Sam the Squid in The Selkie

My first piece of published fiction in The Selkie (www.theselkie.co.uk) called Sam the Squid can be read here

A surreal, dark story about a woman who is also a squid dealing with depression.

Quiet November

At last, I can write again. 

Glad to have taken the month of November off. 

Building works happening in the house are the worst. My rubble life. Brick by brick raining down past windows, the dog barking uncontrollably at workmen shuffling in and out of the house with buckets of cement. Dust on carpets and book binds and in my hair and plaster on bare feet. The clanking and the clanging. The shouting and crash of masonry. Not conducive to writing. Or running it seems, as the stress stopped A from doing his favourite thing too. We were both hunks of stale bread huddled together on the sofa.

Finally, we are free! The scaffolding is down. I can see the light from above when I open the blinds. Now all that is left is the interminable cleaning, but that’s OK. I like cleaning. 

I’m glad I’ve taken the month of November off.

October was full of things, occasions. I went to a wedding in Oxford. The newlyweds surprised everyone by taking us on a boat trip straight after their Town Hall wedding, and we sailed down the Isis into the countryside. It was dusk, rowers on the river paused and parted, and I ducked low as the branches of a tree with its leaves turning red brushed the top deck of our boat. The light was fading into a lavender hue, and I clinked my glass of champagne with the father of the groom – suave and smiling – resplendent with paternalistic pride. 

FEAR || The Creative Pandemic

I had a piece of writing feature in The Creative Pandemic titled FEAR, you can also read an earlier draft of it below. It's not very cheery; about the morose state of mind I found myself in when second lockdown was announced. 

FEAR 

I am afraid that this will last too long. 

Too long to be able to call what we once had normal. 

What if I refuse to adapt and live in denial; go in for hugs and be palmed off on to the pavement; what will they think? 

What on earth do they think? I think sadly to myself at home alone in my kitchen: nobody wants this so – what does that mean?

Eventually, we will become reckless and touch hands to face, to cough and splutter and inadvertently kill off the sick and elderly. How un-caring would that be, and could we live with ourselves after that kind of revolution?

I’m disgusted to even think of it and slam my glass down on the Ikea tabletop. I am not worse off, I’ve not been directly hit by this pandemic, so why am I sitting here being morose when there are people far worse off, dealing with poverty and a lack of space and being displaced. 

It puts me in an angry state, I feel caged in and helpless, I feel stupid and lethargic and incapable of doing anything good in the world. This whole thing makes me lose hope. 

I want to talk about the fear of not knowing. 

Not knowing whether what you are doing is right or wrong, or how you even feel about it in the grand scheme of things. People hope the government is doing the right thing, but of course they can’t be because no one knows what the hell to do, no one understands, there’s too much opposing data, too many questions that bring rise to more questions. 

Unlike a maths problem where there’s a cribsheet and fun to solve, the situation is forty thousand dead in eight months and the numbers are mounting. 

EXT. TREE LINED STREET - DAY

The diagnosis of covid is not black and white.

It’s much more complicated than what the public think.

Why aren’t we listening to the doctors who say that lockdown is going to cause more damage to public health than no lockdown?

Fatigue. That’s the big issue.

You mean post-viral fatigue syndrome?

No, the public’s feeling of fatigue.

 

INT. BASEMENT FLOOR KITCHEN - NIGHT

When was the last time you felt alive?

This very morning when I woke up alive and breathing, awake.

Is that what living is – being stuck in your locale, not communicating with society out of fear of infection? Is that really living?

When you put it like that, then no.

That’s what I’m talking about, man.

 

What if we learn to live small-y. Buy kittens, knead sourdough, prune plants and learn to forage mushrooms.

Get into home-schooling and cycle to work, get to know your neighbours and not rely on quick fixes to solve our mundane problems because we’re too poor to be click-baited all year round, out of season.

But what about the daters? 

I heard us couples became smug in our lockdown bubble o’ bliss. What about those of us who have to find a soul-mate, or someone to cuddle up to when the outside world seeps into your core. 

Penetrated by those desperate quiet stares of strangers sat across from you in train carriages, lips and softness smothered by a stretched piece of cloth. All you can do is swallow and hope that this will soon be over.

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Some sort of manifesto

As I sit here on the stairs thinking to write, forcing each quaver in to my mouth for the crisp to dissolve or crunch away, I am struck with a sense of foreboding determination. I came home and I was so hungry but lacking the willpower to cook anything I ate two bowls of cereal, using up that extra carton of soya milk I bought by accident. Kill two birds? Not the right idiom. Like when I cocked my eyebrow in that way no one else can do apart from on the silver screen, at my friend across the pub table and pronounced, ‘So he’s quite the dark stallion.’ Meaning horse. As I crumple the yellow packet between my twisting fingers, I am doing sums in my head. I have exactly 9 hours I spend at work, 1 hour for lunch, which I completely waste doing nothing, 30% of which is eating. I bore myself eating my lunch, eating the same thing I have cooked every day for the past month now, too afraid to try something different in case it comes out horrible like that baltic curry I tried to muster (and from a jar). Either way that’s 9 hours gone. That leaves me 15 hours in a day. Now if I try to scrape back the equal amount of time I am not at work for myself i.e. to do waking, living things, then that would leave me 6 hours to fall asleep in. And that’s if I really squeeze everything I want to do in to my 9 hours, which has to, by nature, include things I don’t care about doing like putting out the bins, tapping in through commuter barriers, buying soya milk, etc. That’s not even including all the miscellaneous things I sort of want to/have to do in my play time, like answering WhatsApp threads and watching YouTube videos. 

So I pace it up the stairs.

I leave the cereal bowl behind me on the table - I’ll clean it up later - I open this laptop and start padding for words to appear on this screen (a lot like the screen I have to stare at for 9 hours at work), but that’s my bread, you know how people used to say wholesome things like earning your bread and butter to mean doing an honest day’s work? Yeah, well I don’t remember, but I still get the gist. Everyone’s got to make a living and I spend all day looking at brands. We don’t eat as much bread any more but we sure consume a lot of brands and that gave me a job, in the end, I’m grateful for our gastronomic capitalist habits in providing me with a wage. I feel like I’m writing some sort of manifesto, just so that I can get my head stuck back down to the thing that I want my head to be stuck to. And that’s write.