What is it about a short story that makes it more appealing to readers?
Perhaps it is the length, something we can pick up in between our busy lives rather than being completely dedicated to a huge novel. I would argue that short stories are simply better when one experiences a sudden urge to feel and think deeply. There is something about short stories that hold more emotional reasonnace than a long novel, allowing one to be captured momentarily away from reality and be transported into the complex mind of another character.
“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” – Lorrie Moore
Moore’s quote conveys the power that a short story holds. It is ambigious, quiet and blurred without any need for explanation. An echo of meaning as opposed to a scream of certainty. We as modern readers are all different, taken aback by a different texts, genres, styles or writer’s voices.
What is your favourite short story?
Have a read of the one bellow.
Her Self Reflection
After Elenor leaves, I cry.
I commit to the same cleansing ritual at the end of each session: leaning my head forward, bowing down in an almost prayer pose, until the tears gather together into a singular, heavy glass bead. It falls instantly, missing my cupped hands meant to catch the little inconveniences. Instead, gravity pulls them down onto the blue carpet beneath me, with the fibres of the fur soaking up that moment of sadness leaving a darkened mark.
It will dry.
The action is simple and, most of all, it’s perfectly clean, seamless without any touch up needed afterwards. Assembling all the notes I had jotted down from today’s session, I walk over to my desk and place them in surprisingly heavy file, as I take a moment to feel the weight of those pages; the echo of Elenor’s voice, her profound and deeply unsettling account of labour.
She’s only been with me for about a month.
I grab my coat and the dull yellow scarf I knitted last December, during a sudden urge to learn something new, and tightly wrap it around my neck. It sits there, slightly suffocating – but this is necessary, of course, as I know the weather outside will be much worse pain.
The yarn itches and scratches my skin. Linda says it looks like hay, but once I started wearing it again, it felt more like long, thin fingernails: curved, rotted coils stitching themselves into a contorted web, growing steadily more restrictive. The pressure persists, loosening only long enough for me to gasp before tightening again.
I adjust it once, then decide to leave it as it is. January is almost over anyway.
‘Goodnight Mary- oh and happy anniversary!’ Linda calls out behind the reception desk.
Little, plump-faced Linda Carlson, with her bright coloured nail polish and personality that resembles a pink sparkly gel pen. She shouldn’t be a receptionist, something more awaits her.
‘Thanks angel, see you on Monday.’ I reply smiling back at her, hoping she realises that too. She has time. Only twenty-eight.
I think a lot on the drive home. Drifting into thought has become inevitable rather than intentional – questions of purpose rising only when the noise falls away, in the abyss of my mind. My most reoccurring thought haunts me. It is a simple one: what right do I have. Sometimes, I laugh at myself with this seemingly pointless job, that demands one for vulnerability in exchange for opinion, some transactional process that we call therapy. They don’t hand you your final certification after eight years and say casually ‘Congrats, you are God, go forth and judge’.
No qualification ever grants omniscience.
Unlike most, my profession offers permission- or at least the illusion of one -a justification for why I supposedly can give advice. If you can even call it that.
Eleanor tried to explain labour to me.
Words soon failed her, so she showed me instead. I only expected her to lift her shirt, maybe trace something over the fabric of her clothes. Yet, labour is an experience that is not confined to one part of the body alone.
There she stood, with only her underwear on, silently inviting me to trace the path of her journey. The pale scars guided me through lost pigmentation, loosened skin mapping where she had been cut, poked, and prodded into motherhood.
That is when she told me about her reoccurring dream: sitting in a rocking chair, cradling her womb after the emergency surgery.
‘Sometimes,’ she whispered, ‘I can feel it happening all over again.’ There is a pause, a moment of reflection, as she considers telling me the rest. ‘I know it’s crude, but I don’t think he even knew what a vagina was supposed to look like. He just began grabbing skin trying to stitch me back together like some rag doll. Now, I’m just flab, Mary. A piece of meat with folds of old tissue and busted blood vessels.”
I never had children.
***
Nathan is home when I arrive; and I can smell something burning from the front door. As I turn the corner into the kitchen, I am engulfed in a warm, damp hug that carries a faint, clinical edge.
He’s probably just taken off his scrubs, I think.
As usual, this feels more like an examination. His eyes take a scalpel to me. His arms begin to tighten around me, as if this pressure alone will reveal something that lay comfortably under- some undiagnosed infection that I don’t want to be treated. He’s an excellent doctor, but some things are not meant to be tested or dissected, especially not at home.
He feels around my lower back, and I give him a look.
Don’t.
He knows not to say anything.
‘Hey, my love! I thought I would cook something this evening. Fancy burnt potatoes?’ Nathan pushes the thick frame of his glasses clumsily up the bridge of his nose before offering a smile that means please don’t hate me.
‘Thank you. I’ll just go say hi to my baby.’ And I give him a kiss on his cheek, tasting the droplets of sweat that have slid down from his forehead.
Halfway up the stairs, I see Casper waiting for me. I rip the scarf from my neck, relief arriving in a sudden rush as my hand pulls it down and away. Casper pushes his body closer to mine, rubbing himself on my thigh as I admire his white coat, and sit beside him on the top step.
The glow from the kitchen appears as I watch Nathan’s outline across the walls, shifting, stretching as his body grows thinner, taller and suddenly, he looks like how he did at thirty.
‘Oh! Before I forget, your sister called, she said that an old friend of yours is getting married. Apparently, you guys knew each other growing up?’
Hayley doesn’t usually call on a Friday.
Actually, Hayley doesn’t call at all, unless it is an emergency. She’s more of a “Tuesday-at-four”, coffee-in-hand kind of girl. Mum and Dad insisted on a weekly catch-up after her divorce last year, though it feels less like sisterly concern, and more like an unpaid Dr Mary Evariste appointment. I wondered if she was still seeing that man, she’d met the other night at the pub.
‘Did she say who?’ I ask whilst caressing Casper in my arms as I enter the dining room.
‘No, she just said he was busy due to a book release. Some author, I suppose. Hayley thought you would be interested in going with her. But don’t you worry- I already said you weren’t much of a reader.’
I wanted to be a writer.
Have my name engraved into the spine of a book that I had written until it was placed in someone’s library, read by others and really appreciated as a piece of art. Instead, I graduated with a Bachelors in psychology and took a further qualification in counselling as Nathan thought it would be a good idea.
More realistic, he said.
‘You, okay?’
I look up to see Nathan.
‘Yes, yes. Of course, I am.’
But as I sit and stare at this plate of food, I just think of him.
So many little moments that were hidden in my mind. Left beneath a thin cloth draped gently over them, my way to preserve these artifacts. I knew who Hayley was talking about.
Looking down at my wedding band – the one I picked myself; I noticed a gem had fallen loose, leaving a small dark hollow space. The ring was gold plated with small white diamonds that had been handcrafted the utmost precision.
Turning the band with my thumb, I glance down at my hand which has pruned with age. It has lost its elasticity and sagging into an unforgiving reminder that time, without asking permission, has taken its natural course. I look up at Nathan, the man who will do no wrong to me, who would give me the world if I asked him to.
Still, there is something I have not let go of.
My feelings of want lingered- a quiet, pressing silence. And after all those years, I do not exist in his story; I am only a distant thought until some memorable interaction.
Yet, it feels that every interaction with them was memorable enough for me– lasting a lifetime.
It just didn’t end up working out, I guess.
I chew the last of the potatoes in my mouth, coating the ashy pieces in saliva to soften the taste that remains.
***
Eleanor opens the door and sits down in her usual place on the couch.
The third-person perspective can often be the hardest to endure, the therapist perspective. To watch someone fade, or warp under the slow pressure some invisible force. So many incredible people are wasted, not through failure, but through erasure. Through the gradual softening of who they were, until what remains is only what the world found useful.
I open my notebook, feeling a wave of emotion.
I pause.
Breath.
‘Ready?’ she nods, ‘Talk to me.’
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