A Creative Interlude
Postponing Hope
It has been quite a week
This week was an emotionally heavy one for me. I saw my oncologist on Tuesday for my latest cancer test results. The good news is that the blood marker test showed no sign of my cancer kicking off yet. It is sitting at a very healthy 6.
During treatment I remember my oncologist telling me my number had reduced to 66, which was still too high but an improvement. I asked her if my cancer was demonic. She paused, thought about it, and answered that it often felt like it might be. We laughed. I like it when my marker comes back as 6, as it reminds me of that moment of bonding. She’d been quite serious until that point, but after that we had a jokier relationship. Which is the way I like it. She has retired now. I never got to tell her how grateful I was for everything she did for me. Not just the joking, but the fighting to get me life-extending surgery. Never put off telling people when you are grateful for them.
But I digress.
Again.
Dear new subscribers, I apologise.
You will come to learn that I am the queen of tangents.
If you decide to stick around that is 😂
Postponing hope
I had been planning to share an article about hope this week. But I struggled to focus. The fatigue, after getting my good news, hit me like a brick wall. I could get angry with myself, but instead I’m choosing grace. I have carried a lot of fear this week. It surfaces before getting test results. You’ll often hear cancer patients talking about scanxiety. Mine was extra high, because I have been having worrying symptoms. And despite the excellent blood marker results, we are following up with a CT scan, to be safe. But with my marker at 6, odds are I am fine. I appreciate the abundance of caution though, it is reassuring.
Last night, I finally had the energy to sit down to write about hope, but the subject just kept getting bigger. So many brilliant minds have focused on the topic. I was not going to do it justice if I rushed it. Plus, it is such a beautiful subject to delve into, I wanted to give myself more time with it. So I will be writing about hope in June - because next week I’ll be publishing part 2 in my living well after redundancy series.
Creative writing
Those who know me well know that I have been working on a novel for far too long. I admit that that sounds judgmental, but I really do need to just get out of my own way and finish editing it already. I know what I need to do, but it can feel overwhelming. Particularly with a brain that needs regular rest to function.
Strangely my research on hope has helped focus my mind and fueled my determination to get the editing done. And I do think that any writing, whether it is these articles, my short stories or my baggy beast of a book, is helping me develop my craft and my voice.
I am a big fan of productive procrastination. Many of my fellow writers will be familiar with this flavour of procrastination. It is when we do an excessive amount of creative writing courses or story research. Things that swirl around the edges of the job itself, writing the damn story. Creative writing courses and research are both useful things. It is when you persistently do them instead of the book writing, that it becomes problematic.
I love being in a room with other writers. We do the same writing exercises with such diverse results, it restores my faith in humanity. What glorious oddities we all are. How different but quirky our perspectives. The picture above is of Lumb Bank, the former home of Ted Hughes, and now an Arvon Foundation property. In November 2021 I was there on a gothic fiction course. Was I productively procrastinating? Possibly. Was it wonderfully inspiring? Very much so. I wrote the first draft of a short story there, that has since evolved.
Last year I signed up to do a 3 session creative writing course as part of the Wimbledon Book Festival. Sitting in my local library with fellow writers felt like a beautiful kind of therapy. I enjoyed it so much, I signed up again this year. My final session is tomorrow morning. I’ve prepared an auto-biographical piece as that was the homework, but I’m not sure I’ll share it. It carries a lot of the heaviness of this week. Fortunately, sharing is optional. Writing it was the important thing.
Taking part in the creative writing classes means we can submit short pieces for the annual Merton Writers Anthology that is sold at the festival. Although, as we discovered, it is very hard to buy if you aren’t attending the events. That Gothic piece that started life in Lumb Bank, Yorkshire in November 2021, I trimmed it down to under 1,000 words and it was published as the penultimate story in this anthology. The piece is called “In Memoriam” and as so many people I know struggled to get hold of a copy of it (so sweet that you tried), I thought I’d take the opportunity to publish it here. Enjoy.
In Memoriam
A short story by Stephanie Ressort
Cassandra scuttled through the half-moon light. Colours twisted and distorted where the ceaseless drizzle was illuminated by the cautious sweep of car headlights.
She was heading to the solitude of home, a welcome escape from the isolation of an unfriendly workplace. She knew her boss was under pressure to get rid of her. Petitions had been signed, but she was their most productive accountant. Challenged to give examples of fireable transgressions, her colleagues failed. They couldn’t identify the source of their unease. “She’s quiet and creepy” didn’t cut it, even if the head of HR was the first to complain about her down the pub.
Cassandra had always had this effect. Her school years’ brutal lessons in the loneliness of crowds. Maybe if she had made just one friend, or had had warmer parents, she would be different now, but instead she’d learned not to seek comfort in the people around her.
As she passed the war memorial, she paused, her attention drawn to a beautiful bouquet of flowers placed in tribute to the long dead men of the city. Their bones feeding foreign soil. Their dust playing in the winds of distant places. Cassandra bit her lower lip. Would it be so bad? With quick sharp short steps, she swept up the flowers before scuttling on her way.
“Oi, you can’t take those” an elderly woman’s outraged cry bounced harmlessly off Cassandra’s back. Her mind already elsewhere.
She put the flowers in her only vase, her prize possession. Curvaceous, colourful, and expensive, she’d been drawn to it, her opposite. This vase could brighten any room, and the flowers would be happier here. Flowers wanted attention, not to wither away, thirsty and neglected on a stone edifice. Their imagined gratitude was clear to Cassandra.
“You’re welcome” she told them as she popped two slices of frozen bread into the toaster to go with her cream of tomato soup.
That night as she lay in her bed, her old friend insomnia came to play. Together they’d memorized the topography of her bedroom ceiling. A map of nothing going nowhere. As the night started to thin, she had a creeping awareness of whispering downstairs punctuated by the scrape of a kitchen chair. She glanced at her reliable radio alarm clock. 04:04, an antisocial time for visitors.
She slipped her feet into her well-worn blue slippers and shrugged on her tattered grey dressing gown. Tiptoeing towards the top of the staircase the sound of whispers became more distinct.
“Where the fuck are we?” a male voice asked before being shushed by unseen companions. “Why are we whispering?” he wailed.
Clasping her dressing gown close to her chest, Cassandra crept down the stairs. Her kitchen door was ajar; she nudged it open wider. It creaked. She froze on the threshold. Soldiers filled the room. Too many for the space, they spilled out of every corner. The one closest to her had only half a face, he was watching her with his one remaining eye. The others ignored her, continuing to murmur and whisper, jostling each other with affectionate familiarity.
Clearing her throat, Cassandra said “hello.”
Silence.
All eyes turned her way.
“She can see us!” a young red head exclaimed, a void where the back of his head should be.
“No shit Sherlock” was the gruff reply from a reclining adonis, he was beauty from the waist up, pure butchery below.
“You’re in my kitchen” Cassandra explained. She stifled a shiver, but an insistent draft kept creeping up her spine. Looking behind her she realised a cheeky youth, his face twisted with concentration, was trying to stroke her back. “Stop that” she snapped. He stepped away with a smirk. He looked all of 18, it really wasn’t dignified. “I’m old enough to be your mother!”
Even as the words left her lips, she knew it was a stupid thing to say. What was age to a ghost? But she’d never been good with crowds, and the attention was making her nervous.
Silence was replaced with laughter. They started talking at once, to each other, to her. A cacophony of voices with none willing to yield space. Boisterous in their excitement at being heard by the living.
“If you could keep it down, I need to get some sleep,” Cassandra’s words barely made it through the noise to her own ears.
“I said please be quiet!” Louder but still inadequate.
She watched two soldiers pool resources to push her only photo of her parents off the mantelpiece. The sound of broken glass and a cracked frame barely audible over the general brouhaha. That was the final straw.
Cassandra fought her revulsion and waded through the gory assembly of ghosts to the flowers displayed on the kitchen table. Ignoring attempts to engage her in conversation she opened the window, throwing the glorious blooms out before firmly closing the window, bolting it shut against the cold night air.
“Shit!” she heard a soldier exclaim, as they were violently expelled from her house and onto the wet pavement outside. She could hear their grumbles of dissatisfaction, mercifully muffled by her double-glazing.
It might be considered rude to invite people over only to throw them out, but she needed to be fresh for work. She should have known better than to take flowers home on a weeknight, and the war memorial was a mistake she would not be repeating. How was she to know they would arrive so late, in such large numbers, and so attached to the brutality of their deaths? To manifest in such horrific ways was quite unnecessary.
Sighing she headed back to bed, although she doubted sleep would come. She comforted herself with the realisation it was nearing the end of the month. Old Mrs Nesbitt’s son would be visiting her grave at the weekend. It had been a while since Cassandra had had her over. She just hoped he remembered to bring flowers. Sometimes he forgot.
A thank you gift
As is customary here in A Life Quixotic, I share a gift for those who read to the end. Usually a picture of one of my cats. Today, I thought I’d shake things up by sharing a picture of Bo, my lovely Mum’s cat. She is the sweetest, friendliest girl, unlike my aloof beasties.
All of my content is free until it is archived, as I want to make my content accessible to anyone who needs it. I’ve set up the paid subscriber option, as there are people who want to support me (mainly friends and family) but they know that I struggle to accept their financial help. This way I can persuade myself I’ve earned it. Should my paid subscribers expand beyond this niche group, I will explore additional benefits I can offer those who pay to support A Life Quixotic. They will, of course, have input into what shape that might take.