Emily Harrison, ‘Sally and her postcards and the death that comes after’ – Suicide
Author: brieflywrite
Sally and her postcards and the death that comes after
Emily Harrison
This story has a content warning
You take a seat on the sofa and sink into her cushions. Across from you, she sips the coffee she asked you to make. Three teaspoons. No milk. Her face sucks in so sharp that it looks like she’s swallowing her teeth. There’s dust on the armchair that props her up. It’s made of fabric and dust. The clothes on her kiss it.
This was an accident. You. Here. Your parcel sent to 21A rather than 41A. It’s unusual for the delivery service to do mix ups.
The scent of mildew and soap floats like flotsam. There’s something medicinal in it, as if she scrubs her skin and the surfaces with the slippery bar, leaving small suds marks as she goes.
‘Quite a collection,’ you say, as she points you to another of her postcards. She’s laid them out for you to view. You wonder when she last had a visitor.
‘Isn’t it just, Thomas.’
Your name is Tobias. She must have read the parcel wrong.
In front of you there are prints of a sunken Scarborough and the former haunt of Whitby Abbey. The Humber Bridge against a sunset. Saltburn Pier strewn with dots of bodies. On the back of the postcards, in the margins, reads the scrawl of a year. 1997. 2009. 2021. Nothing after 2040.
‘I can’t look at that one,’ she tells you. You’re holding Hartlepool Marina. ‘Not since the place vanished.’
You don’t reply.
‘I have one from Robin Hood’s Bay,’ she says, to fill your gaps. ‘That’s a good postcard. Four pictures in one.’ She holds up four fingers, though they are closer to dead branches. ‘That place was nice.’
She sips, mouth pursed, and you sift through the postcards to be polite. Another of Whitby. One of Whitley Bay. Redcar and a donkey on a beach. Under a grey sea now.
You ask why she never sent them to anyone.
‘They’re my memories,’ she replies. ‘Do you have any?’
She doesn’t define it. Postcards or memories.
‘I don’t,’ you say.
Time slips, and after a while you make your excuses.
‘Thanks,’ you offer, as you linger at the front door, parcel in hand. ‘I appreciate you taking it in.’ Through the wrapping you can feel the bottle of pills. One hour it said on the website. One hour, a series of hallucinations, then death.
‘If I need another coffee, can I knock?’ she asks. One of her eyelids is drooping like melted candle wax.
‘Sure,’ you say, knowing there won’t be an answer. You hope she isn’t the one to find you. It wouldn’t be an easy sight.
You’re halfway to your flat before you realise she wouldn’t make it. She’d probably crack her head before the thirtieth floor. The stairs are so narrow in these tenement buildings that one wrong step can be fatal. They’re dark too, purpose built not to let the light in. It’s easier not to see what you’ve lost.
Later, when the pills are swimming – you swallowed them with home brew that tasted of chalk – and the hour is counting down, you think of the sun on her postcards. The old world lit up. She’s there, dancing. A weird jig in her armchair on Scarborough beach.
Emily Harrison has had work published with X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Barren Magazine, STORGY Magazine, The Molotov Cocktail, Litro, Tiny Molecules and Gone Lawn, to name a few. She is a onetime Best Small Fictions nominee, which is pretty cool.
Mulhacén
BT Barra
Death came from below, we know that now – with hindsight it is obvious.
In our simple-mindedness we believed that the earth was the past, the sky the future,
and that if we could just eat rocks, we could stay on the mountain and never come down.
Note: The third line contains a partial and adapted quote from the subtitles of Sara Dosa’s documentary film Fire of Love (2022).
BT Barra is a visual artist and poet living in Leeds, West Yorkshire. A recent Art History and Creative Writing graduate, he works for the Henry Moore Institute in a number of capacities, including as a Curatorial Research Assistant. His work often explores the intersections of poetic and visual practices.
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What comes before after?
Michelle Marie Jacquot, Afterglow (Michelle Marie Jacquot, 2022)
How can we measure the pandemic years? Lives lost. Loaves baked. Or through poetry?
In the ‘Foreword’ to ‘Afterglow’, Michelle Marie Jacquot invites her reader to imagine ‘late May of 2022’ – the dying embers of the coronavirus pandemic or flaming birth of learning to live with the virus. The poet is ‘sitting on a concrete floor in a little white room out in the middle of the desert, surrounded by almost nothing’. Aware of the vagueness of her setting, she feels compelled to add, ‘Mercury is in retrograde, if that means anything to you’. Such uncertain temporal and spatial surroundings neatly set (or, perhaps, unsettle) the scene for the poems that follow.
Fate and the struggle to find one’s place in an uncaring universe continue to trouble Jacquot. In her previous collection, ‘Deteriorate’, this manifested itself mostly through a personal battle with social media. The influence of lockdown makes the focus of ‘Afterglow’ more metaphysical.
Before blurs with after, just as dark thoughts mix with triviality. These are ‘sometimes silly, sometimes sad, sometimes hope-filled poems’, the poet notes. Box sets and jam on toast might sweeten existential musings, but the mood is overwhelmingly dark. In ‘I Used to Have Dreams’, she laments:
I had a dream
onceI don’t anymore
Often, before and after are subsumed by an inescapable present. ‘I’m frozen in this flat/ with both my personalities’, she writes in ‘Split Ends’. Symbolic meant-to-be moments also fall flat: she describes herself as ‘born on Christmas Eve in a Seventh-day Adventist Church hospital that doesn’t serve coffee’.
The quality of the poetry slips as the collection progresses, with many poems feeling decidedly unpolished. But that is kind of the point, it seems. The collection is, as the poet forewarned, ‘an odd time capsule’. An all-caps rant about religion follows close behind the poetic epiphany that ‘I’ve never seen Santa Claus and God in the same room, not once’. Absurdity reigns towards the end of the collection, a fitting memento of a maddening era.
Interspersed with insanity are self-help mantras, which is perhaps no coincidence. ‘Let yourself sit quiet/ Hear the wind inside your lungs’, the poet urges in ‘Gökotta’, shortly before she discovers that “Lennon” rhymes with “Heaven” in ‘A Place I’d Like to Go’.
Such varied insights into the poet’s thoughts reveal the strange and, at times, torturous experience of living in one’s own mind. Solitude is a precondition for mental plurality, which comes to the fore in ‘Imagine’, another Lennon-tinged poem:
I dare you to imagine
A place where everything goes right
One where the voices in your head
Only tell stories that you like
Brief reflections on nature in ‘Spring’ provide a glimpse into the outside world. But the collection is an introspective romp through the dark, twisting halls of the inner mind. The resulting poetry isn’t always pretty – but it is a revealing and relatable record of a difficult two years.
Michelle Marie Jacquot, Afterglow (Michelle Marie Jacquot, 2022). Available here.
Whispered Screams
Keely O’Shaugnessy, Baby is a Thing Best Whispered (Alien Buddha Press, 2022)
Keely O’Shaugnessy’s collection of short stories is a hard-hitting spin through scenes of horror and glimpses of hope. Screams are heard as whispers and whispers are screamed…
The collection is strewn with violence and fear. Domestic abuse, in particular, is a recurring theme. ‘Hidden in the Margins of a Gideon’s Bible’ is a grimly vivid snapshot of three characters’ responses to such horror: the mother, bloodied and beaten; the ‘kid sister’, inquisitive and fearful; and the older sister holding her family (and the narrative) together. All three lay in a single motel bed, aware to varying degrees of the perils of their situation, a disturbingly evocative metaphor for the widespread impacts of abuse.
For all the horror, however, O’Shaughnessy offers plentiful moments of redemption. Dreams spiral up, emerging from the darkness. In ‘Practising Tricks, Spells and Other Incantations’, the narrator opens with a wonderfully unstable first line:
You’re seven when I fracture my wrists, still young enough to believe in magic
The contrasting personalities housed within this line encapsulate the delicate balance between believing and disbelieving that runs throughout the collection. Magical possibilities interact with harsh realities, often losing but always putting up a fight.
Transformation is a tantalising prospect in a world where escape is often a character’s greatest hope. In ‘What If We Breathed Through Our Skin?’, a boy turns into a frog. Less literally, motherhood transforms characters. The narrator in the collection’s opening story, ‘Baby is a Thing Best Whispered’, is undergoing perhaps the greatest change of her life but ‘the ’90s playlist we devised nights before’ is drowning out moment. The start of a new life blurs into ‘long and winding’ speeches in which the bride and mother-to-be barely features. Starting with a character who feels absent from her own story is a superbly disorienting technique, which sets the scene for the collection’s distinctive instability.
Meanwhile, the convincing co-existence of life-changing and trivial is one of the collection’s greatest achievements. Small details that seem scarcely to warrant a mention are in fact pivotal, like the shade of red on a car used for an extra-marital affair or the different sizes of balloon thrown in water fights as a pregnant narrator’s baby kicks. The ripped chinos the narrator imagines her father might have worn as he threatened her mother with a knife seem vanishingly insignificant yet somehow essential to the made-up memory.
In a collection with such carefully scrutinised memories, vagueness stands out. In ‘The Manicure’, the narrator’s throwaway reference to ‘a long dead actress whose name I can’t remember’ feels like a fitting epithet for many of the collection’s absent and self-absent characters. Loss accompanies transformation like night follows day. ‘How to Bake Cookies When Your Child is Dying’ is not, as the title suggests, a self-help guide for coping with grief; rather, it is an eight-step recipe that advances with unnerving inevitability. Baking, for the narrator, is a gesture. It is ambiguous whether this gesture is meaningful or meaningless. Simply, when going through the motions is all one can do, one must go through the motions.
O’Shaughnessy’s writing certainly does not go through the motions. Her rhythmic prose showcases masterful narrative control and her stories have the ability to surprise with devastating simplicity. Nowhere is this better seen than in ‘Teaching a Clean Front Kick’, where words spoken and unspoken are reflected in actions done and undone. The child narrator sits on her infant sister but is dragged off before she can cause too much harm. The ominous presence of Uncle Jerry, however, lurks over the story – and provokes its chilling final line.
Keely O’Shaughnessy, Baby is a Thing Best Whispered (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). Available here.
‘It seems that I find myself coming out/ as biracial’
Danae Younge, Melanin Sun (–) Blind Spots, 2022
Melanin Sun (–) Blind Spots is a poetic experience / experiment / excommunication in which a self-effacing poet fights to escape the echo chamber she yearns to inhabit. Awarded the 2022 Florence Kahn Memorial Award by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, the collection is a bereaved daughter’s attempts to define herself and her skin.
From the start, the self shifts incessantly. When discussing race, the poetic voice is impersonal in search of personality: ‘It seems that I find myself coming out/ as biracial’ (Just a Brown Girl’s Glass Box). The poet needs to find herself – and finds herself needing poetry.
Yet language obscures the search. The opening poem, ‘Reverberation/Redaction’, sings of instability: words are crossed out, concealed and clouded. Pretence reigns supreme; death is sugar-coated and draped in oversized clothes. In ‘Alibi’, one of the collection’s best poems, bagginess becomes an ‘undersized coat’ – then returns to being an ‘oversized suit’.
This constant flip-flopping characterises the duality of the poetic voice, which is as complex and interlacing as the braids she wears: ‘half rooted in [redacted], half on sale for $7.99’. ‘Alibi’ is framed between the explanation / confession / apology, ‘I looked up a list of Black girl braids before writing this’, which makes the poem drip with the feeling of insufficiency. But it also screams resolve: ‘Ask the photo on the shelf/ with books I’ve never finished/ he’ll tell you; he’ll testify. I said it again. And again.’
Throughout the collection, betweenness manifests itself abundantly. With religion, there is a failure of performance: ‘I could never get myself to believe in God’ (Just a Brown Girl’s Glass Box). Musicality too is an ever-present ambiguity. At times, the poetry is knowingly beautiful: ‘wet warmth dresses the trees like tapestry’. But music can also be a burden; in ‘Black Pinocchio Jazz-Cat Drummer’, the father is ‘Limping from his backpack of songs’.
The absent father figure comes back time and time again. In ‘Nectar | Names’, ‘the spiral peel of his name’ spills down the page; in ‘Driveway, 5/03/20[redacted], ‘he gardens./ His silhouette fluttering like dark chiffon’. The reverberating echo chamber is contradiction in its most literal sense: a space where the poet speaks against herself.
Younge’s poetic space is a multitude of multitudes. Her language is constantly evolving and every line has the capacity to turn a poem upside down as suddenly as day can become night. In ‘Some Things Aren’t Meant to be Metaphors’, the poet suggests that ‘“like” carves a/ crawl space, but there’s not enough room to hide unless/ you make a home in the shadows’. Melanin Sun (–) Blind Spots is at home between shade and sun. The collection is a truly accomplished debut.
Danae Younge, Melanin Sun (−) Blind Spots (2022). Available here.
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Alone and alive
Leah Holbrook Sackett, Catawampus in Sweetgum County (Adelaide Books, 2022)
‘Sweetgum County is a place where death lingers on the doorstep of the soul’ declares the author before we have even reached the Acknowledgements. A faint-hearted reader might turn no further.
Death is certainly ubiquitous in Leah Holbrook Sackett’s literary landscape. But her short stories (many of which first appeared in one of an impressive array of literary journals) are often more surreptitious than sinister.
The collection uses its distinctively bland setting to paint a vivid picture of small-town midwest USA. Marriage, religion, school… characters’ concerns are mostly everyday in this place of ‘suburban sprawl with limited options’, as one character, newly arrived from Kansas City, puts it.
Nostalgia and anonymity run through most of the stories. Yet Holbrook Sackett’s prose is easygoing and intimate. Her observant descriptions are full of wit and piercing little asides that masquerade under a cloak of neutrality.
Solitude is also a common theme in the collection. Although Sweetgum County appears a tight community, many of its residents are desperately lonely. In ‘Spooning’, Nancy, alone after her husband of 35 years has absconded with a younger woman, replaces physical intimacy with ice cream. ‘Let Your Uglies Take Root’ uses Kafka, Boo Radley and Nirvana to highlight the isolating effects of bullying. In ‘Most Marriages Performed’, solitude is more ambiguous: ‘Moira and David had a renewal of their wedding night… blissfully alone in their union’.
In Sweetgum County, disappointment goes hand in hand with loneliness. ‘A Spot Not Blue’, first published in Issue 1 of Briefly Zine, stages the awkward meeting of a swimming pool and a boy, ‘as he realized the water was just clear, water without color’. Meanwhile, in ‘The Rome Club’, six acquaintances partake in an old tradition, whereby ‘the last man of Sweetgum County standing wins’. Even this ultimatum does not lead to foul play. And the winner sobs rather than celebrates upon discovering his lonely victory.
On occasion, the author forays into cultural clashes. An illiberal weddings policy is ‘a small threat in an otherwise accepting culture’, according to the narrator of ‘Most Marriages Performed’. Yet backwards traditions sometimes clash with more forward-looking mores, notably in ‘The Ron Jeremy of Klingons’ where a Trekkie must leave Sweetgum County to achieve her sexual liberation. It is telling that, in the end, she isn’t tempted to stay in her new fantasy world, concluding her adventure with matter-of-fact resolution: ‘It was time I headed back home to Sweetgum County’.
Sweetgum County is both a magnet and a vacuum. Things are happening; things that should be paid more attention. As the narrator muses in ‘Going to the Chapel’, ‘It’s one of those moments that doesn’t get captured, but it should. It is the apex of video posts on Facebook, very likely to go viral. But there was no one to capture the event.’ Catawampus in Sweetgum County captures an array of events, both ordinary and extraordinary. The reader too will be pulled back for more.
Leah Holbrook Sackett, Catawampus in Sweetgum County (Adelaide Books, 2022). Available here: https://adelaidebooks.org/products/catawampus-in-sweetgum-county-short-stories
Outside broadcast
Matt Gilbert
Once, when fleeing from myself, I was arrested by a magpie,
as it dragged some almost dead thing, towards a cherry laurel hell
Stood there rapt, attentive, in a park, rising over Brockley,
gripped beneath the trees, by a routine, nature thriller
The conclusion of another creature, must-see box-set in a bush,
against which, my troubles paled, changing channels, I went home.
Matt Gilbert is a freelance copywriter, who also blogs about place, books and other distractions. Originally from Bristol, he currently gets his fill of urban hills in south east London. Twitter (@richlyevocative).
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