking,Picador, 2002, and published in The Barcelona Review, issue 29: March – April 2002, available here. I read it in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, selected and introduced by Philip Hensher, 2018

Introduction

There was quite a temptation to pick from stories I have published, but I thought, No, that is cheating. And anyway, there are books I treasure, and I know exactly where they are on my shelves, and I think, ah yes, that one would be great for A Personal Anthology, and I go to get them to re-read, and THEY AREN’T THERE.

That has happened twice in the process of putting together this piece of writing. I am hopping mad. I’m going to have to re-buy those books now. Who did I rashly lend them to?? I went for different stories by the same writer, but remain discontented! There is no theme here, these are twelve short stories that once read, I have never forgotten. Many of them are by lesbian writers, most of them have their roots in fantasy or science fiction; other than that, they are just stories I love.

So, starting with one I did publish – twice!

‘Rewilding’ by Jackie Taylor

I published this during lockdown. It was sent in for the Solstice Shorts Festival (which had to be held online) with every story or poem responding to the Southwell poem, Tymes goe by Turnes. As soon as it arrived, I emailed Jackie to thank her for writing exactly the story I had hoped to see, without knowing I hoped for it. Her protagonist lives an isolated life that becomes more and more remote during lockdown until she cannot remember how to speak, and lives only for the birds that come to her garden, and then, of course, the world comes back… The second publication was in Jackie’s collection, Strange Waters. I loved this story so much, I wanted more, and so the collection came about.

First published in Tymes goe by Turnes, ed. Cherry Potts, Arachne Press, 2020, and collected in Strange Waters, Arachne Press, 2021

‘The Woman Who Loved the Moon’ by Elizabeth A. Lynn

I read this just before I came out, and I think it helped influence that decision. Amazons! was probably in my mother’s prodigious SF/F collection – she kept Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, and then Forbidden Planetin business pretty much single-handed. It is dark myth, with an impossible love between a mortal woman and a goddess, with overtones of fairies under the hill and Beauty and the Beast. It made me cry the first time I read it, the tragedy is so utterly inevitable no matter how much you will it otherwise.

First published in Amazons!, ed. Jessica Amanda, Salmonson, 1979, and collected in The Woman Who Loved the Moon, Berkley, 1981

‘Silent Passion’ by Kathleen O’Malley

As a whole, this book hasn’t aged well, but it stays on my bookshelf for this one epic, beautiful, moving story. It has a very early depiction of a deaf character seen as an asset, the aliens are believably bird-like and the fundamental story of rejection and finding a home and family among an entirely alien species is joyous. Another one that made me cry, on first reading AND re-reading.

First published in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, ed. Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel, The Overlook Press, 1999

‘Of Mist Grass and Sand’ by Vonda McIntyre

Another one from my mother’s collection. This short story eventually became the novel, Dream Snake. Re-reading this, I am reminded all over again of the sophisticated world building, where nothing is explained. You just come to understand that snakes can cure, and marriages are a partnership of three people, and you go along with the story and accept the scenery without question. Amongst my fantasy loving friends this is a touchstone. Have you read…? I know they are serious if they have.

First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 1973, and then in Fireflood, Victor Gollancz, 1980

‘The Sandal-Bride’ by Genevieve Valentine

I don’t remember how I came upon this story, which seems only to be available online, but it has stayed with me, and I have been back to re-read it perhaps five times. It is very simple and gentle and reserved, it never says too much, in a mistress-piece of convincing world and character building, that makes me believe entirely in a trader gradually falling in love with a woman he is escorting to her marriage to a husband whom she has not met. They part, each having learned a great deal from the other about how to live and what to care about.

First published in Psychopomp, March 2011, and available to read here

‘Feel Free’ by Alan Garner

I came across this story in Garner’s recent collection of essays, Powsels and Thrums. Garner says it is his only short story, and unlike his novels it is not a magnificent piece of writing: the pace is quite badly off, and the sting in the tale relies on being able to recognise a thumbprint without any specialist equipment; but it carries the same preoccupations with ancient histories and lives and how they can cross over into the present as his other work. I had read only a couple of pages when I realised that I had read it before, just once, probably more than 45 years ago, and that I remembered the ending vividly. And it is still as clever as I remembered it, despite the scientific nonsense.

First published in Powsels and Thrums, 4th Estate, 2024

‘The Stations of the Cross’ by Patricia Duncker

I first read this collection when I was a reader for Onlywomen Press. I gave it an enthusiastic thumbs up, but was ignored, so was thrilled to see it published elsewhere. ‘The Stations of the Cross’ is a neat little story about an academic job interview that goes horribly wrong that manages to be political, funny, and accommodating of the other people around the distraught candidate as she phones friends in tears and has a complete meltdown in a layby beneath the hillside shrine of the title.

First published in Feminist Studies, Spring 1994, and collected in Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees, Serpent’s Tail, 1997