It's been too long...

The truth is, I felt shy

But I know I can't keep avoiding what I really want to do in life just because it's easier. Also, I'm very reluctant to get back to the endless reams of notes I have to take... My pile of books to get through is several feet high. That's an English Lit course for you! I've been thinking about writing this a lot recently and generally about the writing I've done and what I would like to write in the future, and I am aware of the fact that now is maybe not the best time for me to get stuck into the challenges that there are in writing a full blown novel. However, my fingers have been itching again. Yay!

So let's talk short stories because these are more manageable than the novels I'm in the middle of writing. I've literally lost the plot with those... Stephen King says in his book On Writing, that the best thing to do is to make yourself write two thousand or so words every day so that novels are finished within a couple of months. It clearly works for him; that man can write A LOT and it's quality stuff as well. Perhaps that's more manageable than I think it is, perhaps I should aim for 500 instead, or failing that, a sentence. It's keeping up the routine that I need to figure out. But let's move away from my writer's envy. I work too hard for a first year English student as it is, too keen really, but I've been writing occasional short stories instead. Although there are a lot of time restraints at Uni, there are also loads of sources of inspiration. After a lecture on Modernism/Impressionism, unreliable narrators and the short story form, I went to the library to get some books out and ended up writing this instead; a much more fun and creative use of my time.

I hope you enjoy. Comments and criticism very welcome as always.

P.S. I went to a lecture on the short story by Jon McGregor, author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, the other day. He talked about how learning to read is the same as learning to write and recommended reading lots of short stories to learn about the methods of writing. You can more clearly get into the nuts and bolts of writing in terms of what they have tried to achieve and how it has come across. He said that the short story is a more concentrated art form because the writer can have greater control of the pace as the story is meant to be read in one sitting. It can also be more intense as the air is charged with meaning and the writer can add more layers to the story because it is more likely to be read more than once. Every word should count.
It was very interesting. He speaks very poetically and that is reflected in the lyricism of his prose. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is a really beautiful book and I think writers can learn a lot by reading it.

A gentleman's attic

I pushed the door open and it made me ache. Its aged hinges screamed. There was a still that shook me as my eyes pierced the gloom. They imposed, my thoughts, onto the long neglected, starved from touch, objects. I felt they stared back with blindness. Conscious, suddenly, of a certain childish hesitancy that I had been projecting as though I had never grown away from that shy little girl, I pushed the door wide open with decided confidence. Perhaps this lacked respect. I felt the air disturbed, felt the dusty cusses of those last breaths that she had gasped here. The cancerous thickness of them stagnated in the air; I inhaled the sickly musk of it. It was tight and strange like starvation. I was a fish out of water.

It will just be ghosts here soon. My ghost and Mother's ghost before and Mother's ghost before that.

That's what she had said. It was the Mother's waiting room. Waiting, always. We never had much luck with men in our family. Never seemed to hold on tight enough to them or we held onto them too tightly. Then the same happened again and again and again. Memories of mother's murderous howls and wails that echoed through the house and etchings of nails scratched onto the pink cherubim wallpaper. She could not destroy him. There was only she and me left. For it. With a steady hand I allowed the candle to hover against the wall above the faded gold bed-post, black-gold-black-gold, a gate to heaven-to-hell-to-heaven-to-hell. There was blood there in the crevices of the torn paper. Her love had been deep and desperate. Mad love. Madmen. Mad dogs in the last hot flush of a summer almost over.

I observed the room. The room observed me with questioning eyes. The next lunatic, the next asylum seeker. Perhaps.

I am that history, that inheritance. I can be what they want me to be. I can agree to the family curse.

I walked to the window, put my candle on a table. The door fell shut quietly behind me. I did not flinch. I could have no fear because there was nothing unknown. The net curtain was wedding veil and I pushed it gently aside to reach through the thin but definite metal bars. The window latch was out of reach... Just out of reach... Ghostly fingers brushed against mine as they reached with mine for death. The blackness was my horizon. I shivered in the darkness and coldness.

A dying breath suffocated the candle and then I could hear the sound of breaking hearts. The snapping sound of snuffed sanity. Their dying memories lived on in my living dying moments.

Downstairs I hear the sound of him, his voice that impeded on us. His laugh. They pulled at his voice, sucked at him. They wanted him here. Bitter-sweet hopes of footsteps outside, the squeak of the gate, a man's voice. The voice of God. They never came back.

He thinks I have gone upstairs to lie down, weak woman, one of my migraines. But I am here. Contemplating solitude. The choice of it.

I sit in the darkness and see. My future. In here. For an eternity. They will not let me leave. Madwoman in the attic, I sing. Mad woman. The woe of men. They chant.

In the dull glimmer of light that came from... where... I don't know... Myself perhaps, could I presume. In that dullness I sat and stared at my face in the mirror. There was a corpse's grin staring back at me, a lunatic bride's reflection that beckoned in a dusty moth-eaten yellowed gown with a  dirty worm-eaten yellowed face.

He said he needed me, wanted me, loved me. He said that would always be true. I will not wait to find out.

Dear, come here, come to see the attic. It's a forgotten treasure. My mother's room you know. Dear one, sweet angel, yes, perhaps for the baby. Soundproofed you know. Where were you last night, dear? Working, I've heard that one before. Please do admire the drapes and the furnishings. Didn't my mother have marvellous taste?

Time for me to go now. Farewell my love. It's not you, it's me. And my needs. I close it. I lock it. There is silence and I have the world.