‘The Red Suitcase’ by Hilaire

Published by the independent Nightjar Press as one of a sequence of single-author chapbooks. Hilaire is an Australian writer of prose and poetry who now lives in London. This is an elegantly written story set in Australia concerning a life, or lives, not lived to their full. As with Helen Garner’s writing, the small details of life bring out the world of the characters. However, here, there is much that we are left to wonder about.

Dougie Blake is a retired signalman who lives with his elderly mother in her two-bedroomed bungalow situated in a small coastal Australian town. Here, the highlight of the week is a night out at the Constitutional Club. The arrival of a stranger, in this case a woman who calls herself ‘B’, on a day in late autumn sets up a tension in Dougie’s world. “B is there and not-there, and it made Dougie uneasy.” “an acquaintance… a friend…” had told B that she could get a room “at the Blake widow’s cottage”. She is not known to Dougie’s mother who lets out her own room to paying guests. Curtains twitch when B approaches the bungalow with her red suitcase and badly fitting coat, a visitor out of place and out of season.

Dougie’s mother happily gives up her bedroom to B for the week. She is pleased to have the “extra pennies”. Dougie isn’t so sure; the stranger isn’t like the “hardy young women” with “tanned calves and sunny dispositions” who travel with rucksacks in the summer. He can’t imagine taking her along to the Club as he did with the others. B is shy, and awkward, taking solitary walks along the shore in the cold wind. Dougie is unsettled by her presence, how she and his mother get along so well. He looks forward to B leaving. By the end of the week Dougie is perplexed that he finds himself worrying about her. At night, he hears strange sounds through the shared wall between his bedroom and hers. The story progresses with Dougie finding himself unwittingly drawn to this unwanted guest.

First published by Nightjar Press, 2020. Subsequently in Best British Short Stories 2021 from Salt Publishing

‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’ by Sylvia Plath

A strange short fiction written in 1952 when Plath was a student at Smith College. I read this in the Faber Stories edition, which was the first publication of the story in its original form. Plath steps outside the ordinary world in this story with Mary Ventura – who in her red coat is bundled unwillingly onto a train by her apparently loving parents for a journey to the far away and mysterious ‘ninth kingdom’. “You know how trains are” says her father. “They don’t wait.” The station clock “clipped off another minute”.

Plath gives details of the train interior, with reference to “red plush seats, the color of wine” and “the seams of the car, rivetted with bright brass nails”. Mary sits by the window, behind a pair of argumentative boys, whose mother is engrossed in a magazine, ignoring them. Mary is joined by an older woman out of breath from rushing to make the train. It seems fortuitous that there was a spare seat next to Mary’s. The train departs in clouds of smoke and cinders. The woman takes out her knitting. Mary admires the “leaf-green” wool. It turns out that the woman is knitting a dress “For a girl just about your size…”

Plath described the story as ‘a vague symbolic tale’. We can identify many ‘symbolic elements’ and make our own sense of it. The tone of the story, the sounds and rhythm of the text is compelling. We hear the train moving as machine and metaphor for something implacable. Unease and apprehension rise. The irrevocable passing of stops. Long, dark tunnels. Children crying, a mother with a baby in a soiled blanket. Men complaining about a crying baby. But the train will not stop until it arrives in the ninth kingdom. Outside, the terrain is gloomy and smoky. “It’s the forest fires” the woman explains. The scenery becomes post-apocalyptic in appearance. There is a scarecrow “crossed staves propped aslant and the corn husks rotting under it.” “Night comes on quickly.”

It seems that the strange has made this journey often, although no one else takes this journey more than once. There is no return. Mary asks questions about the journey and the ninth kingdom. “The last station, …Are you sure?” the woman asks.

Mary protests “It’s not my fault I took this train. It was my parents. They wanted me to go.” But the woman chides her for her lack of rebellion. Mary decides to pull the emergency cord. There are various ways we might interpret the story, which ends mystically. The publisher describes it as “a strange dark tale of independence over infanticide”.

First published by Faber Stories, 2019

‘The Family Whistle’ by Gerard Woodward

This story was longlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. It is a powerful story of lives re-written. The story is set on Germany some years after the end of WWII. Florian, a German housewife, is becoming comfortable after the exigencies of World War II. Luxuries have appeared in the shops again. She delightedly takes her morning’s purchases, including silk stockings and coffee to show her husband, Wilhelm, at the bar where he works. He seems as pleased as she is and promises to bring home “something good” from leftovers.

At home, she makes them into a pleasing display. “The tin of coffee formed the centrepiece. The silk stockings, still folded, shimmered beside. A packet of eggs. A handful of cherries. A block of butter. Everything was so perfect, beautiful, promising.”

Then comes a knock at the door. Surely her husband isn’t home so soon? Has he forgotten the key? The story changes direction abruptly. Outside is a man “tall but desperately thin” wearing filthy clothing. She recalls the returning soldiers of a few years ago, and wonders if she should offer him a piece of cake. She soon discovers that her obligations go much deeper. The man claims to be her husband, only now released from a Russian prison. She slams the door in his face.

“Can you hear me, Florian? Why won’t you let me in?” He speaks through a crack in the door. She tells him that her husband has already returned from the war. The man informs her that her ‘husband’ is an imposter. Perhaps she had been too willing to accept his claim; some things were awry, but she had ignored them.

The man outside reminds Florian of the ‘family whistle’ – a coded sound that only she would recognise. They had used it for their assignations when they were courting. She hears him on the other side of the door “his mouth was right up to the crack, she heard him wet his lips, she heard the inrush of breath as he prepared, and when the whistle came, it was moist, breathy, and beautiful.”

First published in Legoland, Picador, 2016

Introduction

I love short stories, have done since childhood and I’ve spent loads of time over the last five decades bingeing on the likes of Daphne Du Maurier, John Wyndham, Katherine Mansfield, Raymond Carver, Maeve Binchy and Lydia Davies, to name a tiny few of my favs. But none of these writers are included in the twelve stories I’ve chosen for this most personal of anthologies and here’s why. Ten years ago, at the age of 50, I took up storytelling doing the MA in Creative Writing at the Open University where I learned to read with an eye to the craft of how short stories are created. Since then, these ‘writer’s’ eyes have guided me through many, many new and contemporary short stories that I’ve either studied to learn from as I honed my skills, or that I’ve provided feedback for when they were in that magical and transient state of being created. Each story in this collection is a positive co-ordinate on my writer’s learning curve and is scribed by either one of my writing heroes or one of my writing feedback buddies, or both.

‘The Art of Foot-binding’ by Danielle McLaughlin

I read this brilliant story at the very start of my writing journey and have studied and dissected it ever since, trying to work out its magic, so I might struggle to keep this brief, but as it’s taught me so very much about creating resonance and tension in my own writing I might have to bang on a wee bit. ‘The Art of Foot-binding’ tells the tale of Janice as she tries to hold onto a fractured marriage by tacitly accepting her husband’s infidelity, hoping that what remains unspoken will eventually blow over.

Her fourteen-year-old daughter intuits part of this and becomes increasingly contemptuous of her mother. The narrative is told in two voices. The primary voice tells Janice’s story in the present tense, from a third-person limited point-of-view, showing the reader everything Janice sees as if it were a camera sitting on her shoulder; but it also has access to what she’s thinking, knows what happened to her yesterday and is able to make insightful expositional reflections about her life.

This voice is contemporary, clear and to-the-point, but it is the secondary voice that readers first encounter, a voice that reads like an extract from an ancient Chinese instruction manual teaching the practise of foot-binding. This voice frames the story as well as running between scenes described by the primary voice, and is always presented in italics, implying that it is a quotation. It opens with:

“Begin on the feast day of the goddess Guanyin, that she may grant mercy. Or on the cusp of winter when the cold will numb bones splintered like ice on a broken lake. Begin when she is young, when the bones are closer to water, and a foot may be altered like the course of a mountain stream.”

The culturally alien similes and metaphors (to contemporary western ears) create a mystical tone that implies the torture it heralds is something artistic and spiritual. Straightaway, the reader feels a dissonance between the lyrical beauty and horrific subject matter, and starts asking questions: what is the significance of this distinct voice that assumes an allusive compliance with the reader? Is this a quote from a real text? Who is the assumed addressee? That this addressee was more appalled than in agreement with the voice’s culturally embedded assumptions, created a strong narrative jar that coloured everything that follows, imbuing the story with a sense of unsettling dread.

The two narrative voices do not speak to one another explicitly, so when the primary narrative voice places the reader into a starkly juxtaposed dramatic present, it does so without explanation, leaving the reader to make their own connections, to start actively wondering what the interplay between these voices might mean, and what might link the modern-day protagonist to the horrors described by the lyrically exquisite secondary voice. The narrative atmosphere this creates prickles with darkly foreshadowed unknowns that resonate through the story, creating a mesmerising tension. Seriously if you haven’t read this story, do.

First published in Dinosaurs on Other Planets, The Stinging Fly, 2015; you can listen to a radio version of the story on RTE here

‘The Mistletoe Bride’ by Kate Mosse

Reet, enough of overly detailed writerly descriptions of craft because I love this story too much to attempt to burst the bubble of its apparent simplicity. The first-person narrator quietly tells us her history in clear, girlish language that unpacks hundreds of years of longing and understated melancholy in a way that is both touching and haunting. The story also presents a subtle subtext of modern-day feminism as readers perceive the scant regard the protagonist was held in, in a world where she had no agency at all. It reads so smoothly and sadly – like a half-remembered childhood fairy story, which despite its strange, unsettling tragedy, ends on a surprisingly upbeat note.

First published in The Mistletoe Bride and other Haunting Tales, Orion, 2013

‘Flamingos’ by Ali McGrane

Ali and I did the OU MA together and were in the same tutor group. When she emailed the first version of this story for feedback, it made me cry. In the finished version, her mastery of literary brevity immediately drops the reader inside the story which starts with a mum taking her kids to the zoo. “The children trail after her through the turnstiles. A cloudless sky like an insult, clusters of wooden pointing signs, a peacock dragging finery in the dirt,” and boom – there you are in place, time and mood. The heartbreak of what has happened to this fractured family and their relationships with each other, reveal themselves through deliciously insightful writing, helped along by the prosaic signs that detail information about the animals, signs that are laden with subtext.

First published in The Weight of Feathers, Retreat West Books, 2021

‘If She Bends She Breaks’ by John Gordon

Though I was born in Bolton, I now live in the Cambridgeshire Fens, an eerie flat landscape with hanging mists that sit below sea level and has a distinct atmosphere all of its own. John Gordon lived here too, even went to the same school as my son and was deeply inspired by the landscape. I love everything he’s ever written but this story is my favourite. Set on a freezing winter’s day in a Wisbech classroom, it tells the tale of Ben who cannot focus on his lessons. The strangeness of the day is evoked straight away, in the opening lines, “Ben had felt strange ever since the snow started falling. He looked out of the classroom window and saw that it had come again, sweeping across like a curtain. That was exactly what it seemed to be, a curtain. The snow had come down like a blank sheet in his mind.” The narrative voice and boy’s Fenland idiolect are perfectly rendered, but Gordon’s genius in this piece, for me, lies in disclosure. The reader travels, or is steered, through this dreamtime day, slowly, surely coming to realise, at exactly the right moment, the truth of Ben’s backstory. This is the sort of tale you have to read again the minute you finish it to resee the moments with new eyes. I never tire of this tale. It gets better with the reading of it, even when you see the skill of the storytelling.

First published in Catch Your Death and other ghost stories, Patrick Hardy Books, 1984

‘Abode of Eagles’ by Maureen Bowden

Maureen is a seriously prolific writer and feedback buddy who’s sold over 200 tales since we started swapping stories a decade ago, but this is my favourite because I love a ghost story that takes me somewhere unexpected. It’s the tale of a journey on the narrow-gauge railway that takes travellers up Yr Wyddfa (the mountain sometimes called Snowdon or Eyri). It’s set off season so there are no other travellers to accompany protagonist Trish, except one who she was sort of expecting. The travellers chat as they chug their way up, engaged in conversation that doesn’t make proper sense, until you come to know what they are moving toward and away from. This story, which has haunted me ever since I first read it, taught me the valuable lesson that if a reader is misdirected skilfully enough to be suspecting other twists, then writers can take liberties with plot and spin perfect endings that, though they are seeded all the way through, readers will still not see coming.

First published in The Weird and Whatnot, 2020

‘City Of Specters’ by Bandi

One of the reasons I started writing when I did, in this post-truth age of misinformation and fake news, was because I wanted to be able to tell stories that reveal uncomfortable truths, a determination that led me to Bandi. Bandi, (Korean for Firefly), is a North Korean samizdat writer still living under the Kim regime who in the 1990s wrote smuggled-out, anonymous short stories that reveal the horrors of living there. In honestly presenting everyday life and values, these stories show the culture’s madness and levels of control that western minds like mine might otherwise find hard to understand.

City of Specters is set in Pyongyang in the run up to the National Day of Celebrations – a day when everything must go perfectly, down to smiling the right smile and walking the right walk. When we meet Han Gyeong-hee, she is the well-fed and well-respected daughter of a martyr from the glorious revolution, with an inherited prestigious job and a flat in the capital’s main square. But she also has a two-year old son who is afraid of the huge pictures of Karl Marks and Kim Yong Il that hang opposite where they live. When the square is being prepared for the big celebration, she draws an unsanctioned curtain each night to stop the baby from crying. This sets off a chain of events that lead to her and her husband being accused of passing down negative thoughts to their son, a crime punishable by immediate exile to the starving countryside. The almost casual calm with which these events are told, punctuated by flashes of humour, normalises the unconscionable so seamlessly it’s terrifying.

First published in The Accusation – Forbidden Stories from inside North Korea, Serpents Tail, 2014. Available to read online on Lit Hub

‘A Sex Manual for the Over Sixties’ by Thomas Malloch

Taboo-busting short stories can be hard to execute, running as they do the risk of putting readers off with near-the-knuckle subject matter and uncomfortable narrative re-creations, but Thomas Malloch’s techniques to keep you reading this story are skilful indeed. He adopts a first-person older female narrative voice that brings insight and humour to the opening of this prize-winning story. When his narrator starts to talk about oft-unmentioned issues like vaginal dryness and the practicalities of elder sex I winced. But the pragmatic humour and use of medical terminology offset this discomfiture enough for me to continue and once you’ve navigated past the geriatric sex, and cringed and laughed in equal amounts, you realise this story is about love and grief and loss and closeness and your original discomfiture morphs into empathy and understanding. Would I have stuck with this story if Thomas hadn’t been a feedback buddy? Not sure, but that would have been my genuine loss, so, you know, another valuable lesson learned.

First published by Ringwood Publishing 2023, and available to read here

‘The Witch Who Walked the Shore’ by Gaynor Jones

This gorgeous, lyrical, visceral flash fiction won first prize at Janus Literary in 2021, and no wonder. This story of loss and abuse focusses on a young teenage daughter whose mother has disappeared – murdered maybe by her abusive father. It reads like a twisted fairytale – set in an unspecified past but full of modern, feminist undercurrents. Gaynor often writes about young women and teenage girls caught in the process of negotiating dangerous worlds where default-setting opinions are apt to cast them as bad, but you want this protag to be bad, to fight back, to have had enough, and, come the end of the story, you are not disappointed. Dark, beautiful, twisted, genuine, this story blew me away.

First published by Janus Litzine, 2021, and available to read here

‘Prototype’ by Judith Field

Another reason I took up creative writing was to improve my mental health. I find putting emotion on the page and not in me a cathartic and healing exercise, and I love reading stories that show authentic characterisation of people with, or recovering from, mental illness. This tale is told in the first-person narrative voice of Clare as she recounts events following her discharge from what readers intuit was a time when she was sectioned. It includes mental health struggles, neural a-typicality and everyday, casual antisemitism. Clare is a funny, clever, though not always knowing, narrative presence through which to experience the story, and readers often have more insight into her condition than she has herself. This dramatic irony is skilfully handled and when the reader ends the story not quite sure if the supernatural ally Clare meets inside the house she rents, was a real visitation or a delusion, the not knowing feels just right.

First published in The Book of Judith, Rampant Loon Press, 2014

‘Angels Only Dance with Astronauts’ by Donna L. Greenwood

I love the Molotov Cocktail – it’s my fav e-zine, full as it is of dark speculative fiction with 50s B movie illustrations and wise-cracking razor-smart asides from its editors. On its submissions page they say, “The Molotov Cocktail is interested in volatile flash fiction, the kind of prose you cook up in a bathtub and handle with rubber gloves.” Well, this incandescent ugly-beautiful story that won their Flash Apocalypse comp in 2020 is exactly that. Exquisite, horrifying, lyrical, transcendental. How I wish, wish, wish I’d written it.

First published at Molotov Cocktail, 2020, and available to read here