Tag: Colette Sensier

‘Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s Castle’ by Colette Sensier

Sixty-three-year-old widow Klara Świętokrzyskie works in a hospital, tending to elderly patients. In the evenings, rubbing her sore feet, she plays MagiKingdom, and is transformed into a powerful and beautiful avatar: a peacock-headed creature in metal breastplates and mink fur, strolling around her castle, defeating witches and building up her supply of ammunition.

Klara has two adult children and neither are aware that she is spending real money in this virtual world, or that she has befriended another player, Bernard from Huddersfield, and that they are exchanging daily emails. Klara’s griefs and dreams are handled so delicately and poignantly by Sensier, it’s a story that has never left my heart.

First published in Flamingo Land and Other Stories, Flight Press/Spread the Word, 2015. Collected in Best British Short Stories 2016, ed. Nicholas Royle, Salt Publishing, 2016

‘Świętokrzyskie’s Castle’ by Colette Sensier

Klara Świętokrzyskie is a Polish widow living alone in London. Her son Josef is a sporadic visitor and her daughter Gabriela is busy raising her own family. Klara keeps to herself, but is far from lonely as she has an active life in MagiKingdom, a World of Warcraft-esque game.
 
As Wladyslawa, she wanders the corridors of her castle accompanied by her paid-for-IRL accoutrements, including a leopard: a gift from the divorced Bernard, who occupies the castle opposite hers and with whom she has struck up a friendship. They have much in common: Bernard has known loss – his daughter lives on the other side of the world – as has Klara, who has named her avatar after her other – deceased – daughter.
 
Bernard is also a secret: neither Josef nor Gabriela know of their mother’s second life. How they find out comprises the second part of the story, which incorporates family dysfunction, grief, the dispersal of the digital in the post– of a person’s death and the online afterlife that we unintentionally inhabit when we’re gone.

From Best British Short Stories 2016,  Ed. Nicholas Royle