Ross Closure

Contemporary Black British Short Stories
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-84523-329-7
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

We have always valued the short story as a way to make sense of the world, and our place in it. This anthology by leading Black and Asian British writers is filled with stories, which, like life, rarely end in the way we might expect... JACOB ROSS, KADIJA SESAY, SENI SENEVIRATNE, LEONE ROSS, DESIREE REYNOLDS, SAI MURRAY, RAMAN MUNDAIR, BERNARDINE EVARISTO, MONICA ALI, DINESH ALLIRAJAH, MULI AMAYE, LYNNE E. BLACKWOOD, JUDITH BRYAN, JACQUELINE CLARKE, JACQUELINE CROOKS, FRED D'AGUIAR, SYLVIA DICKINSON, GAYLENE GOULD, MICHELLE INNISS, VALDA JACKSON, PETE KALU, PATRICE LAWRENCE, JENNIFER NANSUBUGA MAKUMBI, TARIQ MEHMOOD, CHANTAL OAKES, KAREN ONOJAIFE, KOYE OYEDEJI, LOUISA ADJOA PARKER, HANA RIAZ, AKILA RICHARDS, AYESHA SIDDIQI, MAHSUDA SNAITH

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ross, Jacob

Leseproben

KAREN ONOJAIFE

HERE BE MONSTERS Arike’s Daily Plan of Action: Drink herbal tea Ten minutes of each of the following, every morning:
a) meditation
b) yoga
c) writing positive thoughts in journal
d) looking in mirror while repeating positive affirmations
e) listening to life-affirming songs Treat others as you would like to be treated Surround yourself with positive things and people Engage in a spiritual practice Exercise! 2 likes, 0 comments * It’s the summer. You start to think about your chakras. You are committed to becoming your best self. You are not going to care that everyone else is getting married or getting promoted, or having babies or buying houses. When friends tell you their good news, you will simply smile and then send them gift baskets of baked goods because your heart is a lighthouse, as opposed to say, a black dwarf star, colder than Alaska. You make an action plan and you post it on this blog, for the sake of accountability. You have precisely ten followers, so if you mess it all up, hardly anyone will know. You pick a Monday morning to start. By the time you’ve had your tea, meditated, yoga’d, journaled, affirmed yourself and listened to upbeat songs, you’re late for work. You dash into the office, stressed as fuck and you imagine your chakras curling like week-old lettuce. “What would Oprah do?” you ask Tieu Ly when you call her later that day. “She would write a cheque to her hurt feelings, dreams and aspirations,” Tieu Ly says. This is an example of why you don’t tell Tieu Ly everything and why you most certainly will not be sharing the details of your action plan. Your best friend can be an emotional terrorist. * Things Arike is scared of: Dying Dying alone Dying before having the chance to clear browser history 5 likes, 2 comments * It’s still summer. One of your teeth just crumbles in your mouth while you are eating a Toblerone. You are forced to go to the dentist for the first time in years and he tells you that the tooth has to be extracted. You are consternated because: a) who wants to hear that kind of thing and b) your dentist is very good looking. It seems cruel that the one time that you have a legitimate reason to be close to someone like this, he is charged with the task of looking into your decaying mouth. “Let’s talk about your diet,” he says. You don’t feel like talking about the cakes, sweets and chocolate that you eat and eat every day, but only when you are by yourself. That you eat until your stomach is a tight, anxious drum and your mind is a flat, sleepy haze. Besides, you never throw up. That would mean you have a problem. “I like the odd sweet every now and then,” you say. He swivels away in his chair, in an attempt to disguise his eye roll, while you wonder when you developed a taste for wildly pointless lies. He listens to Shostakovich while he works. As he creates a temporary filling, you are already thinking what to tell your friends. You know you will make something up, because to explain that your teeth are rotting out of your head because of something that you did is too forthright and truthful. * Arike’s online dictionary “Leap and the net will appear” – an utterly meaningless phrase. Speakers of sentences such as this should be bestowed a swift chop to the throat. 7 likes, 0 comments * Your chakras will not realign themselves and so you turn to self-help books, but these tend to make your chest grow tight with rage. The books all seem to have been written by and for those with no concept of real life. It’s easy to have an epiphany concerning one’s spiritual purpose while residing at an ashram, herding goats on an Italian hillside or building wells in a West African village. You are yet to ascertain how any of the “lessons” these authors impart can be applied to your existence in a poky flat in Haringey that you can barely afford. It seems to involve a lot of magical thinking and the last time that worked for you was when you were six years old. You happened to say out loud that you were hungry and your father, who was passing by, agreed to make you a cheese sandwich. “It’s not you,” Tieu Ly says later that evening, when she calls you from LA. “The people who write these books don’t come from immigrant families.” You think of your own parents, whose thirst for risk was exhausted five decades ago when they crossed an ocean to come to live in this cold place. The stuff they went through they barely ever talk about. But if you were to tell them now that you wanted to resign from work so that you could write? Fiction, of all things? All your aunts and uncles in Nigeria would agree that you had murdered your parents. Like you, Tieu Ly did what she was told (in her case be a doctor, in your case, an accountant), as opposed to what she wanted. Still, she consoled herself by moving overseas to practice medicine. That way, she can tell herself that their victory (and by implication, her defeat) was only partial. As old as you are, you still don’t like to disappoint your parents and they are happy not to be disappointed. See? It all works like it’s supposed to. * Arike is: not in love with the modern world 4 likes, 0 comments * There are so many things that you love about having a job, save for the actual job itself. The office is That Place and your life outside it is Everything Else. You spend between 8 to 11 hours a day at That Place and a lot of the time you think you manage it pretty well. By manage you mean that you are able to maintain a reasonable façade despite the fact that you feel you are on the verge of fucking up on an epic scale at any given moment. This is what you are thinking about as you make your way to work this morning, and so you almost walk past the two kids squalling on the pavement, a worried woman standing next to them. They are two little black kids and the woman, white, is in her early twenties. She asks them questions in a soft voice but this just makes them cry even louder. You’re tempted to keep walking because you’re already late, but you imagine your nephew and niece standing there and you come to a halt. They are brother and sister, both under ten. You work out that they got off at the wrong bus stop and so have no idea how to get to school. They don’t know their address, they don’t know anyone’s phone number; all they have in their satchels are sandwiches and colouring books. They are holding hands like something out of a fairytale, except there are no breadcrumbs in a forest, just dog shit on asphalt and the relentless scream of traffic along the main road. Eventually, you and the woman decide to call the police. The kids have stopped crying now, but the older one, the boy, has a look on his face that says he knows he’s going to catch a world of trouble for getting lost. You want to fold him into you until he stops worrying, but are aware this would be alarming. So, instead, you tell him about the time you got lost when you were a kid and how you thought you’d get in trouble too, but that your mum was so happy to see you, it’s like she forgot to be angry. He doesn’t look reassured, so you tell him not to worry, but then you don’t know his life. You reflect that it’s adults coming on like they know everything that leaves kids fucked up. The amount of lies kids must hear before they’re ten years old, just so an adult can have the satisfaction of making them feel better! Or for the adult to make themselves feel better. Because, maybe, that’s what you wanted more than anything else. Not to have to think about what might happen to that kid when he got home. The police finally arrive – two white men, one old and one young, in a squad car with tinted windows. They are nice enough but it makes you wince when they make jokes about putting the kids in the back of the car. The little girl smiles the way kids smile when adults say funny stuff that they don’t understand, and the boy just looks up at the clouds out of the corner of his eye. The officers make more jokes about the kids being excited to go for a ride, and perhaps they are, though maybe these kids have heard bad things about the police and maybe ten years from now the boy will be stopped and searched every other time he steps out of the house. You think that maybe you’re the crazy one for thinking these things, seeing that the three other adults in this situation are just standing around and laughing because problem solved, job done. Back at your desk you get a client call. You give out your e-mail address, which includes your first name. You spell it out for what must be the thousandth time this year. “Oh, that’s a nice name!” the client says. He asks you where it’s from and you tell him. When he asks you how long you’ve been here, you’re confused. “At this firm?” you ask. “No, no, in the country?’ You laugh as you tell him “all your life” because he’s just an old man being curious, a man who is always sweet to you on the phone but there’s something about the exchange that leaves you sour. You end up snapping at Seth, the new guy,...