Defenestrationism.net

by Chris Cottom
[this is the fourth in the five part series–
read Good and Faithful Servent from the beginning, here]

Edwin still liked Rose to bang the gong in the hall to announce luncheon, even when it was only the two of them. Roland was twenty and serving, most worryingly, in the Royal Navy, while Binkie boarded at school in St Albans.

After Edwin said grace, Rose served him some cold mutton, quartered tomatoes, and new potatoes. Then she passed him a letter.

‘This is addressed to both of us,’ he said. ‘It’s from Roland.’

‘I know.’

‘Didn’t you want to open it?’

‘Of course. But it’s Thursday: I didn’t want to interrupt you writing your sermon.’ And, she thought, because I wanted you beside me in case he’s been wounded.

Edwin didn’t go to his study to fetch his brass letter opener, but used his table knife instead.

‘I know he’s not allowed to tell us,’ Rose said, as Edwin unfolded the coarse cream paper with its familiar handwriting. ‘But I do so wish we knew where he was.’

Edwin started reading aloud: ‘HMS Lancaster, care of GPO London (at sea). Dear Mater and Pater. You’ll never guess who I’ve seen: Grandmama’s old head gardener, Jabez.’

‘I knew it! He’s ill and feverish,’ Rose said. ‘Old Jabez has been dead these past five years.’

~

An hour later Rose strode along the corridor, her hands floury from her baking. She knocked on the study door and went in without waiting. God would forgive her if she disturbed Edwin at prayer.

‘It’s Jabez’s surname he means,’ she said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Snow. Jabez Snow. It’s Roland’s way of telling us where he is.’

‘You mean­–’

‘He’s telling us he’s seen snow. He’s on the convoys, the North Atlantic convoys.’

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by Chris Cottom
[this is the third in the five part series–
read Good and Faithful Servent from the beginning, here]

Rose put down her hairbrush and waited as Edwin yanked his nightgown over his head, dropped it on the rug and ran down the passage. She knew what was coming.

‘Moses!’ he shouted as he jumped into his bath.

While she took strength from her husband’s staunch faith and regular devotions, Rose was less convinced about his ablutions. Almost as firmly as he believed in the infallibility of Scripture, Reverend Lovibond believed in the efficacy of a daily cold bath. He would wash vigorously and dunk his head before leaping out, careless of the water cascading onto the cracked linoleum from his six foot one inch frame. Fortunately, the bathroom’s distance from the nursery meant Roland in his cot would usually remain undisturbed by his father’s morning routine.

When Edwin returned, a towel around his waist, Rose paused from pinning her hair at her dressing table in the bay window and watched three Edwins in the triple mirror: Edwin the husband, Edwin the father and Edwin the priest. After rubbing his hair with his towel he crossed the bedroom, pulled back the curtains and stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders, evidently heedless of the hoarfrost tracing every twig in the garden, beyond which the church tower stood sharp against the dawn sky.

‘Another day shepherding the flock,’ he said.

‘Amen to that,’ she said, leaning back against the firm bare stomach of Edwin the husband. She took a deep breath of his clean soapy smell and wondered if he thought hot water was sinful. In which case why had God given them a boiler? This monster’s voracious appetite for scuttles of coke meant they’d dubbed it The Bunter. ‘I’ll just feed The Bunter,’ she would say, before she got their own breakfast and before they climbed the stairs to bed.

‘Is it symbolic, the cold bath?’ she said. ‘Like baptising yourself again?’

‘You can’t really baptise yourself. That’s why Jesus needed John.’

‘So why–’

‘I’m just waking myself up, that’s all.’

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by Chris Cottom
[this is the second in the five part series–
read Good and Faithful Servent from the beginning, here]

When anyone pressed her, and she tried hard to make sure they did not, Rose told them she’d married in her twenties. The God who’d invented time wouldn’t mind that this wasn’t completely accurate. Anyway He clearly loved her, sparing Edwin from the Orient and calling him instead to Buckinghamshire and the living of St John the Baptist in Little Pulford. Here Rose found herself expected to chair the Flower Guild, the Young Wives Group and even the Mothers’ Union.

‘But I’m not a mother,’ she said, although she hoped to be. On their wedding night, Edwin had explained how he believed priests should reserve the sexual act for procreation, not recreation.

The previous vicar and his wife had retired to a bungalow in Hastings. Accordingly, Rose took immediate charge of two henhouses and their dozen or so residents, a pond on which four white ducks held their daily business meetings, and an irascible nanny goat called Proserpina. To these, she and Edwin added a ginger tomcat called Ptolemy and a cocker spaniel puppy they named Zillah. Edwin soon barred the latter from his study after she gnawed the spine of the ancient leather-bound Book of Common Prayer, so large it would fit only on the bottom shelf of his enormous bookcase.

One morning, after they’d been at Little Pulford for six months, Rose collected five warm brown eggs from under her hens. I’ll have time to milk Proserpina and lay the fire in the dining room before the service, she thought, happy that today she and Edwin would have the vicarage to themselves, without their daily woman, the daunting Mrs Harrop, chattering as she clomped around doing the heavy cleaning. Rose wondered what her severe and remote papa would think of her new life, wedded as he’d always been to a full complement of servants, indoors and out.

As she turned back towards the house, she saw Edwin walking through the garden towards the church for Matins. The mist hung low and, in his long black cassock, he appeared to be floating across the lawn. When he disappeared through the yew trees into the churchyard, the sexton began tolling the single bell high in the flinty tower to summon the faithful. In that moment Rose felt washed with a sense of peace, understanding that this was the life to which her heavenly father had called her, to serve Him here alongside Edwin in this draughty Victorian vicarage. It was too bad if her earthly father had never countenanced his daughter’s delicate fingers being chafed winter-raw through tugging the teats of a recalcitrant nanny goat before breakfast. Although right now she’d be thankful if God could see his way to the minor miracle of healing her chilblains.

Rose taught the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed to the grubby-kneed boys and smock-frocked girls of the Sunday School. She visited the poor with a basket on her arm, dispensing eggs and kindness, rhubarb from the kitchen garden, and tracts from Scripture. She lifted broth to the lips of the infirm, and made chasubles, altar frontals, and a Girls’ Brigade banner with golden tassels. In the evenings she embroidered hassocks and repaired surplices. She ferried cups of tea to Edwin and his visitors in his study and, before they’d celebrated their first wedding anniversary, presented him with a son, after a labour in which she feared she’d screamed loud enough to waken the churchyard dead. They named the boy Roland, after Rose’s eldest brother, lost at Gallipoli, the uncle the child would never know.

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by Chris Cottom

Voluntary Aid Detachment
(publishing December 15th)
Holy Matrimony
(publishing December 16th)
Moses
(publishing December 17th)
North Atlantic
(publishing December 18th)
Kenneth
(publishing December 19th)

Voluntary Aid Detachment

Rose didn’t discover whether her father had used his influence, but she was relieved not to be sent abroad; the suffering in Taunton Red Cross Hospital was horrific enough. She’d never been inside a hospital before; everyone she knew went to a nursing home if they needed to. Neither had she ever done manual household work, knowing nothing of mops or polish or disinfectant. At home, the servants did all that.

Reverend Lovibond had preached on Mark Chapter 1: the disciples leaving their nets and boats to follow Jesus. He said he was considering serving in the Orient once he had completed his curacy.

‘I’m going to train as a VAD,’ Rose told him afterwards at the door, as each parishioner waited to shake his hand.

‘Marvellous, Miss Willoughby. Your parents must be extremely proud.’

‘I haven’t told them yet. I’ve only just decided.’

‘They can’t make you go to Flanders or somewhere, not after Roland,’ Mama had said. ‘They’ve turned that new school into a war hospital. Your father can have a word with the Superintendent.’

‘Isn’t it my duty to serve wherever I’m needed?’

‘As a volunteer nurse? Certainly not.’

‘I won’t be a proper nurse. VADs help the trained nurses and do the things the men orderlies used to do.’

‘Like what?’

‘I suppose I’ll find out, won’t I?’

On Rose’s first shift after her ten days’ training, the Sister told her to make a pot of tea and bring it to her office. A minute after delivering it she heard her shout down the ward.

‘Nurse Willoughby!’ 

She turned to see the Sister at the door of her office, her face as formidable as her bosom, in front of which she held the tea tray, the cup trembling in its saucer. Rose hurried over and stood to attention, as she’d been trained to do whenever anyone in authority spoke to her.

‘You’re supposed to use boiling water, you stupid girl,’ the Sister said, thrusting the tray at her so the milk slopped onto the doily from its dainty jug.

Rose learned to clean wards, sterilize equipment and bandage wounds. She bathed patients, prepared and applied their poultices, took their temperatures and made their beds. She read to them and wrote their letters to their families and sweethearts.

One day the ambulance train from France brought a young private, wasted to the bone, with both of his eyes shot away. Rose sat next to him to write out his messages for his wife and children.

‘Tell Bonnie to be a good … girl,’ he said, ‘and … I’m sorry Nurse, but I don’t have any more words.’ He put up his hand to try and find Rose’s. ‘Is it a fine day?’ he said. ‘Are the flowers in bloom?’

Rose took his hand and pictured the view through the big window for him: the sycamores in leaf, the blackbirds, the bullfinches and the naughty sparrows. She told him of her walk through the meadows, of the willows and catkins, the ox-eye daisies and giant kingcups.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve still got lots to live for, then.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘Of course you have. What work did you do before? Before you joined up?’

‘I was a gardener.’

~

‘I hope you are not finding your work too arduous or distressing, Miss Willoughby,’ Reverend Lovibond said on Sunday.

Rose had come to church straight from her night shift, still in her uniform, her starched collar tight and uncomfortable.

I have never felt so alive, she thought.

‘One must do one’s duty,’ she said.

Holy Matrimony

When anyone pressed her, and she tried hard to make sure they did not, Rose told them she’d married in her twenties. The God who’d invented time wouldn’t mind that this wasn’t completely accurate. Anyway He clearly loved her, sparing Edwin from the Orient and calling him instead to Buckinghamshire and the living of St John the Baptist in Little Pulford. Here Rose found herself expected to chair the Flower Guild, the Young Wives Group and even the Mothers’ Union.

‘But I’m not a mother,’ she said, although she hoped to be. On their wedding night, Edwin had explained how he believed priests should reserve the sexual act for procreation, not recreation.

The previous vicar and his wife had retired to a bungalow in Hastings. Accordingly, Rose took immediate charge of two henhouses and their dozen or so residents, a pond on which four white ducks held their daily business meetings, and an irascible nanny goat called Proserpina. To these, she and Edwin added a ginger tomcat called Ptolemy and a cocker spaniel puppy they named Zillah. Edwin soon barred the latter from his study after she gnawed the spine of the ancient leather-bound Book of Common Prayer, so large it would fit only on the bottom shelf of his enormous bookcase.

One morning, after they’d been at Little Pulford for six months, Rose collected five warm brown eggs from under her hens. I’ll have time to milk Proserpina and lay the fire in the dining room before the service, she thought, happy that today she and Edwin would have the vicarage to themselves, without their daily woman, the daunting Mrs Harrop, chattering as she clomped around doing the heavy cleaning. Rose wondered what her severe and remote papa would think of her new life, wedded as he’d always been to a full complement of servants, indoors and out.

As she turned back towards the house, she saw Edwin walking through the garden towards the church for Matins. The mist hung low and, in his long black cassock, he appeared to be floating across the lawn. When he disappeared through the yew trees into the churchyard, the sexton began tolling the single bell high in the flinty tower to summon the faithful. In that moment Rose felt washed with a sense of peace, understanding that this was the life to which her heavenly father had called her, to serve Him here alongside Edwin in this draughty Victorian vicarage. It was too bad if her earthly father had never countenanced his daughter’s delicate fingers being chafed winter-raw through tugging the teats of a recalcitrant nanny goat before breakfast. Although right now she’d be thankful if God could see his way to the minor miracle of healing her chilblains.

Rose taught the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed to the grubby-kneed boys and smock-frocked girls of the Sunday School. She visited the poor with a basket on her arm, dispensing eggs and kindness, rhubarb from the kitchen garden, and tracts from Scripture. She lifted broth to the lips of the infirm, and made chasubles, altar frontals, and a Girls’ Brigade banner with golden tassels. In the evenings she embroidered hassocks and repaired surplices. She ferried cups of tea to Edwin and his visitors in his study and, before they’d celebrated their first wedding anniversary, presented him with a son, after a labour in which she feared she’d screamed loud enough to waken the churchyard dead. They named the boy Roland, after Rose’s eldest brother, lost at Gallipoli, the uncle the child would never know.

Moses

Rose put down her hairbrush and waited as Edwin yanked his nightgown over his head, dropped it on the rug and ran down the passage. She knew what was coming.

‘Moses!’ he shouted as he jumped into his bath.

While she took strength from her husband’s staunch faith and regular devotions, Rose was less convinced about his ablutions. Almost as firmly as he believed in the infallibility of Scripture, Reverend Lovibond believed in the efficacy of a daily cold bath. He would wash vigorously and dunk his head before leaping out, careless of the water cascading onto the cracked linoleum from his six foot one inch frame. Fortunately, the bathroom’s distance from the nursery meant Roland in his cot would usually remain undisturbed by his father’s morning routine.

When Edwin returned, a towel around his waist, Rose paused from pinning her hair at her dressing table in the bay window and watched three Edwins in the triple mirror: Edwin the husband, Edwin the father and Edwin the priest. After rubbing his hair with his towel he crossed the bedroom, pulled back the curtains and stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders, evidently heedless of the hoarfrost tracing every twig in the garden, beyond which the church tower stood sharp against the dawn sky.

‘Another day shepherding the flock,’ he said.

‘Amen to that,’ she said, leaning back against the firm bare stomach of Edwin the husband. She took a deep breath of his clean soapy smell and wondered if he thought hot water was sinful. In which case why had God given them a boiler? This monster’s voracious appetite for scuttles of coke meant they’d dubbed it The Bunter. ‘I’ll just feed The Bunter,’ she would say, before she got their own breakfast and before they climbed the stairs to bed.

‘Is it symbolic, the cold bath?’ she said. ‘Like baptising yourself again?’

‘You can’t really baptise yourself. That’s why Jesus needed John.’

‘So why–’

‘I’m just waking myself up, that’s all.’

North Atlantic

Edwin still liked Rose to bang the gong in the hall to announce luncheon, even when it was only the two of them. Roland was twenty and serving, most worryingly, in the Royal Navy, while Binkie boarded at school in St Albans.

After Edwin said grace, Rose served him some cold mutton, quartered tomatoes, and new potatoes. Then she passed him a letter.

‘This is addressed to both of us,’ he said. ‘It’s from Roland.’

‘I know.’

‘Didn’t you want to open it?’

‘Of course. But it’s Thursday: I didn’t want to interrupt you writing your sermon.’ And, she thought, because I wanted you beside me in case he’s been wounded.

Edwin didn’t go to his study to fetch his brass letter opener, but used his table knife instead.

‘I know he’s not allowed to tell us,’ Rose said, as Edwin unfolded the coarse cream paper with its familiar handwriting. ‘But I do so wish we knew where he was.’

Edwin started reading aloud: ‘HMS Lancaster, care of GPO London (at sea). Dear Mater and Pater. You’ll never guess who I’ve seen: Grandmama’s old head gardener, Jabez.’

‘I knew it! He’s ill and feverish,’ Rose said. ‘Old Jabez has been dead these past five years.’

~

An hour later Rose strode along the corridor, her hands floury from her baking. She knocked on the study door and went in without waiting. God would forgive her if she disturbed Edwin at prayer.

‘It’s Jabez’s surname he means,’ she said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Snow. Jabez Snow. It’s Roland’s way of telling us where he is.’

‘You mean­–’

‘He’s telling us he’s seen snow. He’s on the convoys, the North Atlantic convoys.’

Kenneth

Rose had great plans for her daughter’s wedding. The only problem was the groom.

There wasn’t one.

From time to time Binkie would bring some man or other down from London for Sunday lunch. ‘This is my friend Eric,’ she’d say, or ‘I’d like to introduce my colleague Maurice.’

The Erics and Maurices were invariably polite and good-humoured, indulging Edwin when he’d quiz them about the London churches where he assumed they worshipped regularly.

‘All these friends but never a boyfriend,’ Rose told her sister on one of their weekly Monday evening telephone chats. ‘I think she’s frightened of tying the knot.’

‘Maybe she wants to be a career girl.’

‘Oh I do hope not.’

‘Excuse me!’ Jessie said. ‘You’re forgetting I had a career. Until I got married.’

‘And she’s already twenty-six.’

‘That’s hardly old! Compared to me. Or even you.’

‘I think they’re decoys, nice young men to throw us off the scent. I hope she isn’t involved with someone unsuitable.’

‘You mean someone married, do you?’

‘Well, yes I suppose that is what I mean.’

‘Why don’t you ask her?

‘Don’t be silly. I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to interfere.’

~

Binkie rang to say she’d like to come home for the weekend. ‘And I’d like to bring someone,’ she said. ‘Someone special.’

‘And does your someone special have a name?’ Rose said.

‘Kenneth. He’s called Kenneth.’

Rose arranged to meet Binkie and Kenneth at the station on Saturday morning. She went straight to the study to tell Edwin.

‘It’s the first time she’s brought a man to stay. It must be serious. I’ll get the blue counterpane out for him. Pink won’t be suitable for a man.’

She planned the Sunday roast and made a plum cake and some brandysnaps. She decided to wear the black and green dress she’d made, the one with the lace bodice and scallop skirt.

~

Rose got to the railway station early so she parked the car and waited on the platform. As the train puffed in, Binkie was leaning out of the window, waving. Rose opened the carriage door and Binkie bustled out with her case. Behind her stood a handsome young man, fair-haired and clean-shaven, holding a boxy wicker case. He smiled at Rose as he handed it down to Binkie. Rose was about to ask her daughter if she thought they were going for a picnic when the porter started slamming doors.

Binkie put the wicker case on the platform with her other one and bent to unfasten its lid.

As the guard blew his whistle Rose realised that the young man had sat down again and was looking out at them through the grubby window.

‘But … what about your friend?’ she said, as the porter shut the door.

The train pulled away and Binkie straightened up, clutching a little silky-haired cocker spaniel puppy.

‘Mummy,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to meet Kenneth.’

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by Jen Ross Laguna

[this is the third in the three part series–
read Fragments of my father from the beginning, here]

I’m teary-eyed as I blather to the towering sugar maple that stands like a sentinel before a legion of poplars – here, where I’d laid Dad’s ashes the day before – when my normally serious 16-month-old bursts into laughter at seemingly nothing at all. I search the forest for a meandering squirrel or chipmunk. A quick shoulder check at the placid waters of Lower Beverly Lake shimmering behind us. Then my gaze veers up towards the bright-green mid-June canopy obscuring the cerulean sky, as blue as Dad’s eyes. And I remember the medium’s message after the funeral: that Dad would see us at the cottage. And although I can’t see him, my son’s giggles are all the confirmation I need.

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by Jen Ross Laguna

[this is the second in the three part series–
read Fragments of my father from the beginning, here]

I couldn’t bring myself to sort through it all in my grief, the memories still too raw, and I’d been gone too long. But Mom was decided on downsizing, so my husband handled the basement.

Mom had always hated clutter but had let Dad have his man cave, that dingy dungeon that smelled of mold and old newspapers, with its cruddy green carpet that no vacuum had ever seen.

We ditched his rickety chair with the ripped orange vinyl and uneven front leg, the crumbling chest of drawers he’d found on a curb, vowing to fix good as new, and the obsolete electric typewriter he could never bring himself to part with.

We donated the books and the boxes of used eyeglasses he collected for the poor but tossed the local Mud Lake protection files and the spine-cracked photo albums, replete with Polaroids of cars, trains and buses, but few faces.

We dumped the stacks of Dad’s old campaign signs tucked under the stairs, remnants of his three – or was it four? – unsuccessful bids, frugally kept in the hopes of that final sha-bang that never was.

We salvaged any family photos or vacation souvenirs we could find, the binoculars we’d use on family walks through Mud Lake or the Chickadee Forest, and his framed Governor-General’s Caring Canadian Award.

Then my husband emerged triumphantly with an old violin, convinced it was a Stradivarius… after watching too many episodes of Pawn Stars. At least it had a story, having emigrated with a Scottish ancestor in the 1800s. It sold on Craig’s List for a couple hundred bucks to a teenager taking lessons.

Some vintage photo lenses and garden tools fetched a few hundred dollars at a yard sale – not enough to pay for the 20-foot dumpster that had to make two trips.

The kid who bought the violin got in touch with us a few days later to tell us she felt as though she could feel that ancestor when she played and wanted to know more about him. That brought me to tears. Why couldn’t I conjure Dad by looking through his binoculars?

I knew these were just things, fragments of a life interrupted, and that nothing would bring my fuddy-duddy Daddy back, but watching it all get hoisted into that dumpster was deeply unsettling. The final curtain-call on an autistic and altruistic life, snuffed out, inconceivably reduced to ashes. Gone, like the dusty old things we were throwing away.

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by Jen Ross Laguna

Sammy Snake
(publishing December 12th)
The things Dad left behind
(publishing December 13th)
See you at the cottage
(publishing December 14th)

Sammy Snake

It’s an early spring morning at Mud Lake and 7-year-old me is meandering through sprouting ferns and dew-covered grasses, scouring for the slightest movement. Dad follows closely, binoculars dangling. Finally, I spot that signature light yellow line against silky black and red scales roping slowly around dampened rocks. I lunge forward and catch him mid-slither, careful to grab close to his head so he can’t bite me. The garter snake writhes angrily, but finally relaxes after I place him in the small cardboard box I’ve decked lovingly with rocks and leaves. And I gleam: “Daddy, meet my new pet, Sammy.”

The things Dad left behind

I couldn’t bring myself to sort through it all in my grief, the memories still too raw, and I’d been gone too long. But Mom was decided on downsizing, so my husband handled the basement.

Mom had always hated clutter but had let Dad have his man cave, that dingy dungeon that smelled of mold and old newspapers, with its cruddy green carpet that no vacuum had ever seen.

We ditched his rickety chair with the ripped orange vinyl and uneven front leg, the crumbling chest of drawers he’d found on a curb, vowing to fix good as new, and the obsolete electric typewriter he could never bring himself to part with.

We donated the books and the boxes of used eyeglasses he collected for the poor but tossed the local Mud Lake protection files and the spine-cracked photo albums, replete with Polaroids of cars, trains and buses, but few faces.

We dumped the stacks of Dad’s old campaign signs tucked under the stairs, remnants of his three – or was it four? – unsuccessful bids, frugally kept in the hopes of that final sha-bang that never was.

We salvaged any family photos or vacation souvenirs we could find, the binoculars we’d use on family walks through Mud Lake or the Chickadee Forest, and his framed Governor-General’s Caring Canadian Award.

Then my husband emerged triumphantly with an old violin, convinced it was a Stradivarius… after watching too many episodes of Pawn Stars. At least it had a story, having emigrated with a Scottish ancestor in the 1800s. It sold on Craig’s List for a couple hundred bucks to a teenager taking lessons.

Some vintage photo lenses and garden tools fetched a few hundred dollars at a yard sale – not enough to pay for the 20-foot dumpster that had to make two trips.

The kid who bought the violin got in touch with us a few days later to tell us she felt as though she could feel that ancestor when she played and wanted to know more about him. That brought me to tears. Why couldn’t I conjure Dad by looking through his binoculars?

I knew these were just things, fragments of a life interrupted, and that nothing would bring my fuddy-duddy Daddy back, but watching it all get hoisted into that dumpster was deeply unsettling. The final curtain-call on an autistic and altruistic life, snuffed out, inconceivably reduced to ashes.

Gone, like the dusty old things we were throwing away.

See you at the cottage

I’m teary-eyed as I blather to the towering sugar maple that stands like a sentinel before a legion of poplars – here, where I’d laid Dad’s ashes the day before – when my normally serious 16-month-old bursts into laughter at seemingly nothing at all. I search the forest for a meandering squirrel or chipmunk. A quick shoulder check at the placid waters of Lower Beverly Lake shimmering behind us. Then my gaze veers up towards the bright-green mid-June canopy obscuring the cerulean sky, as blue as Dad’s eyes. And I remember the medium’s message after the funeral: that Dad would see us at the cottage. And although I can’t see him, my son’s giggles are all the confirmation I need.

More of the 2024 FLASH SUITE Contest
What’s New at Defenestrationism.net
home/ Bonafides

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by Robert Kibble

[this is the third in the three part series–
read Half Life Connections from the beginning, here]

“What the hell is this?”

I look up at Zac, but I don’t need to.  I know four things already.  One, he’s got the letter I gave to Jane.  Two, if I survive I’m going to kill Jane.  Three, this is not the time to have this argument.  Four, this fucking hurts.

Number four would be higher up if I weren’t already biting down hard on the gas and air.

I drift away from the pain that was threatening to engulf me.  I heard singing a little while ago.  I think it was my voice.  The gas and air is amazing.  Zac wants an answer.

He won’t get one.  Not now.  Not now I’ve got this far.

“You!” I shout, intending to go further, but that’s all I can manage with the breath I get before another scream – a scream oddly separate from me.  I meant to say “you are getting what you always bloody wanted.”

I hope that’s true.  I hope he gets everything, but I’ve made my choice.  If it’s me or the baby, he gets the baby.  You don’t get second chances at forty-six, and besides, there’s a fair chance they’ll be able to treat me after.

“How could you hide this from me?”

Zac’s voice gets in between screams and waves of pain, all coming from somewhere else now.  I’m fading.  I can feel my body getting further away.  I don’t want to remember him shouting at me.  That’s not how this should end.  He should be happy.

I drift again, the pain there, but a foreign entity.  Some more words in my ears.

Oh my God.  Something breaks through the numbness.  What’s happened?  I’ve lost feeling in my legs.  Zac shouts out.  I don’t know if that’s a bad sign.

Something moves.  Someone moves.

A tiny ball of blood is held up in front of me, and I try to focus.  There are features on it.  Her.  I smile and try to move a hand up to reach it.  Her.  She kicks.  Her eyes are shut.  I can see her face.  Cut that cord and she’s safe.  Safe from all the disease running round my body.  “Cut it!”

The midwife looks surprised.  She was about to put a clamp on the umbilical anyway.  She clips it, and then a pair of scissors makes that tiny creature separate, safe, a genuine human being.  Zac’s read the letter, so he knows that whatever happens I want her to be named after my grandmother, after a woman before me who sacrificed everything for her family.

My fingers touch little Yazuko’s face, and I look over at Zac.  He’s crying.  I hope I make it back.  We’d make a wonderful family.

The world goes dark.

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by Robert Kibble

[this is the second in the three part series–
read Half Life Connections from the beginning, here]

“Dear Ami.”

Ami hates where this is going already.  Why would Zac write to her?  She hasn’t received a personal letter since her mother wrote to her at university.  She stares at it, imagining the content: “I’m sorry I shouted last night.”  That’s what it’ll say.  Then how much he loves her, how it’s easier to say it in a letter.

He’s a fool sticking with her so long.  She’s a fool sticking with him.  They’re not “in love”.  They’re comfortable, even happy sometimes.  But is this the man she’ll marry?  He keeps asking about kids.  He wants kids.  Ami’s not so sure.  Is he “the one”?  There was that stupid film with Anne Hathaway where she judged by her foot lifting off the floor when they kissed.  Ami’s foot doesn’t budge.

Ami has a box next to her, from her recently-dead grandfather’s attic.  She’s been clearing out the house.  She’s got some black-and-white photographs of unknown people, and has found a folded-up piece of paper tied with a red ribbon.  A love letter, perhaps?  Written from Yazuko to Coleman – Ami’s maternal grandparents – and then kept in this box for decades?  Maybe written when he was away in the navy, with Yazuko’s loyalties torn?

“Coleman,” it begins.  So cold.  No nickname, like “smoochy” or something…  There’s a flutter in her stomach – this isn’t right.

“This needs to be brief…”

Nothing is good when it needs to be brief.  Ami looks at the picture of her grandmother, looking stern.  Of a different age.  But there had always been that beautiful “love across the continents” thing.  That was unusual back then.  Ami was part Japanese, and proud of it.

“…so please forgive my abruptness.”

Please forgive.  Why even say that?  Just get on with it.

“I have found someone else.”

Ami reads this line over and over.  As if by rereading it won’t say the same thing.  She looks at the photograph of Yazuko, looking every bit the woman who would always look after her husband – it didn’t fit.

“I will not be returning to America when the war ends.”

What?  Why?  To stay in Japan on a whim, leaving behind a young child who barely knew her?  A child who would go on a pilgrimage to Japan, trying to understand.  A child who never knew what her mother had done.  A child who would grow up and have her own daughter – Ami – whom she would not abandon.

It was true she didn’t return.  Ami grew up hating the bomb that killed her grandmother, but now has a new hatred – for that decision, even though returning then would have meant being sent to an internment camp.  FDR, that great bastion of progressiveness, the only president elected four times, still put the Japanese into camps.  Ami learnt about it from The Karate Kid.  She liked that film.  Miyako was cool.

And even after the war ended, what Japanese person would’ve wanted to come back to America?  To face what?  Racism?  There was plenty of that.  Would her grandfather have suffered too having a Japanese wife?  He had a half-Japanese daughter.

“Please consider yourself freed from any obligation towards me.  Yazuko.”

What kind of a parting is that?  What mother could turn and say that she wouldn’t be coming back like that?  No obligation.  How cold was that?

Zac intrudes into her thoughts, with his letter.  She reads another line, hoping for light relief from her swirling confusion.

“I said the wrong things.  I’m sorry.  I love you, Ami.  You know that.  I haven’t said it out loud, but you know.  If you really don’t think this is working, that’s your decision.  I think we have a future.”

Not distraction enough.  Ami knew her grandmother had returned to Japan to visit family, but the war had broken out and she’d been stuck.  Things changed in an instant, and people didn’t always have control.  Not like Ami did now.  Not like her choice whether to stay with a sap who doted on her or remain free.

“Any obligation.”

It was an odd way of putting it.  “I have found someone else.”  It was deliberate.  An act of malice.  She looks down into the box and sees more photos, one showing Yazuko and Coleman with friends.  One woman has a young daughter and looks very thin.  Ami turns the picture over.  There’s a little cross on the back, and a date.  April 1945.  Did this woman die in the camps?

Ami pictures her grandmother again.  Had she known?  Had Coleman told her about the camps?  Had she known their friend had died?  What happened to the young girl?  She went through the letter again.  “Any obligation.”  This was calculated.  Ami realises she was wrong – it wasn’t malice.  She pictures her grandmother, back in Japan, hearing the news.  Perhaps she knew.  Perhaps she knew there was a terrible wind coming.

She sees Yazuko again, not malicious, but crying.  Writing a letter knowing she was separating herself from everything she loved.  Making it possible for the man she loved to love again.  He never did.  He wrapped that letter in ribbon.

Ami wonders if Coleman had realised.  The ribbon suggests he had.  He certainly bore her no ill-will, although that could have been because she died so soon after.

Ami imagines writing a letter sacrificing everything you love for the sake of everything you love.

Spending your last days alone, knowing you would never see your family again.

Ami pictures her grandmother, writing the words ending her family, for her at least.  Loneliness.  Separation.  Sorrow.

Ami looks back at Zac’s letter.

She likes Zac.  A lot.  He’s not “the one”.  He’s not everything she’s wants in life.  He’d be a compromise.  Yazuko and Coleman might have been, too.  But Ami likes Zac.  Maybe she even loves him.  They were happy.  Mostly.

Maybe that happiness, that connection, that compromise, that link to another human being, so fragile and precarious – maybe that’s what love is.

Ami picks up the phone.

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by Robert Kibble

Death on a Rock
(publishing on Dec. 9th)
Paper Cuts
(publishing on Dec. 10th)
A Single Snip of the Scissors
(publishing on Dec. 11th)

Death on a Rock

Hanako stares at a photograph of a shadow that has nothing to cast it.

Her daughter is bored.  The weather is hot.  “I don’t know why we have to come out here.”

Hanako is hot too.  She isn’t enjoying the journey, but she never expected to.  Hanako is making this pilgrimage because she feels she has to see the spot for herself.  To see where it happened.  She thought Ami would find a connection here.  Or at least she hoped Ami would find a connection.  She prayed that she and Ami could find a connection.  She doesn’t reply to her daughter.  What is there to say?

“I thought trains in Japan were supposed to be all sci-fi,” says Ami.

Hanako has never been on a bullet train before.  This is a high-tech marvel.  It has special clamps which will grip the rails if it detects an earthquake, faster than the driver can react.  This is the finest of the world’s engineering, but somehow fails to inspire Ami.

Hanako would love to spend time touring her ancestral homeland, but that time is not now.  That is not what she is here to do.  This journey is about seeing for herself something she has seen in a photograph.  Something she has felt viscerally.  Something she has cried herself to sleep over.  This journey is about closure.  Ami, she realises too late, is not helping.

“What’s the point of going to Tokyo and then not letting me shop?  It’s like the absolute capital of shopping anywhere.  Are we staying there on the way back?”

Hanako believed this would be different.  Spiritual, perhaps.  She kept thinking of it as a pilgrimage, but pilgrims rarely dragged twenty-three-year-olds around with them.  She’s read so much about this area, about this journey.  It isn’t living up to what she’d hoped.

Hanako wants to pray, to settle herself into the right mentality.  Into a way of seeing the world, a way of connecting with the physical objects that make it up.  She wants to understand her mother.  She wants to feel how her mother must have felt, growing up here.  She wants to make a connection, to older or younger generations.  She hoped for both.

Ami opens an Asahi.  Her third since leaving Tokyo.  And those weren’t her first drinks of the day.  Ami is bored.  She drinks when she is bored.  She shops when she is bored.  She is often bored.

Hanako wonders if actually being born in Japan would have made a difference, for her or Ami.  She always felt herself Japanese, because her father told her so, even though she was born in San Francisco and had an American father.  Her father told her it was good to be different.  Hanako found it hard when people said things at high school about her eyes, or the colour of her skin.  She learned to keep quiet and meld into the background.  She didn’t feel that the war they all learned about was just good versus evil.  Hanako’s mother had died in that war.  Her father had told her about Yazuko, about how sad it was that Hanako had to grow up without a memory of such a loving mother.  He tried his best to love enough for two.

The train pulls into the station.  Hanako stands, and Ami follows, still grumbling.

Hanako knows where she has to go.  She has researched this, time and time again.  She has studied maps and guidebooks and has seen it with others’ eyes, but not with her own.  That is what is important to her now.  Not “seeing it”, as in seeing a photograph.  She has to sense it.  She has to understand what the place feels like.  The spirits of a place mean something.  The spirits of the objects.  The spirit of what happened.

The streets are pristine.  The people move about as if this is just an ordinary place.  Hanako looks at them and struggles to understand why they don’t stop to pray.  Ami looks at the shops and can’t understand why they don’t stop to shop.

Ami is relieved to be off the train, but hates the heat.  She is worried about her makeup.  She follows her mother through the streets until they come to some steps.  Some ordinary-looking steps.  Ami doesn’t understand what’s so special about them.

Hanako holds up her photograph.

She moves it in front of her, so it lines up.  There is a shadow on the photograph.  A shadow of a woman.  A woman holding something in her hand.

Ami gets bored of looking at the steps and looks at the photograph.  Something is wrong, she knows.  She looks back at the steps as if the answer is to be found there, and the image in the photograph appears to her.  The shadow.  What is wrong with the shadow?

There is nothing to cast the shadow.

Ami realises with a start, and looks at her mother.  “Is that grandmother?” she asks, finally understanding why they’re here.

Hanako nods, and as Ami looks back, she sees the shadow, then imagines a woman standing.  A woman standing on a Monday morning in 1945.  The first Monday in August.  As a single bomber plane flies overhead.

Ami sees the figure casting the shadow now.  A clear figure.  A figure who, in an instant, ceased, and was written only onto the steps she sees in front.  She wouldn’t have known it was about to happen.  She might have turned at the sound of the plane.

Ami is lost, horrified, captivated by this cessation.  By this mortality.  She feels sick.  She stares at a place where a living breathing thinking human being simply stopped, written into a shadow on some stone steps.  She is knocked backwards by it, but she – she herself – does not cease as a result.

She does, however, shut up.

A connection has been made.

Paper Cuts

“Dear Ami.”

Ami hates where this is going already.  Why would Zac write to her?  She hasn’t received a personal letter since her mother wrote to her at university.  She stares at it, imagining the content: “I’m sorry I shouted last night.”  That’s what it’ll say.  Then how much he loves her, how it’s easier to say it in a letter.

He’s a fool sticking with her so long.  She’s a fool sticking with him.  They’re not “in love”.  They’re comfortable, even happy sometimes.  But is this the man she’ll marry?  He keeps asking about kids.  He wants kids.  Ami’s not so sure.  Is he “the one”?  There was that stupid film with Anne Hathaway where she judged by her foot lifting off the floor when they kissed.  Ami’s foot doesn’t budge.

Ami has a box next to her, from her recently-dead grandfather’s attic.  She’s been clearing out the house.  She’s got some black-and-white photographs of unknown people, and has found a folded-up piece of paper tied with a red ribbon.  A love letter, perhaps?  Written from Yazuko to Coleman – Ami’s maternal grandparents – and then kept in this box for decades?  Maybe written when he was away in the navy, with Yazuko’s loyalties torn?

“Coleman,” it begins.  So cold.  No nickname, like “smoochy” or something…  There’s a flutter in her stomach – this isn’t right.

“This needs to be brief…”

Nothing is good when it needs to be brief.  Ami looks at the picture of her grandmother, looking stern.  Of a different age.  But there had always been that beautiful “love across the continents” thing.  That was unusual back then.  Ami was part Japanese, and proud of it.

“…so please forgive my abruptness.”

Please forgive.  Why even say that?  Just get on with it.

“I have found someone else.”

Ami reads this line over and over.  As if by rereading it won’t say the same thing.  She looks at the photograph of Yazuko, looking every bit the woman who would always look after her husband – it didn’t fit.

“I will not be returning to America when the war ends.”

What?  Why?  To stay in Japan on a whim, leaving behind a young child who barely knew her?  A child who would go on a pilgrimage to Japan, trying to understand.  A child who never knew what her mother had done.  A child who would grow up and have her own daughter – Ami – whom she would not abandon.

It was true she didn’t return.  Ami grew up hating the bomb that killed her grandmother, but now has a new hatred – for that decision, even though returning then would have meant being sent to an internment camp.  FDR, that great bastion of progressiveness, the only president elected four times, still put the Japanese into camps.  Ami learnt about it from The Karate Kid.  She liked that film.  Miyako was cool.

And even after the war ended, what Japanese person would’ve wanted to come back to America?  To face what?  Racism?  There was plenty of that.  Would her grandfather have suffered too having a Japanese wife?  He had a half-Japanese daughter.

“Please consider yourself freed from any obligation towards me.  Yazuko.”

What kind of a parting is that?  What mother could turn and say that she wouldn’t be coming back like that?  No obligation.  How cold was that?

Zac intrudes into her thoughts, with his letter.  She reads another line, hoping for light relief from her swirling confusion.

“I said the wrong things.  I’m sorry.  I love you, Ami.  You know that.  I haven’t said it out loud, but you know.  If you really don’t think this is working, that’s your decision.  I think we have a future.”

Not distraction enough.  Ami knew her grandmother had returned to Japan to visit family, but the war had broken out and she’d been stuck.  Things changed in an instant, and people didn’t always have control.  Not like Ami did now.  Not like her choice whether to stay with a sap who doted on her or remain free.

“Any obligation.”

It was an odd way of putting it.  “I have found someone else.”  It was deliberate.  An act of malice.  She looks down into the box and sees more photos, one showing Yazuko and Coleman with friends.  One woman has a young daughter and looks very thin.  Ami turns the picture over.  There’s a little cross on the back, and a date.  April 1945.  Did this woman die in the camps?

Ami pictures her grandmother again.  Had she known?  Had Coleman told her about the camps?  Had she known their friend had died?  What happened to the young girl?  She went through the letter again.  “Any obligation.”  This was calculated.  Ami realises she was wrong – it wasn’t malice.  She pictures her grandmother, back in Japan, hearing the news.  Perhaps she knew.  Perhaps she knew there was a terrible wind coming.

She sees Yazuko again, not malicious, but crying.  Writing a letter knowing she was separating herself from everything she loved.  Making it possible for the man she loved to love again.  He never did.  He wrapped that letter in ribbon.

Ami wonders if Coleman had realised.  The ribbon suggests he had.  He certainly bore her no ill-will, although that could have been because she died so soon after.

Ami imagines writing a letter sacrificing everything you love for the sake of everything you love.

Spending your last days alone, knowing you would never see your family again.

Ami pictures her grandmother, writing the words ending her family, for her at least.  Loneliness.  Separation.  Sorrow.

Ami looks back at Zac’s letter.

She likes Zac.  A lot.  He’s not “the one”.  He’s not everything she’s wants in life.  He’d be a compromise.  Yazuko and Coleman might have been, too.  But Ami likes Zac.  Maybe she even loves him.  They were happy.  Mostly.

Maybe that happiness, that connection, that compromise, that link to another human being, so fragile and precarious – maybe that’s what love is.

Ami picks up the phone.

A Single Snip of the Scissors

“What the hell is this?”

I look up at Zac, but I don’t need to.  I know four things already.  One, he’s got the letter I gave to Jane.  Two, if I survive I’m going to kill Jane.  Three, this is not the time to have this argument.  Four, this fucking hurts.

Number four would be higher up if I weren’t already biting down hard on the gas and air.

I drift away from the pain that was threatening to engulf me.  I heard singing a little while ago.  I think it was my voice.  The gas and air is amazing.  Zac wants an answer.

He won’t get one.  Not now.  Not now I’ve got this far.

“You!” I shout, intending to go further, but that’s all I can manage with the breath I get before another scream – a scream oddly separate from me.  I meant to say “you are getting what you always bloody wanted.”

I hope that’s true.  I hope he gets everything, but I’ve made my choice.  If it’s me or the baby, he gets the baby.  You don’t get second chances at forty-six, and besides, there’s a fair chance they’ll be able to treat me after.

“How could you hide this from me?”

Zac’s voice gets in between screams and waves of pain, all coming from somewhere else now.  I’m fading.  I can feel my body getting further away.  I don’t want to remember him shouting at me.  That’s not how this should end.  He should be happy.

I drift again, the pain there, but a foreign entity.  Some more words in my ears.

Oh my God.  Something breaks through the numbness.  What’s happened?  I’ve lost feeling in my legs.  Zac shouts out.  I don’t know if that’s a bad sign.

Something moves.  Someone moves.

A tiny ball of blood is held up in front of me, and I try to focus.  There are features on it.  Her.  I smile and try to move a hand up to reach it.  Her.  She kicks.  Her eyes are shut.  I can see her face.  Cut that cord and she’s safe.  Safe from all the disease running round my body.  “Cut it!”

The midwife looks surprised.  She was about to put a clamp on the umbilical anyway.  She clips it, and then a pair of scissors makes that tiny creature separate, safe, a genuine human being.  Zac’s read the letter, so he knows that whatever happens I want her to be named after my grandmother, after a woman before me who sacrificed everything for her family.

My fingers touch little Yazuko’s face, and I look over at Zac.  He’s crying.  I hope I make it back.  We’d make a wonderful family.

The world goes dark.

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