LOST IN WORDS
Results and judge's report
Results and judge's report
The inaugural Lost In Words Short Fiction Competition received a total of 150 submissions from 15 countries, a fascinating cross section of work from writers all around the world.
Here are our top picks:
Here are our top picks:
WINNER
The Right Eye, Kate Pozzobon, Australia
RUNNER UP
The Beard, Ron Elisha, Australia
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Call In The Night, Seth Freeman, USA
Jump, Danh Chantachak, Australia
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Begins, Stephen Sewell, Australia
Born Thrawn, Sue Rabbitt Roff, United Kingdom
Flame, Richard Gotti, United States
Maria, I wrote y(our) story, Miranda Saucedo Sanchez, Mexico
No Dogs, Stephen Sewell, Australia
Seduction, Carole Kelly, Australia
SHORTLISTED
A Time Beyond Forgetting, Lynn Fowler, Australia
A touch too much, Harry Colfer, Australia
Aspirations, Jo Mularczyk, Australia
Catherine after the Calamity, Deborah Mulhall, Australia
Damien, Ron Elisha, Australia
Days We Kept, Joshua Potts, UK
Discoveries in the Cosmic Underground, Bria McCarthy, Australia
Flawless, Hayley Young, Australia
Hideous Creatures, David Payne, Australia
Kevin's Performace Review , Allan west, Australia
Lonely Bites, Albert Jamae, Australia
Mad World, Geetanjali Sharma, Australia
My Bloody Pearls, Grant J Venables, Malaysia
One Mo Reason, Erika MacNeil, Canada
Reunion, Erika MacNeil, Canada
Ribbon and Color, Nate Zahn, United States
Santa's Gift, Robert Ballinger, Australia
Squeaking In Tums, Cerise de Gelder, Australia
The Daughter, Bara Swain, USA
The Lucky Ones, Indah Da Silva, Australia
The Thousandth Prospect, Warren Paul Glover, Australia
Trolley Man, John Carvan, Australia
The Right Eye, Kate Pozzobon, Australia
RUNNER UP
The Beard, Ron Elisha, Australia
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Call In The Night, Seth Freeman, USA
Jump, Danh Chantachak, Australia
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Begins, Stephen Sewell, Australia
Born Thrawn, Sue Rabbitt Roff, United Kingdom
Flame, Richard Gotti, United States
Maria, I wrote y(our) story, Miranda Saucedo Sanchez, Mexico
No Dogs, Stephen Sewell, Australia
Seduction, Carole Kelly, Australia
SHORTLISTED
A Time Beyond Forgetting, Lynn Fowler, Australia
A touch too much, Harry Colfer, Australia
Aspirations, Jo Mularczyk, Australia
Catherine after the Calamity, Deborah Mulhall, Australia
Damien, Ron Elisha, Australia
Days We Kept, Joshua Potts, UK
Discoveries in the Cosmic Underground, Bria McCarthy, Australia
Flawless, Hayley Young, Australia
Hideous Creatures, David Payne, Australia
Kevin's Performace Review , Allan west, Australia
Lonely Bites, Albert Jamae, Australia
Mad World, Geetanjali Sharma, Australia
My Bloody Pearls, Grant J Venables, Malaysia
One Mo Reason, Erika MacNeil, Canada
Reunion, Erika MacNeil, Canada
Ribbon and Color, Nate Zahn, United States
Santa's Gift, Robert Ballinger, Australia
Squeaking In Tums, Cerise de Gelder, Australia
The Daughter, Bara Swain, USA
The Lucky Ones, Indah Da Silva, Australia
The Thousandth Prospect, Warren Paul Glover, Australia
Trolley Man, John Carvan, Australia
Judge's report — Pete Malicki
Over the past six weeks, the spaces in my life have been filled with stories from 104 international writers. I've been reading through them in the morning, the evening, during meals, sitting on the train, while taking breaks from work, etc. Many I read twice, some even three times.
I firstly want to thank and commend all of the entrants for "turning up". Creative pursuits are often quite personal and many writers find it intimidating to share their work. It was fun to read your stories, especially those which were excellently crafted and those which made me jealous I didn't write them myself (you bastards!).
Weirdly, some of the best stories were also the darkest. Murderous nutcases, child abuse, assassinations, war, senseless death. I don't know why these awful topics correlated with quality writing, but they did. Thankfully, there were some sweet, poignant and poetic stories among the top pieces as well.
I want to specifically call out five of the entrants.
Kate Pozzobon was my choice of winner, responsible for The Right Eye. This was one of the darkest submissions we received, but the writing is next level. A man – a father – is abducting and butchering young women to "fix their sin". It's written from the perspective of his daughter, who sees her father and his horrific actions as he likely perceives them himself: "He’s real caring, my daddy. Loves to help out where he can. And once those ladies were all fixed up he let them go on their way." It shows the bridge between reality and reality according to the character, and in much the same way that a kid's movie like Shrek works on different levels for children and adults, it tells the story in such a way that you can concurrently see it from both an abnormal (the child's) and a normal (your own) perspective. Fantastic reveal at the end, too, which packs a punch even if you saw it coming.
My runner up was The Beard by Ron Elisha, a fun, absurdist piece about a man whose life is transformed after he shaves off his facial hair. It's quick-paced and delightfully written, where the main character always seems to be a little baffled and one step behind but the author pulls you along with him. Ron's turn of phrase is spectacular, with gems such as, "...he managed to elicit a smile from the woman behind the counter who, in all his previous encounters with her over the years, had given him every reason to believe that her face was entirely devoid of musculature", and "Men smiled that smile they smile when they think they might have a chance, women whispered the whispers they whisper when they see their men smile that smile."
Two stories received a Highly Commended award. Danh Chantachak's Jump was certainly the most wholesome of my top picks, telling the story of a man's marriage to his bungee-jumping instructor. It's touching, relatable and poignant, tackling clichéd topics like love and death in a fresh and natural manner.
Also Highly Commended was Seth Freeman's Call In The Night, a nice character piece about a chance encounter and its lasting impact. I loved its moody and nocturnal tone and enjoyed a depth that belied its simple and linear plot. Its ending – the character's ambivalence between the life he might have had and the fantasy he knew it all to be – evokes a lot of reflection.
I also wanted to call out Stephen Sewell, the only writer to have two stories receive commendations, with his pieces No Dogs and Begins. Having two in the top 10 given there were 150 entries is quite the achievement. Both stories are expertly written, thought-provoking and quickly create a colourful slice of life where the reader can see into the world well beyond the events described.
Congrats to these writers and all the others who received honorable mentions or made the shortlist.
It's worth taking a moment to reflect on where the writers could improve. Here are a few key areas I'd like to call out:
I firstly want to thank and commend all of the entrants for "turning up". Creative pursuits are often quite personal and many writers find it intimidating to share their work. It was fun to read your stories, especially those which were excellently crafted and those which made me jealous I didn't write them myself (you bastards!).
Weirdly, some of the best stories were also the darkest. Murderous nutcases, child abuse, assassinations, war, senseless death. I don't know why these awful topics correlated with quality writing, but they did. Thankfully, there were some sweet, poignant and poetic stories among the top pieces as well.
I want to specifically call out five of the entrants.
Kate Pozzobon was my choice of winner, responsible for The Right Eye. This was one of the darkest submissions we received, but the writing is next level. A man – a father – is abducting and butchering young women to "fix their sin". It's written from the perspective of his daughter, who sees her father and his horrific actions as he likely perceives them himself: "He’s real caring, my daddy. Loves to help out where he can. And once those ladies were all fixed up he let them go on their way." It shows the bridge between reality and reality according to the character, and in much the same way that a kid's movie like Shrek works on different levels for children and adults, it tells the story in such a way that you can concurrently see it from both an abnormal (the child's) and a normal (your own) perspective. Fantastic reveal at the end, too, which packs a punch even if you saw it coming.
My runner up was The Beard by Ron Elisha, a fun, absurdist piece about a man whose life is transformed after he shaves off his facial hair. It's quick-paced and delightfully written, where the main character always seems to be a little baffled and one step behind but the author pulls you along with him. Ron's turn of phrase is spectacular, with gems such as, "...he managed to elicit a smile from the woman behind the counter who, in all his previous encounters with her over the years, had given him every reason to believe that her face was entirely devoid of musculature", and "Men smiled that smile they smile when they think they might have a chance, women whispered the whispers they whisper when they see their men smile that smile."
Two stories received a Highly Commended award. Danh Chantachak's Jump was certainly the most wholesome of my top picks, telling the story of a man's marriage to his bungee-jumping instructor. It's touching, relatable and poignant, tackling clichéd topics like love and death in a fresh and natural manner.
Also Highly Commended was Seth Freeman's Call In The Night, a nice character piece about a chance encounter and its lasting impact. I loved its moody and nocturnal tone and enjoyed a depth that belied its simple and linear plot. Its ending – the character's ambivalence between the life he might have had and the fantasy he knew it all to be – evokes a lot of reflection.
I also wanted to call out Stephen Sewell, the only writer to have two stories receive commendations, with his pieces No Dogs and Begins. Having two in the top 10 given there were 150 entries is quite the achievement. Both stories are expertly written, thought-provoking and quickly create a colourful slice of life where the reader can see into the world well beyond the events described.
Congrats to these writers and all the others who received honorable mentions or made the shortlist.
It's worth taking a moment to reflect on where the writers could improve. Here are a few key areas I'd like to call out:
- The basics. Many stories, including some of the top ones, had quite a number of issues with spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG). I found this quite jarring, given how rare it is to find such errors in published work. Many of you need to proofread your work better, or better understand things like dangling modifiers or how to punctuate a subclause. For better or for worse, good SPaG is valued by the writing industry so you should get it right. Also, some stories switched between past tense and present tense, which is not ideal.
- Be an expert on what you write about. Many writers like to write about a wide range of things, which often puts us in unfamiliar territory. It's easy to forget that what's unfamiliar to us is everyday for at least some of our readers. If you want to write about information technology, you need to thoroughly understand it. If you want your protagonist to be a teenager in 2022, you have to understand the language used by and the mindset of teenagers in 2022. I've worked in IT and found myself wincing at some of the descriptions of characters doing mystical things on their computers, and I probably only know a third of the lingo used by teenagers today but could see that one or two authors know a third as much as me. People will notice when you don't know what you're talking about. Do the research. Put the work in to get it right.
- Descriptive writing is often worse. I work with a team of assessors on another project involving short fiction and one of the most common things we see in our low-rated work is an overuse of descriptive language. This is something that less experienced writers think adds colour, interest and sophistication to their writing, but (bluntly) it usually doesn't. Consider what details are actually important to the story. If your character is "stifled by the sweltering heat", do we need to know that "the blazing sun seared a deepening hole through helpless grey clouds and thrust its burning rays upon the earth" as well? We already get it: it's very hot. And yes, there might be a reason to drill this particular point in, but if everything's described in this much detail then you're probably using three times the requisite number of words to get your point across. It gets a bit much.
Thank you once again to the many writers who shared their work with me and the Lost In Words team. Congratulations to those made the shortlist or beyond, and kudos to Kate Pozzobon for her excellent winning piece The Right Eye.
We've included the winner, runner up and highly commended stories below and I'd encourage you to give them a read. Hopefully you enjoy them even half as much as I did.
LOST IN WORDS 2022 — WINNER
The Right Eye
by Kate Pozzobon, Australia
by Kate Pozzobon, Australia
Daddy knows how to save your soul.
Knows when your blood is tainted and your organs are sticky tar. I’ve seen it. My own two brown eyes. He got me to come in and watch. Knife digging into this girl who screamed and screamed and screamed but it was for her own good.
“Come here,” Daddy barked, rough and gruff man he was. He’d let his beard grow out and it gave him an extra wild appearance. Like those men on the news who get lost and, when they’re found, their eyes are big like dinner plates and their beard hair is down to their chest.
I went to him, moved my hands where he placed them. Right on that girl’s face. She had such pretty hair, like Goldilocks or Rapunzel. I patted it and patted it as tears ran upwards from her eyes to make the hair wet, messy. Black from the eye makeup she had slathered on.
“Daddy,” I said, once her screams had grown quieter, little whimpers and hiccups and pleads, “can I have her hair?”
He didn’t say anything, but once it was all done (so much blood, so many more screams), he took the knife higher and cut the hair right off her skull.
“Thank you,” I said, eyes as wide as those missing men. It was beautiful, even with the rivulets of red twisting in its locks.
::
A soul is such a precious thing. It makes you who you are. Daddy says our body is important, too, with housing our soul. He says that we were given the exact bodies we need except, sometimes, the rest of the world corrupts some part and it’s better to fix it all up.
I don’t know how he started on all this. Only that I found out long after Mama had left. Stolen into the night, Daddy said, and for a long time I feared and hated the night sky for just that. I was a very literal child. Took the idea that it was the black inky horizon and the twinkling stars that stole my mother. Dragged her up to Heaven even though it was me who needed her most. Not some being who could make another soul with the blink of an eye.
Then, some time and many nightmares after that, Daddy went out. I was terrified. It was daytime, bright, and I thought it was the sun’s turn to steal my parent. Made an orphan by the biggest thing on Earth. Then what would be next? Earth swallowing me whole? I’d seen that on TV, too. Roads cracking open like a chocolate egg at Easter, taking into its gaping maw cars and bikes and street lamps and whole skyscrapers with their glass windows and wooden floors.
People, too, I was sure, but they didn’t show that on the 5 o’clock news.
When Daddy came back it was night again. I sat in the lounge room, a bundled ball next to the couch. So scared I had been crying and my nose was all snotty and I couldn’t find the tissues to clean it away.
There was a noise. A really loud thump. I jumped with it, curled up tighter on myself, a fresh round of tears prickling my eyes and nose in that way that makes you want to squeeze your face up real tight to keep it all contained.
Then Daddy was opening the door and, thrown over his shoulder, was a lady.
“Daddy?” I said, a whisper, when I’d found my voice. It was all croaky and far away but I knew he heard me because he looked me right in the eye.
“Thought you’d be in bed,” he said, but he wasn’t angry. More surprised. Except nobody could be as surprised as me on this day to see my Daddy and a lady and the darkness trying to claw its way through the open door.
“Shut the door,” I said next, and he did.
He took that lady into the kitchen and I was sure she had to be dead. All limp, floppy, a doll rather than a human being. Our kitchen table was clean. Always. It was something Daddy was very fastidious about even if the rest of our benches were covered in all sorts of clutter: mail from the last months, half empty cereal boxes, tv guides, old plates neither of us got around to washing. All this and more but that table was fresh, clean, dusted every night.
Now I knew why.
He lay her down gentle like he’d lay me down for bed when I was a little girl. Sit at the end and read me a story from my whole shelf of fairytales.
My favourite was always the old rendition of Cinderella. He got it from trash n treasure before I was even born. Said he knew one day he’d have a little princess of his own.
Once she was lying there I could see her proper. She was older than me, but not as old as Mama. Twenty, maybe. Thirty. She had long blonde hair and real pale skin and lips.
“Is she—”
“She’s alive,” Daddy said, walking into the kitchen proper. He started crashing and bashing around in the drawers and I was sure the lady would wake up if she was just asleep but instead she stayed there all slack limbed and ghost lipped.
I reached out, touched her arm. It was like ice and I shrunk back.
“She’s all wrong,” Daddy said from the kitchen, “we need to fix that.”
Then he came back with a big knife and I learnt what it was all about.
::
Daddy says he was born with this ability, he just had to find it. The first time he ever took a lady (and it’s almost always ladies, he says, but doesn’t explain why) he could see the muck and sin coursing through her veins. The first lady had an arm that was sick, so he brought her home back when he lived with Grandy and Grams, and chopped it off.
Then there was the problem of her having no arm. Luckily his powers meant he could stop the bleeding and give himself time. He went looking, and he found another lady. This one had sin of the eyes but not the arm so he swapped them out. A new arm, a new set of eyes.
He’s real caring, my daddy. Loves to help out where he can. And once those ladies were all fixed up he let them go on their way.
“You can’t keep people trapped,” he said to me after that first lady I saw, “nobody is Rapunzel in a tower.”
I like how he told things as fairytales, I liked how he helped me understand.
So once all was said and done he would let them go. Slung over his shoulder again, put into his car, taken to wherever he found them.
Once he moved in with Mama it stopped for a while. He said, later, she stopped the powers. Put some sort of block over him so all he could see was her and me and there was no sin.
At least not until Mama was the sin.
::
This next one looks different than the usual. Most of these women are fairytale princesses. Long hair, lots of makeup, big eyes that stare up into your soul (trying to steal it, Daddy says, since their own is so corrupted and aching).
This one, though, she’s got short black hair and real thin lips and she wakes up before Daddy even gets her on the table. Eyes fluttering open, closed, open instead of terrifyingly wide.
Once she’s down on the table she tries to fight before Daddy can get started. Arm rising, fist swinging, hits the side of his face slow and clumsy but Daddy still stumbles a few steps. I rush over.
She looks at me. Looks into me. It’s scary, this one. The way it makes my heart drop all the way into the acid of my stomach. I think I’m going to vomit, to scream, and Daddy’s back solid and coming over. Got a big needle like the one the doctors gave me one time but he shoves it into her neck instead of her thigh as she writhes to get away.
“This isn’t right,” she says, fighting against the things Daddy gives her, “sweetie, this is wrong.”
Something happens that never happens. Daddy has to use his fists. Does what she did but ten times harder. Her head rocks back, a sound like a nut cracking as it hits the wood of the table. It’s solid, Daddy always said, made by his Grandaddy’s granddaddy. So, so old. Soaked with so, so much blood.
“You be quiet!” Daddy says, the he starts reciting from the Bible.
A verse from Matthew. One he made me memorise when I was a tiny girl. I mouth the words along with him as I look at the girl on the table. Watch her eyes slowly come back to this world. I always wonder, when they’re sleeping like this, if they get to see some of Heaven. If they talk to God, thank Him for sending Daddy to fix their sins.
She’s back again, awake again, and she starts talking over Daddy’s talking. It’s such a jumble I can’t understand and I cover my ears. Want to scream to drown them both out.
She’s fighting, struggling. Working against that needle, the one that usually makes them sleepy and floppy. Arms and legs in all directions, one gets Dad in the stomach and he stops speaking. Back hits the table. I keep my ears covered.
“Daddy?” I say, “Daddy?”
He couldn’t fix this one.
He says he’ll get it right with the next.
::
Daddy says I wasn’t born with this ability because I was born wrong. Says it had something to do with Mama, what she did while I was growing in her belly.
But he fixed me. Because he loves me.
I’m made of crosswork stitches and other people’s blood. Perfect, perfect, perfect doll he says. And if anything else needs replacing, Daddy knows just how to do it.
Knows when your blood is tainted and your organs are sticky tar. I’ve seen it. My own two brown eyes. He got me to come in and watch. Knife digging into this girl who screamed and screamed and screamed but it was for her own good.
“Come here,” Daddy barked, rough and gruff man he was. He’d let his beard grow out and it gave him an extra wild appearance. Like those men on the news who get lost and, when they’re found, their eyes are big like dinner plates and their beard hair is down to their chest.
I went to him, moved my hands where he placed them. Right on that girl’s face. She had such pretty hair, like Goldilocks or Rapunzel. I patted it and patted it as tears ran upwards from her eyes to make the hair wet, messy. Black from the eye makeup she had slathered on.
“Daddy,” I said, once her screams had grown quieter, little whimpers and hiccups and pleads, “can I have her hair?”
He didn’t say anything, but once it was all done (so much blood, so many more screams), he took the knife higher and cut the hair right off her skull.
“Thank you,” I said, eyes as wide as those missing men. It was beautiful, even with the rivulets of red twisting in its locks.
::
A soul is such a precious thing. It makes you who you are. Daddy says our body is important, too, with housing our soul. He says that we were given the exact bodies we need except, sometimes, the rest of the world corrupts some part and it’s better to fix it all up.
I don’t know how he started on all this. Only that I found out long after Mama had left. Stolen into the night, Daddy said, and for a long time I feared and hated the night sky for just that. I was a very literal child. Took the idea that it was the black inky horizon and the twinkling stars that stole my mother. Dragged her up to Heaven even though it was me who needed her most. Not some being who could make another soul with the blink of an eye.
Then, some time and many nightmares after that, Daddy went out. I was terrified. It was daytime, bright, and I thought it was the sun’s turn to steal my parent. Made an orphan by the biggest thing on Earth. Then what would be next? Earth swallowing me whole? I’d seen that on TV, too. Roads cracking open like a chocolate egg at Easter, taking into its gaping maw cars and bikes and street lamps and whole skyscrapers with their glass windows and wooden floors.
People, too, I was sure, but they didn’t show that on the 5 o’clock news.
When Daddy came back it was night again. I sat in the lounge room, a bundled ball next to the couch. So scared I had been crying and my nose was all snotty and I couldn’t find the tissues to clean it away.
There was a noise. A really loud thump. I jumped with it, curled up tighter on myself, a fresh round of tears prickling my eyes and nose in that way that makes you want to squeeze your face up real tight to keep it all contained.
Then Daddy was opening the door and, thrown over his shoulder, was a lady.
“Daddy?” I said, a whisper, when I’d found my voice. It was all croaky and far away but I knew he heard me because he looked me right in the eye.
“Thought you’d be in bed,” he said, but he wasn’t angry. More surprised. Except nobody could be as surprised as me on this day to see my Daddy and a lady and the darkness trying to claw its way through the open door.
“Shut the door,” I said next, and he did.
He took that lady into the kitchen and I was sure she had to be dead. All limp, floppy, a doll rather than a human being. Our kitchen table was clean. Always. It was something Daddy was very fastidious about even if the rest of our benches were covered in all sorts of clutter: mail from the last months, half empty cereal boxes, tv guides, old plates neither of us got around to washing. All this and more but that table was fresh, clean, dusted every night.
Now I knew why.
He lay her down gentle like he’d lay me down for bed when I was a little girl. Sit at the end and read me a story from my whole shelf of fairytales.
My favourite was always the old rendition of Cinderella. He got it from trash n treasure before I was even born. Said he knew one day he’d have a little princess of his own.
Once she was lying there I could see her proper. She was older than me, but not as old as Mama. Twenty, maybe. Thirty. She had long blonde hair and real pale skin and lips.
“Is she—”
“She’s alive,” Daddy said, walking into the kitchen proper. He started crashing and bashing around in the drawers and I was sure the lady would wake up if she was just asleep but instead she stayed there all slack limbed and ghost lipped.
I reached out, touched her arm. It was like ice and I shrunk back.
“She’s all wrong,” Daddy said from the kitchen, “we need to fix that.”
Then he came back with a big knife and I learnt what it was all about.
::
Daddy says he was born with this ability, he just had to find it. The first time he ever took a lady (and it’s almost always ladies, he says, but doesn’t explain why) he could see the muck and sin coursing through her veins. The first lady had an arm that was sick, so he brought her home back when he lived with Grandy and Grams, and chopped it off.
Then there was the problem of her having no arm. Luckily his powers meant he could stop the bleeding and give himself time. He went looking, and he found another lady. This one had sin of the eyes but not the arm so he swapped them out. A new arm, a new set of eyes.
He’s real caring, my daddy. Loves to help out where he can. And once those ladies were all fixed up he let them go on their way.
“You can’t keep people trapped,” he said to me after that first lady I saw, “nobody is Rapunzel in a tower.”
I like how he told things as fairytales, I liked how he helped me understand.
So once all was said and done he would let them go. Slung over his shoulder again, put into his car, taken to wherever he found them.
Once he moved in with Mama it stopped for a while. He said, later, she stopped the powers. Put some sort of block over him so all he could see was her and me and there was no sin.
At least not until Mama was the sin.
::
This next one looks different than the usual. Most of these women are fairytale princesses. Long hair, lots of makeup, big eyes that stare up into your soul (trying to steal it, Daddy says, since their own is so corrupted and aching).
This one, though, she’s got short black hair and real thin lips and she wakes up before Daddy even gets her on the table. Eyes fluttering open, closed, open instead of terrifyingly wide.
Once she’s down on the table she tries to fight before Daddy can get started. Arm rising, fist swinging, hits the side of his face slow and clumsy but Daddy still stumbles a few steps. I rush over.
She looks at me. Looks into me. It’s scary, this one. The way it makes my heart drop all the way into the acid of my stomach. I think I’m going to vomit, to scream, and Daddy’s back solid and coming over. Got a big needle like the one the doctors gave me one time but he shoves it into her neck instead of her thigh as she writhes to get away.
“This isn’t right,” she says, fighting against the things Daddy gives her, “sweetie, this is wrong.”
Something happens that never happens. Daddy has to use his fists. Does what she did but ten times harder. Her head rocks back, a sound like a nut cracking as it hits the wood of the table. It’s solid, Daddy always said, made by his Grandaddy’s granddaddy. So, so old. Soaked with so, so much blood.
“You be quiet!” Daddy says, the he starts reciting from the Bible.
A verse from Matthew. One he made me memorise when I was a tiny girl. I mouth the words along with him as I look at the girl on the table. Watch her eyes slowly come back to this world. I always wonder, when they’re sleeping like this, if they get to see some of Heaven. If they talk to God, thank Him for sending Daddy to fix their sins.
She’s back again, awake again, and she starts talking over Daddy’s talking. It’s such a jumble I can’t understand and I cover my ears. Want to scream to drown them both out.
She’s fighting, struggling. Working against that needle, the one that usually makes them sleepy and floppy. Arms and legs in all directions, one gets Dad in the stomach and he stops speaking. Back hits the table. I keep my ears covered.
“Daddy?” I say, “Daddy?”
He couldn’t fix this one.
He says he’ll get it right with the next.
::
Daddy says I wasn’t born with this ability because I was born wrong. Says it had something to do with Mama, what she did while I was growing in her belly.
But he fixed me. Because he loves me.
I’m made of crosswork stitches and other people’s blood. Perfect, perfect, perfect doll he says. And if anything else needs replacing, Daddy knows just how to do it.
LOST IN WORDS 2022 — RUNNER UP
The Beard
by Ron Elisha, Australia
by Ron Elisha, Australia
Dmitri’s wife hated his beard.
Not that he’d sprung it on her. The beard had been in her life for as long as Dmitri himself, but it was only in more recent times that she had begun to suspect its role in holding him back.
Not that they lived badly (by Muscovite standards), but Svetlana had been persuaded by her mother that the couple’s modest comforts owed more to the seamless flair with which she practised her effortless frugality than it did to her husband’s daily exertions.
They’d met at a street-party to usher in the new millennium, at which time Dmitri had just secured a position as foreman at a local shoe factory. Twenty years on, he was still a foreman at the same factory making the same shoes his father had made at that very factory up until the day of his accident.
When Svetlana pondered her husband’s lack of advancement – which was not often, as it caused her to question the sincerity of a just and merciful God – she felt mystified. That fateful evening, at the death-knell of the 20th century, he had seemed like a man with a future.
Her mother, never one for an unfilled silence, blamed Dmitri’s height which, at just a shade over five foot six, cast a shadow barely more imposing than her own. But Svetlana, unwilling to accept the pedestrian shame of having married a man who might be described to the secret police as ‘short’, chose instead to zero in on her husband’s beard.
Not that there was anything particularly offensive about the beard itself. Placed in a roomful of bearded men – attached, of course, to its owner – it would not have attracted particular attention, either positive or negative.
To be fair, even Dmitri had never been entirely satisfied with the beard, deeming it insufficiently dense to mask the weak chin that he’d hoped to conceal within its thickets. He himself tended to avoid the term ‘weak’, but there was no getting around it – few adjectives married up quite so well with ‘chin’ as did the inevitable ‘strong’.
And so it was that Svetlana quietly launched the campaign to unbeard her husband – first with the odd aspersion (‘it’s like kissing a puppy who’s just rolled in Salat Olivier’), followed by opportunistic praise of sundry and successful bare chins (‘that Navalny – now there’s a guy who leads with his chin’) and concluding with her coup de grâce: A shaving-kit reputedly once owned by Vladimir Putin.
This last was given by way of a fifty-fifth birthday gift. And, with a brave flourish in the face of frugality, it was the very finest of shaving-kits that money could buy - with a brush of the choicest soft bristle (Asian badger from the north-west reaches of the Ural Mountains), its handle fashioned from West African ivory with a mother-of-pearl inlay and a razor that could split an infinitive (Hans Kniebes straight blade of full hollow ground carbon steel, with olivewood handle and soft, black leather pouch).
Deeply moved by his wife’s sacrifice – taking a leaf from O’Henry, she had been putting aside the money for a course of hair restoration therapy in order to salvage what remained of her own evanescent femininity – Dmitri could not but agree that the time had come to separate himself from his wispy companion of twenty years (the beard, that is, not his wife).
When the great day finally arrived – it was a Sunday morning, at eleven fifteen – Svetlana was there to immortalize the event on a Samsung smartphone that she had inherited from a friend who had backed a more successful (taller, less hirsute) spouse.
The effect was almost instantaneous. Standing in the queue to catch the bus to work the following morning, Dmitri was accosted by a tall, powerfully-built young man who shook him vigorously by the hand and congratulated him on a job well done.
His colleagues at work seemed strangely diffident, all of them fulsome in their praise of his transformation.
His boss, Sergei, a man not normally inclined towards either praise or encouragement of any kind, acknowledged his existence (for only the second time in 20 years, the first having been when his father died on the factory floor) with a laugh and a slap on the back.
Stopping off to buy cigarettes on the way home, he managed to elicit a smile from the woman behind the counter who, in all his previous encounters with her over the years, had given him every reason to believe that her face was entirely devoid of musculature. As he departed, a packet of Bonds in hand, he could’ve sworn that he caught a whiff of a curtsey.
With each day that passed, he seemed to attract more attention. Young groups of girls stopped, pointed and giggled. On the Wednesday, he was approached on three separate occasions by young men requesting selfies with him. On the Thursday, the man at the newspaper stand refused to accept money in exchange for his copy of Izvestia. That afternoon, a young woman stood up for him on the bus.
As he related these events to a vindicated though rapidly balding Svetlana, she grew increasingly hopeful of an imminent promotion at the shoe factory. On the Friday morning, she told him: ‘This is the day, Dmitri. You must speak to Sergei. He can’t possibly refuse.’
Filled with trepidation, and having fortified himself with a Monday morning shot of Zhouravli (for special occasions only), he made his way to work (the empty seat next to him on the bus being declined with a smile by all those crammed into the aisle) and climbed to the tiny office (the landing on the stairs) straddled by Sergei’s secretary, Yana.
He was about to ask if there was a time when he might speak with Sergei when she said: ‘Go right in. They’re waiting for you.’
For one, panicked moment he feared that Svetlana had called ahead in an effort to smooth his path but, with Yana’s uncharacteristic wink, he felt reassured that this was the way in which his new, clean-shaven life was now destined to unfold.
Upon entering Sergei’s office – a dim, dank cranny crammed with curling files, gum-wrappers and overflowing ashtrays – he was confronted by three large men in large suits, each man with close-cropped hair, reflective shades and an earbud attached to a black, spiral lead which disappeared inside his shirt collar. Though daunted and more than a little afraid (had it become illegal for bearded men to shave?), he mused upon the fate of the black, spiral lead once it had entered the confines of the shirt.
Shades notwithstanding, it was obvious to Dmitri that the men were taken aback and possibly even impressed at his appearance. However, almost immediately, their expressions gave way to quizzical smiles, and they exchanged presumably derisory comments in a foreign tongue.
It was made clear to Dmitri that he should accompany the men. Outside in the back lane stood a hulking, black Marussia SUV (was there a logistical reason for the blackness?) into the back seat of which he was ushered. Once settled into the embrace of the leather, he sat between two of the men and was careful not to ask any questions. One of them patted him on the thigh and smiled, as if by way of reassurance. He felt a sudden urge to empty his bowels.
After what seemed like an extraordinarily circuitous journey, the vehicle entered a darkened warehouse and stopped. Dmitri followed the men out into the gloom of a yellowed globe. Just as his eyes were adjusting to the dimness, a man emerged from the shadows.
Dmitri blinked. This was not Sergei. Nor was it any other man that he could call a friend, an enemy, an acquaintance or an informer. And yet he knew the face as well as he knew his own. It belonged to Vladimir Putin.
The eyes in the face betrayed no emotion as they ranged over his features, his frame, even his feet - Putin himself circling all the while, like a beast of prey.
Suddenly, without warning, Putin reached out and flipped (there was no other word for it) one of Dmitri’s ears, as if to assure himself that it was securely fastened. He then rubbed some of the hairs at the nape of Dmitri’s neck between his fingers, doubtless checking for cheap dye.
Seemingly satisfied, his head bobbed affirmatively. Then, and only then, did he allow the left extremity of his lips to stretch out into what a sycophant might have interpreted as a smile.
Dmitri could feel the hot lead at the base of his belly straining to squirt out onto his trouser-leg. He bit his lip, then regretted what might’ve been seen as a show of weakness.
Putin stepped up close – very close – closer than a whispering lover – and sniffed.
‘Zhouravli?’ he asked, in a voice surprisingly soft, almost commiserative.
Dmitri, paralyzed at the prospect of incontinence in front of his country’s leader, released the most miniscule of nods.
‘No more.’
Dmitri oscillated his head.
‘Cigarettes. Finished.’
Dmitri bit through his lip.
‘How tall?’
‘Five six. Just over.’ It was as if the words had issued forth from someone else’s (unpunctured) lips. The muscles around Putin’s neck relaxed somewhat.
‘How old?’
‘Fifty-five.’
The muscles relaxed still further.
‘Ever killed a bear?’
Twenty years earlier, whilst on military manoeuvres, Dmitri had been driving a truck through the Kamchatka Peninsula. Rounding a sharp bend, the truck had skidded and hit a brown bear. Dmitri had been forced to place a bullet between its eyes.
He was about to confess to this transgression (he had had no hunting license at the time) when he noticed one of the men (the driver) give the slightest warning shake of his head.
‘No,’ he lied.
Putin’s shoulders were like those of a hibernating bear, his smile bordering on the symmetrical.
With this, he gave a short, sharp nod to the driver and disappeared into the shadows.
By the Saturday, a new life had begun for Dmitri. Each day of this life began at 4 a.m. with a ten-kilometer jog, accompanied by a heavily perspiring relay of the large men with the black, spiral leads. For the first two weeks, he would collapse after the first kilometer or two, and would have to be carried the rest of the way, dry-retching and vomiting.
Breakfast, accompanied by an unbearable urge to smoke, consisted of a protein shake.
This was followed by an intensive, excruciating hour in the gym, supervised by a being whose primate ancestry left little to the imagination.
Once the nausea subsided, there was a tasteless salad and another protein shake.
The afternoons were taken up with endless fittings with a disturbingly obsequious tailor – business suits, formal wear, shirts, sporting gear, outdoor apparel – the inventory seemed endless. But nowhere near as endless as the lectures that filled the nightmarish hours until his evening gym session – a period during which a mild though distressing form of the DTs set in.
Duly medicated, he was taken through another hour in the gym, followed by a steak, a protein shake and an apple.
The evenings were consumed with such things as voice and elocution lessons, deportment and hair-dyeing, after which he was felled with a combination of exhaustion and intravenous valium.
It was some six weeks later, on a Saturday morning, when he received the visit.
The door to the gym swung open and Putin entered, strode forward and immediately encroached upon Dmitri’s personal space.
‘Exhale.’
Dmitri did.
Putin circumnavigated his clean-shaven protégé, turned to the primate, gave a short, sharp nod, delivered the same to the driver and disappeared.
That evening, after his gym session, Dmitri returned to his bedroom to find a dress-shirt and tuxedo laid out on his bed, with black, patent-leather shoes at its base. He allowed himself a smile. The shoes were from his factory. Top of the range.
No sooner had his face relaxed into a smile than there was a knock at the door. He stiffened. Visitors were unheard of and the minders never knocked.
‘Yes?’
The door opened, and he was confronted by a tall, slim, beautiful brunette in an evening gown.
‘You’re not ready yet.’ The observation had about it the air of indulgent affection.
He had seen her face. Somewhere. Television? A magazine?
‘You may call me Lubov.’
She stepped forward, regally, her hand extended. For a kiss? A handshake, perhaps?
He opted for the latter.
She smiled, as if she knew him better than that, then turned her back to him, purposefully.
Dmitri, somewhat mystified: ‘Can I.. help you?’
‘Yes. The zipper. It’s a little stiff.’
Aside from his own, the only zipper he had ever handled belonged to Svetlana. He wondered who might be entrusted with the task in his absence. He had been assured that she was kept fully informed of his whereabouts and his well-being, but such assurances invariably lacked conviction.
This woman’s back did not resemble Svetlana’s. It was smooth, tapered, young, tanned, lithe. So lithe, in fact, that he doubted the genuineness of her request for assistance. Not wishing to offend, however, he launched the zipper on the first inch of its journey.
‘Don’t stop there.’ He could sense an almost playful goading in the dark liquid of her voice.
He continued the downward trajectory of the zipper, until he could see the soft, shadowed upper reaches of her natal cleft, a pert dimple either side offering an alluring frame.
Something in him stirred. Something that hadn’t stirred in a long time.
He strove to picture Svetlana’s face as it had been when they first met.
The woman’s gown plopped lightly to the floor, with the sound of surrender. She stepped out of it, sending it scooting across the parquetry with a flick of her six-inch stiletto.
Her arms were around his neck.
He thought of his wedding day.
Her lips worked their way over his clean-shaven chin.
He thought of the sacrifice that had enabled the shaving-kit to come into his possession.
A cool hand ran down over his belly, and further.
He thought of nothing.
That evening, with this entrancing chestnut-haired enchantress on his arm and a vermilion bowtie at his throat, his member still pulsating with resurrected memory, he attended a lavish dinner in honor of the Latvian President.
He was relieved when it appeared that his dark-eyed consort was the object of most of the attention in the room. Men smiled that smile they smile when they think they might have a chance, women whispered the whispers they whisper when they see their men smile that smile, and he heard the name ‘Anna’ mentioned repeatedly.
At the end of the evening (2 a.m. when the last vodka was downed, though his was water made to impersonate vodka), he was congratulated by the driver on a job well done, then escorted back to his room.
‘We have an early start,’ said the driver as he set the alarm clock for six a.m. ‘A large car plant near the Ukranian border.’
Most of Sunday was spent in transit, Dmitri reliving the highlights of his encounter with Lubov.
In the morning paper, on page three, he read that Putin had attended a state dinner in honor of the Latvian President, the accompanying photograph showing a great deal of Lubov and very little of himself. On page five, he read that Putin had spent the evening at a fashion event in the company of an Anna Chapman, the correspondent marvelling at the leader’s energy.
On the Monday, Dmitri was assassinated.
His funeral, three days later, was a quiet affair, attended only by Svetlana, the driver, a priest and a gravedigger.
On the Friday, Svetlana posted the shaving-kit on eBay, emphasizing its provenance and posting the video of her then husband removing his beard (by way of supporting material).
She was advised to await a call from Putin.
As it happened, the call was not forthcoming, but there has since been talk of a modest pension.
Svetlana, it was reported, was hopeful that she might use a portion thereof in the pursuit of hair regrowth.
Not that he’d sprung it on her. The beard had been in her life for as long as Dmitri himself, but it was only in more recent times that she had begun to suspect its role in holding him back.
Not that they lived badly (by Muscovite standards), but Svetlana had been persuaded by her mother that the couple’s modest comforts owed more to the seamless flair with which she practised her effortless frugality than it did to her husband’s daily exertions.
They’d met at a street-party to usher in the new millennium, at which time Dmitri had just secured a position as foreman at a local shoe factory. Twenty years on, he was still a foreman at the same factory making the same shoes his father had made at that very factory up until the day of his accident.
When Svetlana pondered her husband’s lack of advancement – which was not often, as it caused her to question the sincerity of a just and merciful God – she felt mystified. That fateful evening, at the death-knell of the 20th century, he had seemed like a man with a future.
Her mother, never one for an unfilled silence, blamed Dmitri’s height which, at just a shade over five foot six, cast a shadow barely more imposing than her own. But Svetlana, unwilling to accept the pedestrian shame of having married a man who might be described to the secret police as ‘short’, chose instead to zero in on her husband’s beard.
Not that there was anything particularly offensive about the beard itself. Placed in a roomful of bearded men – attached, of course, to its owner – it would not have attracted particular attention, either positive or negative.
To be fair, even Dmitri had never been entirely satisfied with the beard, deeming it insufficiently dense to mask the weak chin that he’d hoped to conceal within its thickets. He himself tended to avoid the term ‘weak’, but there was no getting around it – few adjectives married up quite so well with ‘chin’ as did the inevitable ‘strong’.
And so it was that Svetlana quietly launched the campaign to unbeard her husband – first with the odd aspersion (‘it’s like kissing a puppy who’s just rolled in Salat Olivier’), followed by opportunistic praise of sundry and successful bare chins (‘that Navalny – now there’s a guy who leads with his chin’) and concluding with her coup de grâce: A shaving-kit reputedly once owned by Vladimir Putin.
This last was given by way of a fifty-fifth birthday gift. And, with a brave flourish in the face of frugality, it was the very finest of shaving-kits that money could buy - with a brush of the choicest soft bristle (Asian badger from the north-west reaches of the Ural Mountains), its handle fashioned from West African ivory with a mother-of-pearl inlay and a razor that could split an infinitive (Hans Kniebes straight blade of full hollow ground carbon steel, with olivewood handle and soft, black leather pouch).
Deeply moved by his wife’s sacrifice – taking a leaf from O’Henry, she had been putting aside the money for a course of hair restoration therapy in order to salvage what remained of her own evanescent femininity – Dmitri could not but agree that the time had come to separate himself from his wispy companion of twenty years (the beard, that is, not his wife).
When the great day finally arrived – it was a Sunday morning, at eleven fifteen – Svetlana was there to immortalize the event on a Samsung smartphone that she had inherited from a friend who had backed a more successful (taller, less hirsute) spouse.
The effect was almost instantaneous. Standing in the queue to catch the bus to work the following morning, Dmitri was accosted by a tall, powerfully-built young man who shook him vigorously by the hand and congratulated him on a job well done.
His colleagues at work seemed strangely diffident, all of them fulsome in their praise of his transformation.
His boss, Sergei, a man not normally inclined towards either praise or encouragement of any kind, acknowledged his existence (for only the second time in 20 years, the first having been when his father died on the factory floor) with a laugh and a slap on the back.
Stopping off to buy cigarettes on the way home, he managed to elicit a smile from the woman behind the counter who, in all his previous encounters with her over the years, had given him every reason to believe that her face was entirely devoid of musculature. As he departed, a packet of Bonds in hand, he could’ve sworn that he caught a whiff of a curtsey.
With each day that passed, he seemed to attract more attention. Young groups of girls stopped, pointed and giggled. On the Wednesday, he was approached on three separate occasions by young men requesting selfies with him. On the Thursday, the man at the newspaper stand refused to accept money in exchange for his copy of Izvestia. That afternoon, a young woman stood up for him on the bus.
As he related these events to a vindicated though rapidly balding Svetlana, she grew increasingly hopeful of an imminent promotion at the shoe factory. On the Friday morning, she told him: ‘This is the day, Dmitri. You must speak to Sergei. He can’t possibly refuse.’
Filled with trepidation, and having fortified himself with a Monday morning shot of Zhouravli (for special occasions only), he made his way to work (the empty seat next to him on the bus being declined with a smile by all those crammed into the aisle) and climbed to the tiny office (the landing on the stairs) straddled by Sergei’s secretary, Yana.
He was about to ask if there was a time when he might speak with Sergei when she said: ‘Go right in. They’re waiting for you.’
For one, panicked moment he feared that Svetlana had called ahead in an effort to smooth his path but, with Yana’s uncharacteristic wink, he felt reassured that this was the way in which his new, clean-shaven life was now destined to unfold.
Upon entering Sergei’s office – a dim, dank cranny crammed with curling files, gum-wrappers and overflowing ashtrays – he was confronted by three large men in large suits, each man with close-cropped hair, reflective shades and an earbud attached to a black, spiral lead which disappeared inside his shirt collar. Though daunted and more than a little afraid (had it become illegal for bearded men to shave?), he mused upon the fate of the black, spiral lead once it had entered the confines of the shirt.
Shades notwithstanding, it was obvious to Dmitri that the men were taken aback and possibly even impressed at his appearance. However, almost immediately, their expressions gave way to quizzical smiles, and they exchanged presumably derisory comments in a foreign tongue.
It was made clear to Dmitri that he should accompany the men. Outside in the back lane stood a hulking, black Marussia SUV (was there a logistical reason for the blackness?) into the back seat of which he was ushered. Once settled into the embrace of the leather, he sat between two of the men and was careful not to ask any questions. One of them patted him on the thigh and smiled, as if by way of reassurance. He felt a sudden urge to empty his bowels.
After what seemed like an extraordinarily circuitous journey, the vehicle entered a darkened warehouse and stopped. Dmitri followed the men out into the gloom of a yellowed globe. Just as his eyes were adjusting to the dimness, a man emerged from the shadows.
Dmitri blinked. This was not Sergei. Nor was it any other man that he could call a friend, an enemy, an acquaintance or an informer. And yet he knew the face as well as he knew his own. It belonged to Vladimir Putin.
The eyes in the face betrayed no emotion as they ranged over his features, his frame, even his feet - Putin himself circling all the while, like a beast of prey.
Suddenly, without warning, Putin reached out and flipped (there was no other word for it) one of Dmitri’s ears, as if to assure himself that it was securely fastened. He then rubbed some of the hairs at the nape of Dmitri’s neck between his fingers, doubtless checking for cheap dye.
Seemingly satisfied, his head bobbed affirmatively. Then, and only then, did he allow the left extremity of his lips to stretch out into what a sycophant might have interpreted as a smile.
Dmitri could feel the hot lead at the base of his belly straining to squirt out onto his trouser-leg. He bit his lip, then regretted what might’ve been seen as a show of weakness.
Putin stepped up close – very close – closer than a whispering lover – and sniffed.
‘Zhouravli?’ he asked, in a voice surprisingly soft, almost commiserative.
Dmitri, paralyzed at the prospect of incontinence in front of his country’s leader, released the most miniscule of nods.
‘No more.’
Dmitri oscillated his head.
‘Cigarettes. Finished.’
Dmitri bit through his lip.
‘How tall?’
‘Five six. Just over.’ It was as if the words had issued forth from someone else’s (unpunctured) lips. The muscles around Putin’s neck relaxed somewhat.
‘How old?’
‘Fifty-five.’
The muscles relaxed still further.
‘Ever killed a bear?’
Twenty years earlier, whilst on military manoeuvres, Dmitri had been driving a truck through the Kamchatka Peninsula. Rounding a sharp bend, the truck had skidded and hit a brown bear. Dmitri had been forced to place a bullet between its eyes.
He was about to confess to this transgression (he had had no hunting license at the time) when he noticed one of the men (the driver) give the slightest warning shake of his head.
‘No,’ he lied.
Putin’s shoulders were like those of a hibernating bear, his smile bordering on the symmetrical.
With this, he gave a short, sharp nod to the driver and disappeared into the shadows.
By the Saturday, a new life had begun for Dmitri. Each day of this life began at 4 a.m. with a ten-kilometer jog, accompanied by a heavily perspiring relay of the large men with the black, spiral leads. For the first two weeks, he would collapse after the first kilometer or two, and would have to be carried the rest of the way, dry-retching and vomiting.
Breakfast, accompanied by an unbearable urge to smoke, consisted of a protein shake.
This was followed by an intensive, excruciating hour in the gym, supervised by a being whose primate ancestry left little to the imagination.
Once the nausea subsided, there was a tasteless salad and another protein shake.
The afternoons were taken up with endless fittings with a disturbingly obsequious tailor – business suits, formal wear, shirts, sporting gear, outdoor apparel – the inventory seemed endless. But nowhere near as endless as the lectures that filled the nightmarish hours until his evening gym session – a period during which a mild though distressing form of the DTs set in.
Duly medicated, he was taken through another hour in the gym, followed by a steak, a protein shake and an apple.
The evenings were consumed with such things as voice and elocution lessons, deportment and hair-dyeing, after which he was felled with a combination of exhaustion and intravenous valium.
It was some six weeks later, on a Saturday morning, when he received the visit.
The door to the gym swung open and Putin entered, strode forward and immediately encroached upon Dmitri’s personal space.
‘Exhale.’
Dmitri did.
Putin circumnavigated his clean-shaven protégé, turned to the primate, gave a short, sharp nod, delivered the same to the driver and disappeared.
That evening, after his gym session, Dmitri returned to his bedroom to find a dress-shirt and tuxedo laid out on his bed, with black, patent-leather shoes at its base. He allowed himself a smile. The shoes were from his factory. Top of the range.
No sooner had his face relaxed into a smile than there was a knock at the door. He stiffened. Visitors were unheard of and the minders never knocked.
‘Yes?’
The door opened, and he was confronted by a tall, slim, beautiful brunette in an evening gown.
‘You’re not ready yet.’ The observation had about it the air of indulgent affection.
He had seen her face. Somewhere. Television? A magazine?
‘You may call me Lubov.’
She stepped forward, regally, her hand extended. For a kiss? A handshake, perhaps?
He opted for the latter.
She smiled, as if she knew him better than that, then turned her back to him, purposefully.
Dmitri, somewhat mystified: ‘Can I.. help you?’
‘Yes. The zipper. It’s a little stiff.’
Aside from his own, the only zipper he had ever handled belonged to Svetlana. He wondered who might be entrusted with the task in his absence. He had been assured that she was kept fully informed of his whereabouts and his well-being, but such assurances invariably lacked conviction.
This woman’s back did not resemble Svetlana’s. It was smooth, tapered, young, tanned, lithe. So lithe, in fact, that he doubted the genuineness of her request for assistance. Not wishing to offend, however, he launched the zipper on the first inch of its journey.
‘Don’t stop there.’ He could sense an almost playful goading in the dark liquid of her voice.
He continued the downward trajectory of the zipper, until he could see the soft, shadowed upper reaches of her natal cleft, a pert dimple either side offering an alluring frame.
Something in him stirred. Something that hadn’t stirred in a long time.
He strove to picture Svetlana’s face as it had been when they first met.
The woman’s gown plopped lightly to the floor, with the sound of surrender. She stepped out of it, sending it scooting across the parquetry with a flick of her six-inch stiletto.
Her arms were around his neck.
He thought of his wedding day.
Her lips worked their way over his clean-shaven chin.
He thought of the sacrifice that had enabled the shaving-kit to come into his possession.
A cool hand ran down over his belly, and further.
He thought of nothing.
That evening, with this entrancing chestnut-haired enchantress on his arm and a vermilion bowtie at his throat, his member still pulsating with resurrected memory, he attended a lavish dinner in honor of the Latvian President.
He was relieved when it appeared that his dark-eyed consort was the object of most of the attention in the room. Men smiled that smile they smile when they think they might have a chance, women whispered the whispers they whisper when they see their men smile that smile, and he heard the name ‘Anna’ mentioned repeatedly.
At the end of the evening (2 a.m. when the last vodka was downed, though his was water made to impersonate vodka), he was congratulated by the driver on a job well done, then escorted back to his room.
‘We have an early start,’ said the driver as he set the alarm clock for six a.m. ‘A large car plant near the Ukranian border.’
Most of Sunday was spent in transit, Dmitri reliving the highlights of his encounter with Lubov.
In the morning paper, on page three, he read that Putin had attended a state dinner in honor of the Latvian President, the accompanying photograph showing a great deal of Lubov and very little of himself. On page five, he read that Putin had spent the evening at a fashion event in the company of an Anna Chapman, the correspondent marvelling at the leader’s energy.
On the Monday, Dmitri was assassinated.
His funeral, three days later, was a quiet affair, attended only by Svetlana, the driver, a priest and a gravedigger.
On the Friday, Svetlana posted the shaving-kit on eBay, emphasizing its provenance and posting the video of her then husband removing his beard (by way of supporting material).
She was advised to await a call from Putin.
As it happened, the call was not forthcoming, but there has since been talk of a modest pension.
Svetlana, it was reported, was hopeful that she might use a portion thereof in the pursuit of hair regrowth.
LOST IN WORDS 2022 — HIGHLY COMMENDED
Jump
by Danh Chantachak, Australia
by Danh Chantachak, Australia
I stand at the edge of the platform, looking down at the view below. It’s dark, still a few minutes before daybreak, so I can only make out rough shapes and outlines of cliffs and trees. The waterfall plummets down the cliff behind me, its thunderous chorus filling my ears with the sound of crashing water. It is a powerful and terrifying sound and though I have made this kind of jump many times before, the sheer violence and speed of the water rushing down the cliff is enough to give me pause.
Just as I am about to lose my nerve, the sun peaks over the horizon, illuminating the scene before me in the first light of dawn. Never, in all my jumps, have I witnessed a more beautiful sight. The gorge stretches out in front of me, its cliffs lined with verdant, green trees. The horizon line itself is green with nature, and this green meets the golden embrace of the early dawn sky in the most spectacular fashion. Below, at the base of the gorge, the white water of the river rushes away from the fall behind me. Daylight shines off the rocks that line the riverbank, causing them to sparkle.
And just like that, all doubt in my mind is erased. I know that I am meant to be here. Perhaps I was always meant to end up here. No, not I. We were meant to end up here. Together.
As I stare out at the beautiful scenery ahead, my toes hanging over the edge of the platform, I recall the first time I ever jumped, which was, as fate would have it, the first time I met him.
*
“Jump, you pussy!”
Without wanting to, I turned back to look at the source of the slur – my colleague, Greg. He was waiting in line behind me, clearly just as nervous as I was about this whole thing. I gave him the finger, before turning back to the jump ahead of me.
“Don’t worry about that guy,” the bungee instructor holding my harness said gently. “Try not to look down. Instead, focus on a distant object. Like that tree over there. You see it?”
I followed his extended hand and saw the tree he was talking about – a skinny little thing poking out from a rocky outcrop in the distance. The tree was almost completely bare of leaves and its pitiful looking branches seemed to struggle to stay intact as it was buffeted by the winds. It looked as helpless as I felt. But somehow, focusing on it did make me feel better.
“Okay,” the bungee instructor said. “You’ve been here for a while now, buddy. You can do this. I’m gonna count down from five. Then, you’re gonna jump. Arms out, just like we practiced. Ready?”
I nodded, focusing on the tree.
“Here we go. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go!”
I felt his grip on my harness loosen and I took an involuntary step backwards, away from the edge. The line of spectators behind me, my colleagues, let out a collective groan of disappointment. From the front of the line, I heard Greg yell, “Pussy!”
I couldn’t blame the other guys for losing their patience with me, nor could I really blame Greg. As much of an asshole as he was, he was absolutely right. I was a pussy. This was the third time the instructor had counted down for me and I still hadn’t been able to jump. It didn’t seem as if I was getting any closer to taking the leap, either. At this point, I was just holding up the line.
Whose dumbass idea was it to go bungee jumping on a company retreat, anyway?
Of course, I knew the answer to this question. My boss, the self-proclaimed adrenaline junky. Mr. “I-like-to-swim-with-sharks-before-breakfast-and-go-ice-climbing-after-lunch.” Still though. Whatever happened to good ol’ fashioned paintball?
Speaking of the devil, my boss chose then to speak up from the sidelines. Of course, he had been the first to jump. He had always been the type to lead by example. “Maybe you should take a moment, son,” he said. “Let the others have a go first. We can get back to you. No one would think any less of you.”
What an asshole, I thought. Still, looking out at the horrifying plunge before me, I was just about to accept his offer.
However, at that moment, another voice spoke up from behind me. A voice I didn’t recognize. “Don’t you dare step back from that edge,” the voice said.
I looked over my shoulder at the source of the voice and saw him for the first time. He was tall and skinny, with wavy blonde hair and a boyish face – not handsome, but likeable. However, I noticed his eyes right away. They were blue and fearless. The eyes of a hero. It struck me that these eyes did not match the rest of his face, which had otherwise soft features.
He wore the same yellow uniform polo top that the other bungee instructors wore, only his had the word “TRAINEE” stencilled across the front in bold orange letters. He stepped forward as he spoke, making eye contact with me. “If you give up now, you’ll never be able to get back on that edge.”
I didn’t know this man, but something made me want to open up to him. “I can’t do it,” I said, and the words came out as a whisper.
To this, he held up a hand, telling me to wait. Then he exchanged some words with the instructor that had been holding my harness. After a brief exchange, they both nodded. The trainee started busying himself with a harness of his own, while the instructor who had been holding my harness turned to me.
“Change of plans,” the instructor said. “With your permission, our guy here is gonna jump with you.”
“What?!” I exclaimed.
“It’s called a tandem jump. We’re gonna strap you two together with a special harness and you’ll make the jump as a pair. It’s perfectly safe and just as fun as a solo jump.”
I looked at the trainee, who, upon seeing my look of disbelief, flashed me a toothy grin and a big thumbs up.
“But…” I struggled to find an excuse – any excuse – not to do this. “He’s just a trainee!”
To this, the instructor laughed. “Don’t worry. His shirt may say “trainee” but he’s perfectly capable of doing this jump with you.”
Before I knew it, the trainee and I were strapped together, standing side-by-side at the edge of the jumping platform. Despite the hot weather, I was shaking visibly.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” the trainee said.
I made a sound, something between a sob and a laugh.
He looked at me. “The tree thing didn’t work, huh?”
I shook my head.
“Yeah, it never worked for me either. To be honest, its not about where your eyes are. Its about where your head is. Look down.”
I stared at him.
“Go on. It won’t bite.”
I swallowed thickly and did as he said. Looking down, I saw the vast drop just before us, the green water far below.
“Good. Now what’s going through your mind?”
“I’m terrified.”
“Why?”
“I’ve never done this before. What if something goes wrong? What if the rope breaks?”
“Well, that would be bad news for both of us. I wish I could tell you without a doubt that that isn’t going to happen, but the truth is you never know whether or not something is going to go wrong.”
I gaped at the trainee. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
The trainee chuckled. I noticed that he had one dimple in his left cheek when he smiled. “Look at it like this. Life is full of unknowns. Anyone that has gone through life knowing exactly what to expect, has lived a helluva boring life. The best part of living are those moments when you don’t know what is going to happen next. Every great adventure begins with a step into the unknown.” The trainee gestured grandly in front of him. “A leap of faith.”
The trainee’s words lingered in the air between us. I stared out at the canyon below and as the realization dawned on me that I was going to do it, that I was going to freefall with this total stranger into the abyss, all I could say was, “Shit.”
The trainee laughed again. “Well, maybe some tunes will help.” He turned and yelled to the instructors behind us. “Hit it!”
Over the speakers, the opening guitar riff of ACDC’s Thunderstruck began to play. The trainee beside me nodded along as the music began to escalate. Then as the drums kicked in, he raised his hands above his head and began clapping to the beat of the song. The other instructors followed suit, clapping along. Then, amazingly, my co-workers began to clap along to the song too. I looked over my shoulder and saw that everyone was clapping and cheering, including my boss. Even Greg was into it, his own nervousness at this exercise seemingly evaporated for now.
I turned back to the trainee, who was smiling at me, continuing to clap. He nodded at me and, shaking my head, I raised my own hands above my head and began clapping along to the song. As I did so, I felt my own fears fall from my mind, as if they themselves had bungeed out of existence.
Still clapping, the trainee said to me, “You ready?”
“Yes,” I said, and for the first time today, I meant it.
As Brian Johnson’s vocals reached their crescendo along with the cheers from my colleagues behind us, we jumped. There was no countdown needed this time. We just jumped.
The wind rushed through my hair and just before I squeezed my eyes shut, I caught a glimpse of green water rushing toward me. We fell for what felt like an eternity before I felt the bungee restraints tighten around my ankles. My stomach lurched as we were bounced in the other direction and all of a sudden, we were falling upwards, a disorientating sense of weightlessness taking over. Then gravity once again took hold and we fell back down.
It was only once we stopped bouncing that I dared to open my eyes again. The first thing that I saw when I opened my eyes was that my hand was gripping tightly onto the trainee’s beside me. The second thing I saw was that the trainee was squeezing back.
I looked up at him as he beamed at me, his blonde hair falling away from his face to reveal those eyes again. Those fearless eyes. “My name’s Jack,” he told me.
“I’m David,” I told him.
*
We went on many jumps together after that. He would get so excited looking up different jumps we could do together. He’d show me videos of people doing it on his phone and I would watch the videos with a never-ending sense of dread. But his excitement made me excited. It became our thing – a huge part of our relationship.
In the years that we were together, we travelled the world, always looking forward to the next jump. We went to New Zealand, China, the US, Switzerland; anywhere where there was something for us to jump off, we’d go. We always did the jumps in tandem. Even though we could have done them solo, it just felt right to do them together.
But the biggest leap we ever took together was the leap to matrimony. We tied the knot in front of a small group of our friends and family. I had been terrified, of course. But not Jack. My Jack was always fearless. Our first dance as a married couple was to ACDC’s Thunderstruck and yes, it was as cringe as that sounds.
After getting married, we didn’t go on as many jumps as we used to. Part of it was that we were getting older. We were also getting busier. Looking back, maybe it wasn’t even that. Maybe we just thought that there would be time. Every now and then, Jack would show me a video of an amazing jump from across the globe. I would smile and tell him ‘someday’. My Jack. He was always making plans. Even at the end.
By the time we caught the cancer, it had already spread across a large portion of his pancreas and invaded several lymph nodes. Once again, I was terrified. But not Jack. Never Jack. Upon hearing the prognosis, he simply smiled, held onto my hand and asked the doctor, “What’s next?”
Surgery was not an option, but we started chemo and radiation therapy straight away. The doctors initially gave him two years but he fought on for fifteen years. Fifteen years of fighting. Fifteen years of heartache. Fifteen years of joy. Fifteen years of love. But no more jumps. Those days were behind us. Still, we were able to grow old together and that’s a better deal than a lot of people get.
A few days before he passed, Jack called me to his bed. I rushed over as fast as I could, mistaking his urgent tone for distress. But he wasn’t distressed, he was excited. His skin was pale, his hair was gone, and his face was drawn and deeply lined. Yet when I looked at his excited eyes glinting at me, I could’ve sworn they were the same blue, fearless eyes he had the day that I first met him.
“Check this out!” he exclaimed, holding up his phone.
I looked at the video on the screen. According to the title, it was drone footage of a jump in Zimbabwe. The scenery was spectacular; a waterfall fell directly behind the jumping platform, the water cascading down to the Zambezi River below. Despite my usual feelings of dread, I was taken aback by how beautiful the location was.
“111 metres,” Jack said with genuine admiration. “Crazy view, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Crazy.”
“Man, what I wouldn’t give…” Jack trailed off.
I remembered all the times he’d shown me a video like this. I remembered all the times I’d told him ‘someday’. I fell to my knees at the side of his bed and buried my face in his arm, hot tears of regret pouring from my eyes.
“Hey now,” he said in the voice he’d always use whenever I had a meltdown.
“I just don’t know,” I sobbed. “How to go on without you.”
**
The scene that extends out before me now looks even more spectacular than it had in the video he had first shown me those many months ago. The tiny screen of the phone could not do the natural beauty of the African landscape justice, particularly in the orange glow of the sunrise. Jack would have loved to have been able to see this.
I reach into my pocket and pull out a portable mp3 player – a gift from my niece. I place the headphones in my ears and scroll through my music. I quickly find the song that I’m looking for and tap the screen. As the familiar guitar riff begins to play, I place the mp3 player back into my pocket, nodding along to the tune.
I feel the bridge vibrating with footsteps. I am dimly aware of the people running toward me from both ends of the bridge. They are yelling. Telling me to stop.
Tears slide down my face. Looking down at the river below me, I find that I am not afraid. Because of Jack. My Jack. From the day that I met him, he taught me that the unknown was not something to be afraid of, but rather something to leap at.
As Brian Johnson’s vocals approach the climax of the song, before the footsteps approaching from either side of me are able to reach me, I do as I have done so many times in the past. I jump.
*
“I just don’t know how to go on without you.”
Jack grew quiet and let me sob into his arm. He patted the back of my head, and I could feel the frailty of his fingers as he did so.
Finally, as I began to calm down, he spoke. “I know we’ve always taken our jumps together in the past,” he said, and his voice sounded as if it was a million miles away. “But this next jump is something that we’re both gonna have to do alone. And that is scary.”
He lifted my head up so that he could look at me. He smiled his toothy, dimpled smile. “The unknown is always scary. But remember? That’s what makes life worth living.”
**
I freefall towards the raging waters of the Zambezi River for a total of 3.05 seconds before I feel the bungee restraints tighten around my ankles. The cord tightens and I bounce back up into the air. My stomach lurches and I embrace the familiar discomfort. It’s been a while since I’ve jumped. I forgot how much I loved it. It occurs to me that this is the first time that I have performed a jump on my own.
Only I’m not on my own. As I slowly stop bouncing and the bungee cord tightens up, I unzip my jacket and remove the urn from within. It is a simple, metal affair. Engraved on the face of the urn are the words, “My fearless Jack”.
Gears turn and my automatic pulley system begins to raise me back to the jumping platform, where there are a lot of people who are no doubt angry at me for this unsupervised and unauthorised jump. I unscrew the urn and watch as the ashes scatter into the air below. There is only the slightest breeze, and the ashes fall unhindered into the river below me. The river flows on, taking my Jack with it. On to the next unknown.
Just as I am about to lose my nerve, the sun peaks over the horizon, illuminating the scene before me in the first light of dawn. Never, in all my jumps, have I witnessed a more beautiful sight. The gorge stretches out in front of me, its cliffs lined with verdant, green trees. The horizon line itself is green with nature, and this green meets the golden embrace of the early dawn sky in the most spectacular fashion. Below, at the base of the gorge, the white water of the river rushes away from the fall behind me. Daylight shines off the rocks that line the riverbank, causing them to sparkle.
And just like that, all doubt in my mind is erased. I know that I am meant to be here. Perhaps I was always meant to end up here. No, not I. We were meant to end up here. Together.
As I stare out at the beautiful scenery ahead, my toes hanging over the edge of the platform, I recall the first time I ever jumped, which was, as fate would have it, the first time I met him.
*
“Jump, you pussy!”
Without wanting to, I turned back to look at the source of the slur – my colleague, Greg. He was waiting in line behind me, clearly just as nervous as I was about this whole thing. I gave him the finger, before turning back to the jump ahead of me.
“Don’t worry about that guy,” the bungee instructor holding my harness said gently. “Try not to look down. Instead, focus on a distant object. Like that tree over there. You see it?”
I followed his extended hand and saw the tree he was talking about – a skinny little thing poking out from a rocky outcrop in the distance. The tree was almost completely bare of leaves and its pitiful looking branches seemed to struggle to stay intact as it was buffeted by the winds. It looked as helpless as I felt. But somehow, focusing on it did make me feel better.
“Okay,” the bungee instructor said. “You’ve been here for a while now, buddy. You can do this. I’m gonna count down from five. Then, you’re gonna jump. Arms out, just like we practiced. Ready?”
I nodded, focusing on the tree.
“Here we go. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go!”
I felt his grip on my harness loosen and I took an involuntary step backwards, away from the edge. The line of spectators behind me, my colleagues, let out a collective groan of disappointment. From the front of the line, I heard Greg yell, “Pussy!”
I couldn’t blame the other guys for losing their patience with me, nor could I really blame Greg. As much of an asshole as he was, he was absolutely right. I was a pussy. This was the third time the instructor had counted down for me and I still hadn’t been able to jump. It didn’t seem as if I was getting any closer to taking the leap, either. At this point, I was just holding up the line.
Whose dumbass idea was it to go bungee jumping on a company retreat, anyway?
Of course, I knew the answer to this question. My boss, the self-proclaimed adrenaline junky. Mr. “I-like-to-swim-with-sharks-before-breakfast-and-go-ice-climbing-after-lunch.” Still though. Whatever happened to good ol’ fashioned paintball?
Speaking of the devil, my boss chose then to speak up from the sidelines. Of course, he had been the first to jump. He had always been the type to lead by example. “Maybe you should take a moment, son,” he said. “Let the others have a go first. We can get back to you. No one would think any less of you.”
What an asshole, I thought. Still, looking out at the horrifying plunge before me, I was just about to accept his offer.
However, at that moment, another voice spoke up from behind me. A voice I didn’t recognize. “Don’t you dare step back from that edge,” the voice said.
I looked over my shoulder at the source of the voice and saw him for the first time. He was tall and skinny, with wavy blonde hair and a boyish face – not handsome, but likeable. However, I noticed his eyes right away. They were blue and fearless. The eyes of a hero. It struck me that these eyes did not match the rest of his face, which had otherwise soft features.
He wore the same yellow uniform polo top that the other bungee instructors wore, only his had the word “TRAINEE” stencilled across the front in bold orange letters. He stepped forward as he spoke, making eye contact with me. “If you give up now, you’ll never be able to get back on that edge.”
I didn’t know this man, but something made me want to open up to him. “I can’t do it,” I said, and the words came out as a whisper.
To this, he held up a hand, telling me to wait. Then he exchanged some words with the instructor that had been holding my harness. After a brief exchange, they both nodded. The trainee started busying himself with a harness of his own, while the instructor who had been holding my harness turned to me.
“Change of plans,” the instructor said. “With your permission, our guy here is gonna jump with you.”
“What?!” I exclaimed.
“It’s called a tandem jump. We’re gonna strap you two together with a special harness and you’ll make the jump as a pair. It’s perfectly safe and just as fun as a solo jump.”
I looked at the trainee, who, upon seeing my look of disbelief, flashed me a toothy grin and a big thumbs up.
“But…” I struggled to find an excuse – any excuse – not to do this. “He’s just a trainee!”
To this, the instructor laughed. “Don’t worry. His shirt may say “trainee” but he’s perfectly capable of doing this jump with you.”
Before I knew it, the trainee and I were strapped together, standing side-by-side at the edge of the jumping platform. Despite the hot weather, I was shaking visibly.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” the trainee said.
I made a sound, something between a sob and a laugh.
He looked at me. “The tree thing didn’t work, huh?”
I shook my head.
“Yeah, it never worked for me either. To be honest, its not about where your eyes are. Its about where your head is. Look down.”
I stared at him.
“Go on. It won’t bite.”
I swallowed thickly and did as he said. Looking down, I saw the vast drop just before us, the green water far below.
“Good. Now what’s going through your mind?”
“I’m terrified.”
“Why?”
“I’ve never done this before. What if something goes wrong? What if the rope breaks?”
“Well, that would be bad news for both of us. I wish I could tell you without a doubt that that isn’t going to happen, but the truth is you never know whether or not something is going to go wrong.”
I gaped at the trainee. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
The trainee chuckled. I noticed that he had one dimple in his left cheek when he smiled. “Look at it like this. Life is full of unknowns. Anyone that has gone through life knowing exactly what to expect, has lived a helluva boring life. The best part of living are those moments when you don’t know what is going to happen next. Every great adventure begins with a step into the unknown.” The trainee gestured grandly in front of him. “A leap of faith.”
The trainee’s words lingered in the air between us. I stared out at the canyon below and as the realization dawned on me that I was going to do it, that I was going to freefall with this total stranger into the abyss, all I could say was, “Shit.”
The trainee laughed again. “Well, maybe some tunes will help.” He turned and yelled to the instructors behind us. “Hit it!”
Over the speakers, the opening guitar riff of ACDC’s Thunderstruck began to play. The trainee beside me nodded along as the music began to escalate. Then as the drums kicked in, he raised his hands above his head and began clapping to the beat of the song. The other instructors followed suit, clapping along. Then, amazingly, my co-workers began to clap along to the song too. I looked over my shoulder and saw that everyone was clapping and cheering, including my boss. Even Greg was into it, his own nervousness at this exercise seemingly evaporated for now.
I turned back to the trainee, who was smiling at me, continuing to clap. He nodded at me and, shaking my head, I raised my own hands above my head and began clapping along to the song. As I did so, I felt my own fears fall from my mind, as if they themselves had bungeed out of existence.
Still clapping, the trainee said to me, “You ready?”
“Yes,” I said, and for the first time today, I meant it.
As Brian Johnson’s vocals reached their crescendo along with the cheers from my colleagues behind us, we jumped. There was no countdown needed this time. We just jumped.
The wind rushed through my hair and just before I squeezed my eyes shut, I caught a glimpse of green water rushing toward me. We fell for what felt like an eternity before I felt the bungee restraints tighten around my ankles. My stomach lurched as we were bounced in the other direction and all of a sudden, we were falling upwards, a disorientating sense of weightlessness taking over. Then gravity once again took hold and we fell back down.
It was only once we stopped bouncing that I dared to open my eyes again. The first thing that I saw when I opened my eyes was that my hand was gripping tightly onto the trainee’s beside me. The second thing I saw was that the trainee was squeezing back.
I looked up at him as he beamed at me, his blonde hair falling away from his face to reveal those eyes again. Those fearless eyes. “My name’s Jack,” he told me.
“I’m David,” I told him.
*
We went on many jumps together after that. He would get so excited looking up different jumps we could do together. He’d show me videos of people doing it on his phone and I would watch the videos with a never-ending sense of dread. But his excitement made me excited. It became our thing – a huge part of our relationship.
In the years that we were together, we travelled the world, always looking forward to the next jump. We went to New Zealand, China, the US, Switzerland; anywhere where there was something for us to jump off, we’d go. We always did the jumps in tandem. Even though we could have done them solo, it just felt right to do them together.
But the biggest leap we ever took together was the leap to matrimony. We tied the knot in front of a small group of our friends and family. I had been terrified, of course. But not Jack. My Jack was always fearless. Our first dance as a married couple was to ACDC’s Thunderstruck and yes, it was as cringe as that sounds.
After getting married, we didn’t go on as many jumps as we used to. Part of it was that we were getting older. We were also getting busier. Looking back, maybe it wasn’t even that. Maybe we just thought that there would be time. Every now and then, Jack would show me a video of an amazing jump from across the globe. I would smile and tell him ‘someday’. My Jack. He was always making plans. Even at the end.
By the time we caught the cancer, it had already spread across a large portion of his pancreas and invaded several lymph nodes. Once again, I was terrified. But not Jack. Never Jack. Upon hearing the prognosis, he simply smiled, held onto my hand and asked the doctor, “What’s next?”
Surgery was not an option, but we started chemo and radiation therapy straight away. The doctors initially gave him two years but he fought on for fifteen years. Fifteen years of fighting. Fifteen years of heartache. Fifteen years of joy. Fifteen years of love. But no more jumps. Those days were behind us. Still, we were able to grow old together and that’s a better deal than a lot of people get.
A few days before he passed, Jack called me to his bed. I rushed over as fast as I could, mistaking his urgent tone for distress. But he wasn’t distressed, he was excited. His skin was pale, his hair was gone, and his face was drawn and deeply lined. Yet when I looked at his excited eyes glinting at me, I could’ve sworn they were the same blue, fearless eyes he had the day that I first met him.
“Check this out!” he exclaimed, holding up his phone.
I looked at the video on the screen. According to the title, it was drone footage of a jump in Zimbabwe. The scenery was spectacular; a waterfall fell directly behind the jumping platform, the water cascading down to the Zambezi River below. Despite my usual feelings of dread, I was taken aback by how beautiful the location was.
“111 metres,” Jack said with genuine admiration. “Crazy view, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Crazy.”
“Man, what I wouldn’t give…” Jack trailed off.
I remembered all the times he’d shown me a video like this. I remembered all the times I’d told him ‘someday’. I fell to my knees at the side of his bed and buried my face in his arm, hot tears of regret pouring from my eyes.
“Hey now,” he said in the voice he’d always use whenever I had a meltdown.
“I just don’t know,” I sobbed. “How to go on without you.”
**
The scene that extends out before me now looks even more spectacular than it had in the video he had first shown me those many months ago. The tiny screen of the phone could not do the natural beauty of the African landscape justice, particularly in the orange glow of the sunrise. Jack would have loved to have been able to see this.
I reach into my pocket and pull out a portable mp3 player – a gift from my niece. I place the headphones in my ears and scroll through my music. I quickly find the song that I’m looking for and tap the screen. As the familiar guitar riff begins to play, I place the mp3 player back into my pocket, nodding along to the tune.
I feel the bridge vibrating with footsteps. I am dimly aware of the people running toward me from both ends of the bridge. They are yelling. Telling me to stop.
Tears slide down my face. Looking down at the river below me, I find that I am not afraid. Because of Jack. My Jack. From the day that I met him, he taught me that the unknown was not something to be afraid of, but rather something to leap at.
As Brian Johnson’s vocals approach the climax of the song, before the footsteps approaching from either side of me are able to reach me, I do as I have done so many times in the past. I jump.
*
“I just don’t know how to go on without you.”
Jack grew quiet and let me sob into his arm. He patted the back of my head, and I could feel the frailty of his fingers as he did so.
Finally, as I began to calm down, he spoke. “I know we’ve always taken our jumps together in the past,” he said, and his voice sounded as if it was a million miles away. “But this next jump is something that we’re both gonna have to do alone. And that is scary.”
He lifted my head up so that he could look at me. He smiled his toothy, dimpled smile. “The unknown is always scary. But remember? That’s what makes life worth living.”
**
I freefall towards the raging waters of the Zambezi River for a total of 3.05 seconds before I feel the bungee restraints tighten around my ankles. The cord tightens and I bounce back up into the air. My stomach lurches and I embrace the familiar discomfort. It’s been a while since I’ve jumped. I forgot how much I loved it. It occurs to me that this is the first time that I have performed a jump on my own.
Only I’m not on my own. As I slowly stop bouncing and the bungee cord tightens up, I unzip my jacket and remove the urn from within. It is a simple, metal affair. Engraved on the face of the urn are the words, “My fearless Jack”.
Gears turn and my automatic pulley system begins to raise me back to the jumping platform, where there are a lot of people who are no doubt angry at me for this unsupervised and unauthorised jump. I unscrew the urn and watch as the ashes scatter into the air below. There is only the slightest breeze, and the ashes fall unhindered into the river below me. The river flows on, taking my Jack with it. On to the next unknown.
LOST IN WORDS 2022 — HIGHLY COMMENDED
Call In The Night
by Seth Freeman, USA
by Seth Freeman, USA
The call must have come very late on one of those sultry, pungently fecund nights when you feel you can actually hear the dense, dark greenery growing feverishly outside the window. I was in that hard to surrender, far away from this world part of the deepest sleep. I picked up the landline phone from the floor next to the bed, unfocused, not really yet awake.
The voice was female.
"I hope every deal you are working on falls apart. I hope some maniac juvenile delinquent steals your computer and iPhone and your i-everything else along with your fancy ass car which I hope he totals. I hope you learn you've got some rare, incurable disease that rots your mind but leaves you just enough aware to know what's happening when your pecker turns to fungus and falls off like a rotten piece of fruit..."
I said, "Who is this?"
There was a pause. Then, "Barlow?"
I said, "No."
She said, "Oh. Shit."
And the thing was, although her words were not the sweetest or kindest I'd ever heard, I already liked her voice. Liquid like mulled cider, warm, amber, smooth with a trace of spice, despite that she was on a tear. That warm voice with a hint of cheerful music touched something deep inside me.
"What did Barlow do to deserve this?" I asked her.
"He fucked my best friend."
"Well," I said. "I'm sorry."
"I found his goddamn belt in her bedroom. He must have just jumped out the window or something minutes before I got there."
I half sat up in bed, in the dark. I said, "That sounds incriminating, but are you sure you've got all the facts?"
"She 'fessed up. Are you a lawyer?"
"No."
"You talk like a lawyer," she said. "What do you do?"
"I try to get to know what I'm talking about before I rush to judgment."
"A sensible guy, huh? You sound like a sensible guy."
"I guess."
"And here you are talking to someone you don't know in the middle of the night. This
isn't like you, is it?"
"It hasn’t really come up much."
" So what number did I call here anyway?"
I told her. She laughed at herself.
"I was only off on three digits. I must have been shaking like a vibrator." Some image. "I’m very sorry I woke you, really. That was unfair. And you’ve been a good sport about it. I appreciate that. Look, good night."
"Good night. I hope things work out for you."
Derisively, "Huh, yeah. Right."
And she hung up.
I stared at the ceiling with a vein of soft white light from the streetlamp below and
slipped back to sleep.
In the light of morning I had that sensation that follows a special dream where the dream events feel, if not exactly more real, more compelling than the real day and draw you back to them. But with even the most evanescent of pieces of dreams, there is always a slight chance of actually getting back to them through force of will or some cunning steering of the subconscious. In this case I had lost all connection to the voice on the phone. She was gone, completely, utterly gone.
. . . .
A week later she called again. A coal dark night, except for the solitary street lamp. Barely one in the morning.
"I didn't call at a reasonable hour because I didn't want some wife or girlfriend picking up."
"I live alone."
"I figured you for a lonely sort."
"Not really."
"You're a touchy sort anyway. That’s cool. I'm touchy too. At work nobody says anything positive about what I'm doing for a few days, I'm sure they hate me and I'm going to lose my job. Actually I'm more perfectionistic than any of them. Jump right in if any of this sounds familiar."
"Well," I said, "It isn't that I'm perfectionistic. I just work hard so I won't get found out."
"What might they find?"
"That they don't need me."
"Ah." Her tone was interested, not mocking.
I was telling this voice on the other end of the phone things I wouldn't have said to anyone at work, perhaps not to anyone I knew.
She observed, "You work harder now than ever before, harder than, say, you worked in school."
She was right.
"Exactly."
"You're interesting," she said, sounding genuinely interested.
For an hour that night we talked about work, how it affects us, defines us. Then she hung up and was gone.
I sat up in bed for a while and finally slept. I felt tired all the next day.
When she called a week later, we talked about friends. I awakened quickly, slid up against the bed wall, comfortable, like when you have time for a real talk with an old friend. The clock showed slightly past midnight.
"Can you trust your friends?" she asked right away.
"That's what friends are for."
"So can you?"
"Can you?"
"I'm not sure I can, not totally. You're having real trouble with this one, aren't you?"
And we were into a long talk about friendship that night. The next week the conversations were shorter, but she called three times. I was tired during the days, but pleasantly tired, not dragging around. My phone then didn’t have the automatic call back option, and I still didn't even know her phone number.
. . . .
It was on the fifth or sixth call, extraordinary we waited so long, that we talked about possibly meeting. We were both wary, instinctively not wanting to harm or sully something that had taken on a special meaning for both of us. We approached the subject but came to no conclusion.
It was at the end of the next conversation that she said, "Tomorrow night. Leave the door unlocked.”
My throat dry. "Yes?"
"Go to bed. Turn out the lights. Whatever you normally do."
We hung up.
I had never given her my address, but once I had described the winding street in the hills where I lived in a pink stucco apartment complex from the forties. Unit C. She said she was familiar with street and knew the building. But mine was not the only one of its kind. I couldn’t call her back with the address. I still didn't even know her phone number.
That night I left the door unlocked, went to bed at my usual time, read for ten minutes, couldn't concentrate. I turned out the lights and lay back with my eyes wide open, hardly expecting to fall asleep. Amazingly, after a while, I did.
I didn't know what time it was when I heard the front door being gently closed. The wooden floorboards creaked as someone with a feathery tread tiptoed across the living room.
My eyes were adjusted to the dark, and illumination from the moon fell through the window, so I could see her shape as she appeared in the doorway to the bedroom. Her silhouette at least was perfect. She crossed quickly and lightly across the carpet, stepped out of her shoes, and in one fluid movement, lifted the top sheet and slipped between the covers. The rippled current of cool air she created brushed across my cheek. In the few seconds she took to glide across the room I had seen a person of uncomplicated, natural grace and ease.
"Well, buona notte," she said finally.
"Hi."
The room had a new scent, delicate, not flowery or perfumed, but warm, clean and pleasant.
In the next indeterminate period of minutes and hours, time changed, both expanded and slowed. Time was space, and space was time. I was aware of everything and aware of nothing but her. Her hair dark and soft, her tummy flat, her skin, cool at first, was faintly sweet, supple honey. I remained patiently content with as much experience as chose to present itself to consciousness.
At one point she started to laugh.
"What?"
"What if I have the wrong apartment?"
"Well, sure. There could be two women in this neighborhood tonight calling on people they've never met, and two guys waiting for them."
"Okay, good. Only you would say something like that."
The night then took on a rhythm, part of the time talking, most of the time abandoning ourselves to each other's bodies with a lack of inhibition I had never before known. Physically as well as with our words, we shared the intimacy of strangers, as people seated together for a train or plane ride can sometimes reveal in a hour or two the deepest most personal aspects of their lives. If there was a warning in this, I didn't heed it.
We would rest, arms around each other. Without prompting one would begin a long story about something that happened in elementary school or high school, and the other would listen, not wanting the story to be hurried or slowed, no impulse to interrupt or comment, absorbing as many details as possible, as if we had waited all our lives to receive this information.
I must have dozed because my eyes opened before dawn as a single bird stirred and chirped, and I saw her rising from the bed. As I started to get up, she lay a hand gently on my shoulder.
"Shh," she whispered, kissed me lightly, and glided out of the room.
And – I watched her go.
You're thinking I should have jumped up, run after her. We should have arranged our next meeting or at least a phone call.
But there had been no past or future, no calculation, no plans. So, yes, I let her go. It didn’t occur to me to follow her. After such a perfect night, I was not thinking ahead, although had I thought about it, I'm sure it would not have seemed possible that we would not be together, let alone never meet again.
But we haven't.
. . . .
I fantasize how I might have gone after her as the light of dawn unfolded. I imagine her telling me why she had to leave as she did, why that had to be the end because we couldn't top that night, exactly because it was totally disconnected from the rest of our lives, that it would mean less if we tried to repeat or hold on to it. In my fantasy I always argue strenuously against this point of view.
But she didn't call, and I had absolutely no way to contact her.
I had only frustration, and a powerful sense of wonder that it could have happened at all.
Maybe that is why, although I never found out her phone number or knew her name and, although I have had long, worthwhile, and rewarding relationships since then, that single night we had together was so much more than just a pleasant memory. That night somehow, profoundly, miraculously and for the rest of my life, made me a better person. Wherever she is, I hope she knows that, and that she feels the same.
The voice was female.
"I hope every deal you are working on falls apart. I hope some maniac juvenile delinquent steals your computer and iPhone and your i-everything else along with your fancy ass car which I hope he totals. I hope you learn you've got some rare, incurable disease that rots your mind but leaves you just enough aware to know what's happening when your pecker turns to fungus and falls off like a rotten piece of fruit..."
I said, "Who is this?"
There was a pause. Then, "Barlow?"
I said, "No."
She said, "Oh. Shit."
And the thing was, although her words were not the sweetest or kindest I'd ever heard, I already liked her voice. Liquid like mulled cider, warm, amber, smooth with a trace of spice, despite that she was on a tear. That warm voice with a hint of cheerful music touched something deep inside me.
"What did Barlow do to deserve this?" I asked her.
"He fucked my best friend."
"Well," I said. "I'm sorry."
"I found his goddamn belt in her bedroom. He must have just jumped out the window or something minutes before I got there."
I half sat up in bed, in the dark. I said, "That sounds incriminating, but are you sure you've got all the facts?"
"She 'fessed up. Are you a lawyer?"
"No."
"You talk like a lawyer," she said. "What do you do?"
"I try to get to know what I'm talking about before I rush to judgment."
"A sensible guy, huh? You sound like a sensible guy."
"I guess."
"And here you are talking to someone you don't know in the middle of the night. This
isn't like you, is it?"
"It hasn’t really come up much."
" So what number did I call here anyway?"
I told her. She laughed at herself.
"I was only off on three digits. I must have been shaking like a vibrator." Some image. "I’m very sorry I woke you, really. That was unfair. And you’ve been a good sport about it. I appreciate that. Look, good night."
"Good night. I hope things work out for you."
Derisively, "Huh, yeah. Right."
And she hung up.
I stared at the ceiling with a vein of soft white light from the streetlamp below and
slipped back to sleep.
In the light of morning I had that sensation that follows a special dream where the dream events feel, if not exactly more real, more compelling than the real day and draw you back to them. But with even the most evanescent of pieces of dreams, there is always a slight chance of actually getting back to them through force of will or some cunning steering of the subconscious. In this case I had lost all connection to the voice on the phone. She was gone, completely, utterly gone.
. . . .
A week later she called again. A coal dark night, except for the solitary street lamp. Barely one in the morning.
"I didn't call at a reasonable hour because I didn't want some wife or girlfriend picking up."
"I live alone."
"I figured you for a lonely sort."
"Not really."
"You're a touchy sort anyway. That’s cool. I'm touchy too. At work nobody says anything positive about what I'm doing for a few days, I'm sure they hate me and I'm going to lose my job. Actually I'm more perfectionistic than any of them. Jump right in if any of this sounds familiar."
"Well," I said, "It isn't that I'm perfectionistic. I just work hard so I won't get found out."
"What might they find?"
"That they don't need me."
"Ah." Her tone was interested, not mocking.
I was telling this voice on the other end of the phone things I wouldn't have said to anyone at work, perhaps not to anyone I knew.
She observed, "You work harder now than ever before, harder than, say, you worked in school."
She was right.
"Exactly."
"You're interesting," she said, sounding genuinely interested.
For an hour that night we talked about work, how it affects us, defines us. Then she hung up and was gone.
I sat up in bed for a while and finally slept. I felt tired all the next day.
When she called a week later, we talked about friends. I awakened quickly, slid up against the bed wall, comfortable, like when you have time for a real talk with an old friend. The clock showed slightly past midnight.
"Can you trust your friends?" she asked right away.
"That's what friends are for."
"So can you?"
"Can you?"
"I'm not sure I can, not totally. You're having real trouble with this one, aren't you?"
And we were into a long talk about friendship that night. The next week the conversations were shorter, but she called three times. I was tired during the days, but pleasantly tired, not dragging around. My phone then didn’t have the automatic call back option, and I still didn't even know her phone number.
. . . .
It was on the fifth or sixth call, extraordinary we waited so long, that we talked about possibly meeting. We were both wary, instinctively not wanting to harm or sully something that had taken on a special meaning for both of us. We approached the subject but came to no conclusion.
It was at the end of the next conversation that she said, "Tomorrow night. Leave the door unlocked.”
My throat dry. "Yes?"
"Go to bed. Turn out the lights. Whatever you normally do."
We hung up.
I had never given her my address, but once I had described the winding street in the hills where I lived in a pink stucco apartment complex from the forties. Unit C. She said she was familiar with street and knew the building. But mine was not the only one of its kind. I couldn’t call her back with the address. I still didn't even know her phone number.
That night I left the door unlocked, went to bed at my usual time, read for ten minutes, couldn't concentrate. I turned out the lights and lay back with my eyes wide open, hardly expecting to fall asleep. Amazingly, after a while, I did.
I didn't know what time it was when I heard the front door being gently closed. The wooden floorboards creaked as someone with a feathery tread tiptoed across the living room.
My eyes were adjusted to the dark, and illumination from the moon fell through the window, so I could see her shape as she appeared in the doorway to the bedroom. Her silhouette at least was perfect. She crossed quickly and lightly across the carpet, stepped out of her shoes, and in one fluid movement, lifted the top sheet and slipped between the covers. The rippled current of cool air she created brushed across my cheek. In the few seconds she took to glide across the room I had seen a person of uncomplicated, natural grace and ease.
"Well, buona notte," she said finally.
"Hi."
The room had a new scent, delicate, not flowery or perfumed, but warm, clean and pleasant.
In the next indeterminate period of minutes and hours, time changed, both expanded and slowed. Time was space, and space was time. I was aware of everything and aware of nothing but her. Her hair dark and soft, her tummy flat, her skin, cool at first, was faintly sweet, supple honey. I remained patiently content with as much experience as chose to present itself to consciousness.
At one point she started to laugh.
"What?"
"What if I have the wrong apartment?"
"Well, sure. There could be two women in this neighborhood tonight calling on people they've never met, and two guys waiting for them."
"Okay, good. Only you would say something like that."
The night then took on a rhythm, part of the time talking, most of the time abandoning ourselves to each other's bodies with a lack of inhibition I had never before known. Physically as well as with our words, we shared the intimacy of strangers, as people seated together for a train or plane ride can sometimes reveal in a hour or two the deepest most personal aspects of their lives. If there was a warning in this, I didn't heed it.
We would rest, arms around each other. Without prompting one would begin a long story about something that happened in elementary school or high school, and the other would listen, not wanting the story to be hurried or slowed, no impulse to interrupt or comment, absorbing as many details as possible, as if we had waited all our lives to receive this information.
I must have dozed because my eyes opened before dawn as a single bird stirred and chirped, and I saw her rising from the bed. As I started to get up, she lay a hand gently on my shoulder.
"Shh," she whispered, kissed me lightly, and glided out of the room.
And – I watched her go.
You're thinking I should have jumped up, run after her. We should have arranged our next meeting or at least a phone call.
But there had been no past or future, no calculation, no plans. So, yes, I let her go. It didn’t occur to me to follow her. After such a perfect night, I was not thinking ahead, although had I thought about it, I'm sure it would not have seemed possible that we would not be together, let alone never meet again.
But we haven't.
. . . .
I fantasize how I might have gone after her as the light of dawn unfolded. I imagine her telling me why she had to leave as she did, why that had to be the end because we couldn't top that night, exactly because it was totally disconnected from the rest of our lives, that it would mean less if we tried to repeat or hold on to it. In my fantasy I always argue strenuously against this point of view.
But she didn't call, and I had absolutely no way to contact her.
I had only frustration, and a powerful sense of wonder that it could have happened at all.
Maybe that is why, although I never found out her phone number or knew her name and, although I have had long, worthwhile, and rewarding relationships since then, that single night we had together was so much more than just a pleasant memory. That night somehow, profoundly, miraculously and for the rest of my life, made me a better person. Wherever she is, I hope she knows that, and that she feels the same.
UNDO REDO'S BUSINESS PORTFOLIO
the world's most comprehensive career development training for creative artists
creative industries leadership course and business incubator
an indie video game development studio where we work as management consultants
systems, automation and de-administration for small, medium and arts businesses
offers a massive script bank, live shows, video resources and more
is the globe's largest acting competition, often called the Olympics for Actors
provides a unique challenge for filmmakers and actors
Coming soon...
top secret for now, but we have an awesome new project on its way
UNDO REDO ENTERTAINMENT'S BUSINESS PORTFOLIO
the world's most comprehensive career development training for creative artists
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creative industries leadership course and business incubator
arrow_drop_down_circle
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an indie video game development studio where we work as management consultants
arrow_drop_down_circle
Divider Text
an indie video game development studio where we work as management consultants
arrow_drop_down_circle
Divider Text
offers a massive script bank, live shows, video resources and more
arrow_drop_down_circle
Divider Text
is the globe's largest acting competition, often called the Olympics for Actors
arrow_drop_down_circle
Divider Text
provides a unique challenge for filmmakers and actors
arrow_drop_down_circle
Divider Text
Coming soon...
top secret for now, but we have an awesome new project on its way
