Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose 2024 – Long List
Diana Crawford is so familiar with the route to her childhood home that the car nearly drives itself. Turning left, she chats to her parents’ ghosts.
“Mum, are you still giving him the silent treatment up there? I’ve emptied the kitchen. Why six teapots? Sorry, Dad. It’s the workshop today. Everything’s got to go.”
Parking on the weed-infested driveway, she dodges puddles to the back door. Inside, the familiar aroma of stale cigarettes mixed with mould greets her. The house feels as empty as a dried-out kina. She navigates around stacked cardboard boxes to the bench and makes herself a coffee in the mug she bought her parents for their golden wedding anniversary. The print is worn, but the numerals 1948 are still visible beneath the photo of Dad’s stiff pose with Mum, who is clutching an oversized bouquet of lilies across her belly.
Diana charges through a downpour to Dad’s workshop, the mug in one hand and a key in the other. The wooden shed has repurposed white French doors and a large side window. Above the lintel, a sign reads: NO ENTRY. HAZARDOUS MATERIAL INSIDE. Dad bought it at a garage sale when she was a teenager, claiming it was a joke, but even before it went up, she’d never dared enter. A bushy lilac tree stands by the window, with three sparrows huddled on a lower branch. The memory of planting the sapling as a child surfaces, along with Mum’s warning: “Be careful with the roots. You don’t want it growing up stunted.”
The smell of brush cleaner and enamel paint catches the back of her throat as she enters the workshop. Rain pounding on the tin roof sounds like a battle drum. She sets the mug down on the workbench and surveys Dad’s secret cave, a shrine to his obsession with building ships in bottles. Pinned around the walls are plans for model boats alongside photographs of real vessels.
“So much bloody stuff,” she mumbles.
A return trip to the kitchen through the rain to collect cardboard boxes, rubbish bags, and tape soaks her. Back in the shed, she flops into Dad’s chair and mops her face with a cloth from the bench, immediately regretting it – the rag reeks of turpentine.
A powerful magnifying glass sits on a flexible stand on the workbench beside an almost completed model of a lifeboat. White and orange lifebelts, shaped like cereal loops, lie on the deck alongside fine strands of thread meant to tie them in place. She scratches her chin, trying to remember the cereal’s name. Is it Cheerios? She’s never had a reason to buy food for children. Next to the lifebelts is a model man the size of her little fingernail. She picks him up and pops him inside the cabin.
“Dad, if it keeps on raining like this, I’ll join you in there.
Another image surfaces – Dad whispering as he kissed her goodnight: It’s you and me against the dragon, kiddo. She’d spent years of her childhood in her bedroom while he pottered out here. Later, she learned he often slept in the shed. Diana tries in vain to haul up a memory of affection between her parents.
Lifeboat in hand, she marvels at the details. Dad’s eyesight was perfect almost until he died. This unfinished vessel is unnamed, but he called others after the women in their family tree. The imposing battleship Phyllis was named after Mum. A sturdy tugboat sported Diana along its side in silver script. When she’d asked why her name was on that boat and not a fancy galleon, Dad had spent an evening telling her how helpful tugboats were. They kept larger vessels from running aground. Appeased, she’d begged Mum to let her take the bottle to school to show her friends, but Mum had forbidden it. A clumsy girl like you….
She unlatches the doors of a blue cabinet beside the workbench. Inside, three full-length shelves sit above a small chest of drawers. The top drawer bulges with boat plans. Rocking it from side to side to free it, she yanks it open and dumps the contents into a black rubbish bag. Then she notices a metal cash box on the highest shelf, the size of a loaf of bread. On tiptoes, she pulls it forward with her fingertips. It’s lighter than she imagined when it drops into her hands, but the lid is locked.
“Where’s the key, Dad?”
She rifles through the desk drawer and finds a key behind the pack of HB pencils right at the back. Her pulse quickens as she inserts it into the lock and turns it.
Raising the lid, she mumbles, “What have we here?”
The box is full of airmail envelopes bound with a white ribbon. Diana unties the knot and frees the letters. “Who sent these?”
The top envelope has a PO box address. She fans them out, noting that they all have the same address, except for the last one, which was sent to her parents’ home. Each, neatly slit, contains a letter. She opens the last one first. The faded writing in blue ink on tissue-thin paper is still legible.
In the top corner are Asian characters and the word Tokyo. She reads:
Sweet Charles,
As if snagged by a fishhook, she sits bolt upright. Never has she heard Dad called that.
A faded black-and-white picture peeks out of the envelope. It shows an infant girl propped up on a blanket, laughing as she holds a flower towards a man. Diana gasps. It’s Dad. The child has dark hair tied in two high ponytails. Her wrap-over dress, with three-quarter sleeves, is a tiny kimono patterned with an oversized daisy print. On the back of the photograph, in Dad’s hand: June 1949. Miyoko, ten months. Diana skims along the letter, takes in the short lines, searches for a signature at the end of the letter.
Always love you.
Kazuko
She rips out more letters and finds they are all from this mystery woman. Out of one floats a pressed flower, which crumbles beneath her fingers. The text reveals it was a violet from Kazuko’s garden, and states that in the Japanese language of flowers, violet means ‘small bliss’. The writer says the purple blooms remind her of their summer together.
With a slack jaw, Diana slumps. Dad once mentioned a contract job in post-war Japan, assisting with the rebuild. The coffee mug in front of her catches her eye. 1948, the year of her parents’ wedding and her birth, seems to pulsate. The room swims. Rain lashes the window and beats on the roof. Outside, a lone sparrow in the lilac tree, clutches a shaky branch.
Was the switch to a PO box because Mum found this letter? Diana recalls discussing divorce with Mum when her best friends, Gerald and Pam, split. Salty as ever, Mum had condemned them with the words, “Till death do us part has no get-out clause.” Mum never spoke to either again.
“Did you know about Miyoko, Mum?”
In the far corner of the workshop, a shelf unit displays Dad’s finished ships in bottles. Among old galleons, a Japanese junk stands out with red sails. She crosses the shed’s floor, lifts it, and searches for a name. The lettering is too small, and the lighting too dim, so she uses the magnifying glass. Kazuko is painted in gold. Two figures stand side-by-side on the deck. One wears a kimono, the other is a smaller version of the figure in the lifeboat. Leaving the bottle on the workbench, she grabs her tugboat from the display. It has no crew, but she sees a life raft near the rear for the first time. Her legs wobble. “Was that your get-away boat, Dad?”
Reaching for the back of the chair to steady herself, the bottle topples. It shatters and silver shards sparkle the carpet like minnows. Panic floods her whole body. She bursts into tears. “Sorry, Dad. It was an accident.”
She glances at the tool board. All of Dad’s pliers and tools hang within red outlines. And then she sees it. That’s all her parents had ever been – angry outlines.
“The bastards.”
She rips out more letters, trying to piece together Dad’s questions from Kazuko’s responses. In one, she mentions her by name: there is her name, Diana, written in an unknown hand. In one, there is the mention of money, and gratitude for what has been sent. In yet another, the question of divorce – and her mother’s name, also in the same hand: Phyllis.
Diana snatches the man out of the lifeboat and squeezes him. Through gritted teeth, she tells his inscrutable face, “I visited you every day after Mum died. You must have known I’d find these letters. Why didn’t you say something?”
She gulps, her skin clammy. Now, she’s floating above herself, looking down from the ceiling. She focuses on the Japanese junk bottle. Snatching a hammer from the tool board, she swings it.
“All…” thump, “those…” thump, “years…” thump, “spent trying to please you! Bliss, was it? Well, what about me?”
Diana hurls the mug across the shed. It shatters, spraying cold coffee over the boat plans on the wall. Storming out, she startles the remaining sparrow, which flies off in search of a secure roost.
Sue Kingham is an award-winning author of poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and both fiction and non-fiction works. Her flash fiction has been featured on Flash Frontier and in Bath and New Zealand anthologies. In 2018, her piece ‘Swan Song’ won the North & South short-short story competition. Writing under the pen name Beth Beamish, Sue published Dyslexia: Wrestling with an Octopus in 2020, with an updated audiobook edition in 2023. Sue is currently writing historical novels.