‘Book of Job’ by Anon

A boy, ten years of age, cocks an air rifle. He squints along the barrel, aiming at a sheep. Do it and you’ll think Job lucky roars a voice from the hedge, the farmer’s voice. The boy runs. He knows the tale well and flees the farmer’s wrath to come.

The Book of Job is the short story to which I most frequently return. I’ve lived with and through it since childhood. God and the devil bet on whether Job’s loyalty to the former is instrumental, and based on self-interest alone. If his wealth and health and family are taken from him, will he lose faith?

Job’s response has nothing to do with patience. He has committed no crime and objects to the unjust way in which he is being treated. Job is a voice of protest. He takes his complaint to the highest court of appeal. “I cannot keep quiet: in my anguish of spirit I shall speak, in my bitterness of soul I shall complain.” He challenges omnipotent injustice face to face.

The Book of Job casts about for the cause of human suffering, asks what our response should be, hits upon a limit to human understanding, and shapes a way of writing about it, breeding poetry from prose. It has prompted many other texts and reflections – from Milton to Thomas Hobbes, to Thomas Hardy and Kafka, from Liberation theologian Gustavo Giuttierez to the late Italian autonomist Toni Negri. Long may it continue to do so.

First published as a handwritten papyrus scroll sometime between 700 BCE and 400 BCE, much translated and anthologised in editions of The Bible, and available to read in the 1599 Geneva version here

‘The Lawyer’s Tale’ as told to Stephen Collis

During most summers since 2015 refugees, their supporters, poets and novelists have walked as a group the route of the Canterbury Tales in reverse. The refugees share their stories with the writers while walking, they are written up and shared as the convoy overnights in community halls, after which they are published in collections, of which there are four volumes to date.

It’s a unique collaborative process in which established authors such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ali Smith, Jackie Kay and many others midwife anonymous stories, and refugees gain allies and solidarity in a new literature and location. Some of the narratives are predictable, in terms of lived experience and form. Lorries, pitiless border staff, stark detention centres and moments of injustice and legal limbo figure prominently.

A few collaborations stand out and ‘The Lawyer’s Tale’ as shaped by Stephen Collis is one.

we were in motion
complicating
the empty category
– ‘we’ –
moving north

His montage of poetry, reportage, reflections on Gericault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa and general disregard for boundaries between genres of writing – an analogue, perhaps, for the project’s aims – sets the bar high for future volunteers.

First published in Refugee Tales, ed. David Herd and Anna Pincus, Comma Press, 2016

‘Some children’s story about a tramp rolling smokes from the tobacco in discarded cigarette butts’ by Unknown Author

The heat of the afternoon seemed unbearable; I stumbled down the street with my suitcases, unable to look back towards the hotel. I collapsed, shaking, into the shaded alcove. Perhaps it was a few moments or a few minutes that passed. When I looked up, a man was standing over me: the old kitchen hand. He reached to the floor, picking up a discarded cigarette, half smoked. He gestured for a light.

I composed myself, and handed him my lighter. He didn’t need to smoke the cigarette from the floor, I insisted—I pulled one from the packet in my pocket. He put the cigarette I had offered in his own pocket, and lit the one he had picked up from the ground.

‘I’m not paid enough to walk past good tobacco,’ he said. He drew heavily on the half-cigarette. ‘When I find a cigarette on the floor, it reminds me of a story from my childhood: the fable of the tramp who collected cigarette butts. The townsfolk let this slide: the streets were cleaner for it, and the tramp would not try and bum cigarettes from others. For every six butts he has, you see, he can make his own cigarette—he takes a little of the unsmoked tobacco from each, rolls it in his own paper and, by piecing these fragments together, has a smoke of his own.

‘Here’s the riddle of the fable, though: one day, he finds more cigarette butts than he ever has—he picks up thirty-six cigarette butts from the ground. The question is: how many cigarettes is he able to roll and smoke that day?’

I took a cigarette for myself from the packet in my pocket, and lit it. Before I could answer, the kitchen hand stubbed out his own cigarette, and wiped his hands on his apron. ‘Think it over. And the answer’s not six, Giovanotto.’

Published in a book of short stories which I read as a child, but cannot find nor trace

‘The Mystery Story’ by ?

“ – ”

As I said above, I used to read a lot of scifi anthologies, and I used to forget what the stories were called and who wrote them: and so it is with this story. I remember the plot – a man lives in a literal nightmare world where freakish and murderous creatures are everywhere, and his only escape is in sleep, where he dreams that he lives in a normal, dull world exactly like our own. I was so obsessed with finding this story that I seriously considered writing it again, myself: I didn’t, but the thought gave me the idea for my novel, All My Colors.

(If you know what the story is, by the way, please let me know. I will be disappointed and delighted.)

‘Sir Patrick Spens’ by Anonymous

The short fictions I gnaw most often are three traditional ballads. Two of them, ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Mattie Groves’, lure with a puzzle: despite their constraints and fast pace, they convey twists, nuanced characters, and a world of cross-thatched hierarchies. It’s some sort of trick; maybe if I watch again and sit real close… ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, in contrast, is as stripped down and recurrent as the nightmare where I drive onto a highway and then realize I’m in the back seat with no one in the front. An unknown person for unknown reasons recommends an unqualified person for a dangerous job; for equally unknown reasons that person feels compelled to accept the job and fail. How like life.

Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads volumes are in the public domain, with ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ online here. I never came up with collations better than those recorded by Fairport Convention, who base their ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ on Child’s variant A, merging one variant G verse that Child footnoted as a “silly reading”. All the more appropriate for a tragic absurdity.

‘The Whole Life & Death of Long Meg of Westminster’ by Anonymous

One of England’s leading pre-novel genres was what might be called the bio-jestbook, aspects of which survive post-novel in theatrical memoirs and Twitter threads of celebrity anecdotes. Humor is a dish best served fresh and locovore, and few bio-jestbooks appeal to contemporary taste. I’d follow a character as appealing as Long Meg anywhere, though. Why quarrel with the script of ‘The Big Lebowski’ when you can simply enjoy Jeff Bridges?

The earliest facsimile I’ve found of ‘The Life and Pranks of Long Meg of Westminster’ was printed around 1635 but we’re told derives from an 1582 edition. Its prose is as overpadded as an Elizabethan codpiece and some of its jests sound suspiciously transplantable. I prefer the brisk eighteenth-century chapbook condensation, almost a synopsis, available online here.

Despite the title’s come-on, a death goes unrecorded. Long Meg abides. It’s possible, even likely, that she eventually made her way to the Bronx and bumped into young Joanna Russ, but who’s to say?

‘The Tales of Ise’ by Anonymous

There are more transcendently beautiful things without category, I think, than there are such beautiful things within one. Or perhaps I am misreading Aristotle. Anyway, one more such thing to me is about 1,100 years or so removed from clipping. : the Heian court poems in the Tales of Ise (伊勢物語, Ise monogatari). Each of the Tales is a short story… technically. But the stories are each little frames for a single classical Japanese waka poem. Confusingly, thirty of the poems in this volume also appear in another Heian period anthology, the Kokin Wakashū (古今和歌集).

This poem is in both—though I recommend reading it in the Penguin translation of Ise for the framing story, and also to get a feel for how different translations of this kind of poetry are. I love waka poetry from the Heian period especially, because, like many of the speculative fiction shorts above, it evokes a whole world with so very little. I am currently learning some modern Japanese, and am not particularly talented at it, but I hope to persevere to be able to stumble though some of these poems and their frame stories in the original Late Old Japanese someday.

There is incidentally a beautiful illuminated copy of Ise from the 16^th century at the British Library, which is fully digitised, though of course, it is much later than the period of the poems’ composition, and the illustrations reflect the Sengoku-period of the manuscript’s manufacture rather than the Heian one of the text.

Prayer nut (physical object) by Anonymous

This is probably an odi et amo situation by now. Those of you who hate me already for my total transhistorical disregard of the formal boundaries of the short story might just want to walk away in disgust. Those of you who love it, stay.

I’m an art historian, as I’ll have to remind you in a tedious biographical note at the end of this list, and one of the things about studying visual and material culture is that everything becomes a story and then you start ask what constitutes a short one. I don’t know if tiny is to materiality as short is to fiction (I already know it can’t be that simple as I type this, forever analytically accursed creature that I am), but the rather unpoetically named prayer nuts of the late 15th-16th Century are to me, sort of short stories.

Click on the Wikipedia link to see the things then come back. Okay so, they can tell different stories, but the one I like most is in the Met is boxwood and shows both the Adoration of the Magic and the Crucifixion in about the size of a big chestnut you can grasp easily in your hand. It even has a central panel that opens like an altarpiece, with Old Testament scenes, no thicker than a Nairn’s oat cracker. It’s the life of Christ and the prefigurations of the life of Christ, and the life of the person who owned it as a cabinet object or status rosary addition, all in one tiny orb. It’s a short story. It’s a huge story. It’s amazing.

Please do not ask me about the harpsichords I left out to tell you about the Prayer Nut. I still feel very guilty.