E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten
Mathews / Tate / Perry Solstice Shorts
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-909208-24-7
Verlag: Arachne Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Sixteen Stories About Time
E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-909208-24-7
Verlag: Arachne Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
David Mathews is one of the winners of the Solstice Shorts Festival Short Story Competition. His story in Solstice Shorts: Sixteen Stories about Time is Wednesday Afternoon. For 35 years David was a work psychologist. That gave him a license to mind other people's business. He comes from Wales and lives in Bath and SW France. Recently his collection of short stories was shortlisted for the Impress Prize, Brittle Star magazine published his story 'Florence, who made mustard', and Audio Arcadia are currently recording 'Removed' about a man who looks for stones.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
The Largest Sundial in the World
Anita Sethi
The car stopped as we became stuck in a football match traffic jam and I watched a red and white Manchester United scarf fluttering out of the window of the car beside me, flapping in the rain which started to plummet down, rapidly making the colours fade as if they were trickling out of the scarf, not really a permanent part of the scarf but liable to be lost in a downpour, as if the whole world might melt away at any moment. Dad’s voice tugged at me suddenly: ‘Roshni are you still there? Rosh, have you vanished?’ he teased.
A long time later, after waiting in the traffic jam until day turned into darkness, we arrived at our Grandmother Mamee’s house, which curved around a corner of Stretford, near to the Lancashire Cricket Ground and not far from the football stadium. Mamee lived above a corner shop, which she worked in every day, a corner shop with a small, wild overgrown garden behind it and a deep cellar full of ghosts and wine bottles beneath it and a patch of sky often thundering and crying above it.
The shop shared its patch of pavement with a chippy, a newsagent and an old man who sat on the bench all day, deep in a perpetual monologue. The shop was stacked thick with tins of food, sacks of potatoes that I often helped to weigh out into smaller bags, and best of all, sweets. Our necks were forever draped with love-heart necklaces with slogans like BITE ME, LOVE YOU, YOU ARE SWEET, our heads exploding with the Space Crackle sweets which fizzed as soon as they touched the tongue. I devoured the sweetness, as if it might counteract the bitterness which had begun to seep into our lives like a poison.
The living room directly above the shop had a thick, woolly, chocolate-brown carpet covering the whole room, thick like the fur of an animal so that bits of food, penny pieces, spiders, were forever being lost in there.
Mamee doesn’t know anything about what has happened. She doesn’t know that Mum has vanished into the hungry air of Manchester. I don’t know whether or not to tell her, because Dad said it was a secret that must never be told. Never, he said. Don’t breathe a word. So many things that happened to us we were sworn to secrecy about. So many things were sealed away, separated from the external narrative. Don’t breathe a word.
Ashish the astrologer is visiting from Jaipur and we gather in the lounge above the shop, which is now shut for the evening. Ashish has known Dad for almost half their lives. Mamee is draped in a white sari, with a jumper pouring slowly, painfully, thread by thread from her fingers, until she suddenly gives up and lays the half-made sweater and the knitting needles to one side and sinks back into herself. The gas fire is lit and roaring and the television flickers away furiously in the corner of the room, Mamee’s glittering eyes fixed on it, laughing at the sad bits of Coronation Street since she doesn’t understand much English. I watch the TV through watching Mamee’s eyes, wondering where mum is, where Mum is, where Mum is. The phrase thuds in my heartbeat, where is mum, where is mum, where is Mum. Soon enough, though, it becomes part and parcel of myself. It becomes the ghost making my heart tick.
‘Right, everybody. Enough of gazing at the box,’ the Astrologer announces, clapping his hands together, his white moustache twitching against his brown face. ‘Let’s gaze at the stars.’ I peer through the window but can’t see any stars lurking in the muggy black sky. There is a sliver of a moon but not so much of it that you can see its full face.
Dr Ashish Kumar teaches astronomy in Jaipur as well as working as an astrologer selling readings to punters.
‘The largest sundial in the world sits in Jaipur, a city in India known as the ‘pink city’ due to the huge buildings built out of pink stone or painted pink,’ says Ashish. ‘The sundial is larger than each of you, larger than this house, and is a thing of great beauty. It has been measuring time for hundreds of years.’
Ashish tells us how he still visits sundials every single morning at sunrise when he is in India, watching the changing shapes of the shadows on the earth, potential lives and paths stretching themselves out, or shrinking and shrivelling up. He translates the patterns of light and dark into astrological readings, which he gives to his clients who pay him to see their lives mapped out before them, feeling comforted that they can at least see a shape in the great nothingness which they can then fill in; like number colouring for those fearful of the future.
‘The lines on the palm have already settled, you know, beti,’ he says to Sohni. ‘Even on a little girl like you, even on a baby still in the womb.’
Sohni stretches out her arm to him fearfully, part of her hand covered in ink smudges. I wonder if that is the part showing the path to where mum is, when she will be coming back. The heart line?
‘Hmmm – let’s see. When were you born?’
‘July,’ says my sister.
‘No, no, precise times, child, we need to know the exact precise time.’
‘24th July,’ she beams, proud that she has remembered the date, which she was always forgetting.
‘Hare Ram, child, we need to know the exact second the clock struck, to be able to trace the way the sun was falling, what planets were colliding, exactly where the light and darkness was and where the darkness and the light will be. Accha? How will we know that unless we have that time at our fingertips? Prem! Don’t worry, Sohni, your dad will know. Prem.’
He beckons to dad who is sitting with his new girlfriend Juana on the sofa. I can see their fingers touching, their eyes deep into each other. Mamee seems totally oblivious to it though, as if she has purposely switched off her sight to them, blocking out the scene as easily as switching off a television.
‘Prem, I need your help. We need this child’s birth details. I’m plotting her astrological chart.’
Dad removes his head from Juana’s shoulder and looks over to us.
‘What time was she born?’ asks Ashish the Astrologer.
‘Well, let’s see,’ says Dad, ‘sometime in the morning, I think. Or was that Roshni?’
‘What time in the morning, Prem?’
‘Just let me think …’
There is a long pause in which Ashish holds his breath.
Juana laughs. ‘Hey, Prem, just tell them the truth, you weren’t even there,’ she giggles. ‘Let me guess where you were, playing cricket?’
Dad chuckles too.
‘No, no. Sushanti had gallstones at the time. She was so fat, you see.’
He starts laughing and Juana is laughing too, their laughter falling into each other.
‘No wonder she had gallstones when she was fat as a balloon. Stuffing herself with so much food all the time. Eating and making herself sick and eating again. Crazy woman she was.’
Why was he talking about my Mum in the past tense and was it really her he was talking about? She wasn’t fat at all, the mum I knew. And what were gull stones? I imagine a flock of gulls with precious stones in their beaks, delivering them to Mum. I wonder if she ate them all by accident and it is that which made her fat and heavy.
‘Anyway, yar, she had gallstones so was in hospital for weeks,’ continues Dad. ‘Roshni might never have been born as it was touch and go for much of time. We didn’t know if she’d pull through. The stones were shifting the baby out of place. So anyway, I couldn’t be there all the time, not all the time. Someone had to work and make the money. It doesn’t make itself. Not money. Not time. But you have some of the story.’
Ashish the Astrologer shakes his head looking very perplexed.
‘You should know, Prem, what a travesty that is in India, not to know the exact time of your child’s birth. How is she ever going to be able to plan her life now?’ he asks, voice rising to near hysteria. ‘Hare Ram, how is she going to be able to live?’
‘Look, I’ve told you what I know of the story,’ says Dad. ‘You must be able to give her something to go on from that.’
Next it is time for me to have my palm read and I tell Ashish the Astrologer my birth date as we gaze down at my palm. It is the first time I have ever inspected my palm in such detail and I am shocked to see such an intricacy of paths overlapping and colliding and forking out, and crisscrossing. Along with the little lines and the great swerving lines, there are concentric circles, like the bark of a tree and the veins of a leaf. Could the course of my whole life really lie in these strange etchings?
‘Hmmm, let’s see. Oh, the lifeline starts off very, very strong, but then, Hare Ram, there is a great rupture in it just here,’ he crinkles up his brow, tutting. ‘Some accident or misfortune.’
‘Well, let’s see, what else? You know you are on the cusp of birth signs? Fire and Water. Whatever you do, just be careful not to burn yourself out, yar? Balance the water and the fire.’
How could a person burn themselves out? I was not allowed to play with fire and the only water I knew was from the tap.
‘If there is any way to delay that great rupture, listen carefully to the stories your grandmother is telling you. Learn from the lessons of the Ramayana,’ he says, holding up a copy of the book which...
