Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose 2024 – First Place
first
There is a woman rotting in the front room of the Torea Street house.
Because she likes to listen, she has heard people use this phrase colloquially. Sunday? Oh, I mostly just rotted in bed. But half her face has fallen away, revealing a broad smile of grey-white bone, so she feels she has the greatest claim to the maxim.
Most of the time she spends asleep. The sun does interesting things through the grimy windows, playing with the curtains, the spirals of gold-flecked dust, the crack that widens in the bottom corner of the glass every time a gust of wind or earthquake rocks the house.
She would like to go to the library, which she has seen on her midnight walks. The building glows, beckons, under the sharp West Coast moon. She would like to remember who she is, and what ties her to this tiny town, this…
Shithole she hears in her head, with a crack like a whip. Half-laughing. Not her own voice –a man’s voice.
With a slow sort of understanding, she realises she is having a memory. Remembering a man’s voice that went tender and fuzzy at the seams with laughter. A voice which normally had edges, like his… like his face, his weathered, corner-y face; she remembers that face, his hard drawl melting into laughter, and the elegant bruising corner of his elbow. So sharp. So tender.
The woman rubs her ribs distractedly, and feels them give a little under her touch. Probably, she’ll eventually collapse inward like a potato got the rot. Hopefully she won’t still be feeling anything, however obliquely, by that point.
Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more! She wants to laugh, but she doesn’t have the organs. She wants to cry, but those are missing too. Some days and months I hear them two words knocking inside me –what for? That’s what I’m driving at. Oh! I don’t mean only the spuds and the kid…
Exhausted by her decaying body and the impenetrable nonsense of her own mind, the woman curls up against the thin wall and sleeps.
second
Mrs John Underwood leaves the TV on when she goes to have her midday lie-down, so the thing in the corner creeps out of the shadows to watch Billy Graham.
The thing likes the singing: America, America, God shed his grace on thee! The thing also enjoys the funny acoustic trick when Billy is at the big seething stadiums – when he says those grand strings of thees and thous in his fiercely convicted, nearly-fatherly Southern voice and, for a second, the speakers bounce that voice around like they’re whispering to each other in tinny tones. Whisper whisper whisper, did you hear what he said, about the tiger coming to lie down in the living room?
Brotherhood is another one of Billy’s Big Concepts. It’s a striking idea, and the thing would like time and space to consider it properly. But Mrs Underwood, Dawn, call me Dawny honey, everybody does, always walks back into the room when Billy is only just getting to his second point, and then she shudders with some unseen presence and starts casting paranoid glances over her shoulder, which means the thing has to go back behind the door and never gets a chance to think it over. And then, of course, John and the kids get home and the thing can barely string a thought together.
But the thing would like to. Oh, the thing yearns.
third
The worst thing about the house his father grew up in isn’t the mould. Nor is it the cloying, tangible dust, which he thinks he could probably lick from the air and taste on his tongue. The worst thing is not the carpet that peels and the roof that leaks, or even the time he found a fizzing, oozing jar of pickled baby onions in the bathroom cabinet.
The worst thing is the back room, where Zia Gia paints her statues.
It’s markedly cooler than the rest of the house; light-filled, very quiet. Huge, jumbled carcasses of blowflies accumulate in the windowsills.
Once, when he was very young, he ventured into the room on a dare from his sister. There, a round-cheeked, sheet-white Mary loomed over a fork-bearded Jesus. Another Saviour watched him from a plaster cradle. Three identical Christs drooped in exhausted agony from a Calvary of crosses on an empty bookshelf.
Zia Gia, Zia Gia, he’d cried, bolting from the room. Their eyes, their eyes are following me!
Yes dear, she’d said, unruffled. Sometimes they do that.
fourth
Over the railway bridge to the old part of town, taking a sharp turn at Beppe’s, you suddenly find yourself in the astringent hush of bush. Spindle-fingered trees reach for each other overhead. Leaf litter rots underfoot. Up and up you go, drawn by the promise of the view.
And then you emerge on the bald crown of hill, surrounded by granite boulders, town spread out like a fortune below you. Beyond that, acres of farmland before the hard blue line of mountains. Before you is the little temple to the dead.
Set on a raised concrete slab, it is sort of house-shaped, but with four yawning arches cut out of each side. 1914-1918 in red numerals below the pointed tin roof. Sunlight falling through the glassless windows, wooden benches set into the walls. Inside, names and names and names. Simcocks, Donovan, R and S Clunes. All four Eedy boys.
This is not the terrible thing. The terrible thing happens once the sun has painted the town pink, and then deepest blue, and the sharp stars have prickled to life overhead, and a storm is visible as a distant line of clouds in the bowl of the valley.
The terrible thing is the sighing. You think it’s just the wind in the trees, but there is no wind yet, no gentle conversational rustle of leaves. There is just a long, exhausted exhale, and the sound of shuffling feet. The clink of a belt, or a harness. A sigh, an inhale. Anxious, overlapping sounds, and the sense of movement.
You yourself do not dare move. A dried poppy, tucked behind Rizzato, 1952-1973, South Vietnam falls, and takes a long time to reach the ground. Under your feet, the earth wants you to remember something. When sheet lightning splashes across the plains, you think you see the ghosts of trees.
—
Note: Misquote in first from ‘The Woman at the Store’, in Something Childish and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield (Constable & Co Ltd, 1924)
Gilbert Ostini isn’t from Wellington, but he loves it here very much. He has a BA (Hons) in English Literature and History from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, and spends a lot of time thinking and writing about trees. His novel-in-progress features big haunted landscapes and small knotty social lives.