Dear Readers,
I am hosting an Spring writing competition.
The theme of your stories should be RENEWAL, in the broadest sense of the word.
You have until the 6th of May 2024 to get your stories in.
Please post your stories on this thread.
They be should be no more than seven-hundred and fifty words.
Because of the amount of reading that will have to be done, the competition is for paid subscribers only.
Write with freedom, without inhibition.
Your loving writer,
Hanif xx
Please excuse my typo. This is a SPRING writing competition, not Autumn.
Sometimes I smell the warm familiar meaty waft of his slept-in skin. He wouldn’t mind that at all. Proud fastidiousness he happily and confidently boundaried with the outer limits of his person. Whatever emanated from there on, was no longer his, or his responsibility. Mr Fastidious, Mr Punctilious, Mr Officious, Mr Scrupulous, Mr Meticulous. He could so lazily and uncarefully foul the air, soil a toilet. And deny his ownership of such ‘til the cows came home. Rosie and I, or should I now say ‘Ro’, had argued angrily about replacing the pillows. She tells me that keeping his died-on pillow, was creepy and evidence of my denial of his death, me comforted by the dent from his head and years old yellowing. And the smell. Good morning, I whisper. Good morning to the person for whom I, with all my faults, was the most important person in the world. And for those moments every day after his death, I was, still, somebody’s most important person in the world.
How appalled Ro would be if she knew that it had been a good ten minutes between me waking to her father’s corpse and calling an ambulance. No one would know what time I woke. Even though I was faced away from him, the silent, cool, rigidity told me he had been dead for some hours. I had been slow to turn toward him. I wanted time to prepare for what would happen that day, that week, that year and for the rest of my life. When I finally turned, I held his face and gently kissed him. Oh, my darling, I said, leaning and pressing into him to search for some fading warmth. Instinctively I adjusted the quilt to his shoulders. I rested my head on him, and as I had in the worst moments of our lives, let that big round hard shoulder cradle me, like a child. There without warning came the yelling and howling of me the animal, crying more salty water than one could imagine a body could hold. There was no mistaking this for the wailing of a child. The sounds of my crying slammed hard against the walls, floors and ceilings near and far in our home. The harsh volume I didn’t know I had, shocked my ears. Oxytocin and endorphins that had surged with my early morning find were released in an episode that hurt my gut and throat, my ears and my eyes, the salt burning my skin, a painful headache seeping through my head, every heartbeat driving the pain further, harder. I was wrecked.
I was back to three days at the practice. I’d been hinted to, clued up and then outright told, that this was more trouble to management of the practice than it was worth. They hadn’t yet had the balls to sack me. The more they dropped the hint that it was time for me to leave, the more my resolve to not leave, hardened. Years of unfairness scarred me into a hard, gristly, intimidating, combat veteran. The red beret of female staff. I wouldn’t have anyone pushing me around now. Now when there was nothing at stake. Now that I didn’t need the work. How it must gall the worst of them to come and ask my opinion on complex patients. I’m a good doctor.
Today is one of the four days in the week that I must fill to make it look like I am doing alright. Otherwise, there will be my adult children, family and friends who will, after interrogation, express concern. In all their annoying ways. What are your plans now? Forthwith analysed and followed by unsolicited advice or discussed with the blunter of family and friends who deliver their unsolicited advice. Ro says I’ve developed an aggressive habit of smiling and nodding while she tries to talk to me about such things. The things that seemed to be approved of are my practice and advisory positions, walking, errands and help in the households of my adult children, volunteering, cooking (but not too much because ‘remember it’s only you mum’). Has Con’s death left me so inept. Has his death taken him and with it me, leaving only this useless aimless shell?
Con’s words whisper from his grave, from his ashes tipped carefully below our lemon tree, from years of love, from the smell of that old pillow. Catherine Eleanor Dawes, the most important person in my life, you are not dead yet.