Winner of the 2018 White Review Short Story Prize, Rebecca Watson’s ‘little scratch’ was unlike anything I’d ever read before. Since, I have adored the innovative writing of authors such as Eimear McBride, Dawn Watson, Louisa Reid, though still, Watson’s rendering of a contemporary modernism feels fresh, engaging, entirely unique. The prose of her story zigzags across the page and columns of text (of thought) appear simultaneously. We are part of the protagonist’s stream of consciousness, or as the author puts it, her “stream of experience”, as we are drawn into the narrator’s “honest present tense”. On the surface, we follow a young woman navigating a world of office hierarchies. She hopes not to draw attention to herself as she leaves her desk, orders lunch and sits hidden “behind the coffee station”. When she’s seen by a colleague and asked what she’s been reading recently, her mind is

“gone,

not a clear head but a blank head, making me question my capacity to think at all (even though I know that questioning my capacity to think is thinking in itself”

I have recently been teaching this story to third-year undergraduates and many have expressed how uncomfortably close the narrative voice can get. As Sarah Hemming writes, we “feel as if we’ve climbed into someone else’s mind and skin”. Watson’s ability to render her protagonist’s interiority is spellbinding, and as the story progresses, we sense that under the surface, something more sinister is going on. After her lunch, she hides in a toilet cubicle to scratch her skin, then reflects on the uncanny stillness of her face in the mirror, then receives an email on “SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE”. The story’s ending powerfully gestures towards but does not speak the trauma lurking beneath.

First published in The White Review, 2018, and available to read online here. The short story was developed into a novel of the same title in 2020, published by Faber