‘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

‘Licenced to Kill’ by Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is one of the queens of short fiction. Another book gone missing: Nothing Missing but the Samovar. She does good memorable titles too. So in lieu of the Samovar, which is indeed missing, a more recent collection, and Licenced to Kill. I’m fairly sure I heard this on the radio before reading it. It starts as a rumination on old age as Pauline and her carer Cally fumble their way out of the house and through the shopping run, until Pauline, in Marks & Spencer, casually reveals that she was once a spy. The story pivots as she remembers places she’s been and people she has killed, and Cally decides that perhaps, her planned career in hospitality isn’t for her after all.

First published in The Purple Swamp Hen, Penguin, 2017

‘Direction of the Road’ by Ursula Le Guin

Another queen of the short story. I’ve been reading Ursula Le Guin since my teens, and rereading and discovering entirely different meanings as I grow into her stories. I could have chosen a baker’s dozen of stories just by Ursula – the only author I ever wrote a fan letter to (so far!)

I was looking for Sea Road, but it too has disappeared. Most of the stories in Buffalo Gals are slight and mischievous, and ‘Direction of Road’ is too, but also mind-bending in its exploration of relativity, as a tree grows and experiences the change of pace as walkers become horse riders become jalopy owners become an entire traffic jam, for whom the tree must accomplish the increasingly complex task of appearing to grown closer/bigger and diminish so that the poor humans think they are actually going somewhere.

First published in Orbit 14, 1984, and collected in Buffalo Gals, Roc Fantasy, 1990

‘Lull’s Wirth’ by Jeremy Gavron

When is a short story not a short story? When it is part of a novel. Except Gavron’s Acre is made from dozens of short pieces, some not even stories: poems, marginalia, court documents, cartoons – every possible genre is tapped to describe the imagined history of Brick Lane in East London. ‘Lull’s Wirth’ is a tale of a simple life lived in a time of danger and betrayal, and the fatal decision to travel in search of a smith to mend a broken scythe. I remembered it particularly for the side purchase of some medicine to ease the painful joints of the main character’s wife – such a casually loving moment – I forgot that it was this transaction that brings trouble.

First published as part of An Acre of Barren Ground, Scribner, 2005

‘There’s a Woman Works Down the Chip Shop’ by Angela Readman

What a joy this story is. The narrator’s mother, a downtrodden, faceless chip shop worker, finds herself being noticed by another unremarkable woman, and after a simple conversation where she feels seen for perhaps the first time in her life, apparently morphs into Elvis. ‘Elvis’ is a metaphor for inner confidence and an awakening of a different sexuality, unrecognised by the child. It is funny, cruel, loving, sad and joyful all at once.

First published in Root, ed. by Kitty Fitzgerald, Iron Press, 2013, and collected in Don’t Try This at Home, And Other Stories, 2015