There is a storybook. All of us are in it.
Here are some tales.
Hello
Conversation with a disapproving Mimi
https://www.bloodhoneylit.com/fiction/conversation-with-disapproving-mimi
If I explained why the dog ran away you would not be looking at me with that hitch in your lip. Arms a bridge truss at your chest like you think I might bark. I might bark.
Sometimes things grow
What was it
T is for Tino
When Tino called in the sharks they were ready. They’d practiced so many times. The circle, the dip. Synchronized finning to the music of Bolero. Everyone watched the sharks so no one watched Tino. That’s how he released the swans who never stayed in order no matter how much they practiced. They flapped and snapped at whatever was closest so people scuttled like roaches and Tino was invisible as always.
Baton twirlers, sash girls and red-cheeked boys with guns
Madelaine, Because we want to grow up, Families complicate things
These three little stories were first published in Leon Literary. https://leonliteraryreview.com/eirene-gentle-madelaine/
A little god on a cold morning, dreaming
A tiny bubble first published in Ink in Thirds, March 2025.
Flower tongue
https://inksweatandtears.co.uk/eirene-gentle
Daffodils hate being shoved in corners. When forced they emit a peculiar scent, part butter, part ulcer. I wear yellow shoes because I don’t like corners either but I am frequently left in them, and so I exude a peculiar smell. You sense it even from outside and I feel you hesitate and turn away.
How do they Sing and Tornado has the last dance
The calls of their last days and hours reverberate endlessly through the buildings and trees, carried on the wings of any buzzing thing that survives the heat. I am sometimes beak and sometimes claw, sometimes two legs like the fallen
Violet
No one warned me of this thirst. Your throat bulges like a baby bird, my chin is streaked red and there’s no one to feed us.
https://www.roifaineantpress.com/post/because-we-don-t-know-how-to-lose-violet-by-eirene-gentle
Because we don’t know how to lose
Because we bend. Like trees. Flow like rivers, know a whole vocabulary of smiles, such range of choice flight freeze and fawn because we don’t. Know how to lose.
https://www.roifaineantpress.com/post/because-we-don-t-know-how-to-lose-violet-by-eirene-gentle
Happy endings
Did you ache to bear sorrow for me? You should have taken it with you then. I never asked you to carry me, I break enough things. Just a place to crawl into, like the space between breaths. The luxury of quiet outside contusion. The tang of pine in the sound after thunder.
On grief
https://heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/grief-unpeopled-spaces-by-irene-gentle
I read up on grief long before anyone close to me died. I wanted to prepare. Then they died and I was not prepared.
I was lucky to live quite a while before death came knocking. When it did, it came in packs. My father-in-law, who I was close to. My dog. My brother. My mother. My job. But this is mostly about my brother and mother.
All my life I loved my brother unreasonably. We left home at about the same time, me the youngest at 17, my sister at 22 and Jim in the middle. By the time he died we had not lived under the same roof for decades.
He was complicated even as a child, shouldering an old-fashioned man of the house role before puberty, an awkward fit for a scrawny, freckled kid but he had my mother’s unwavering devotion and glowing charisma. People of all ages were drawn to him, bestowing in him the hubris of someone widely adored without trying. The only person I’m sure he loved is his son, who arrived many years later. To this day I don’t know if he loved me back. Nor do I care. With or without love he took what he saw as his responsibilities seriously and I was among them.
A series of knocks kicked his hubris down. He became ill. His death was neither operatically prolonged nor sudden. There was indication of illness, six weeks in the hospital, then death. I spent those weeks with him, watching him want to live for his son. His valour rocked even his hospital doctor. It ennobled him, and awed and brutalized me.
He died and grief began.
It’s idiotic to compare the love of people and a dog but my dog is one of the few things I also loved unreasonably and without need for reciprocity. She was with us almost 18 years. As she declined, unable to walk, skin and bones, a slip of herself, I pre-mourned. She had a heroic will, a stubbornness of self even as her body melted. I grieved alongside her while she diminished. I feel the loss of her to this day. Her absence is like an extra part of me. An addition, not a subtraction.
I could not pre-grieve my brother. He did not intend to die when he entered that hospital and I did not intend to lose him. Hours of quiet watchfulness, observing every breath or sign of discomfort or want, laced with adrenaline. There was sleep but no rest. Quiet but no calm. Six weeks of the eternal moment before the finger pulls the trigger. Adrenaline with no outlet erodes you from inside.
It was just the two of us when he died. In my mind it felt like the depth of night but in fact it was 10:30 p.m. My husband picked me up from the hospital where they’d placed a white dove on his door, their signal the patient is no more. We stopped for takeout before returning to the room we’d rented for the last months to be by my brother’s side. This the first of a new landscape, eating when he is dead.
Adrenaline that wears off leaves an emptiness. To sleep I picture myself fading into a black river, thick and viscous. I carry the image with me through the day. My only comfort is submerging into this thick black river. It works for a bit until the river wants me out; I can lower onto it but not inside it. So I float along it instead like an Ophelia. I dream of obsidian without knowing what obsidian in. When I learn it’s smooth, glossy blackness is cooled lava I picture melting into a wall of it, becoming invisible. Grief is different for everyone. Some want the world to stop but I wanted it to flow on without me. Let me melt into darkness, alive but unbidden, unneeded, unseen, unbothered, untethered, unavailable. Let me watch from the shadow with my eyes closed. Let me be still while time moves. Eventually that ejects me too.
Until it happened I did not realize the physicality of grief. It manifests in me like an illness, ever-present nausea, a swallower of breath. Movement is effort, any movement. But the helpful guides say it is necessary so I move. I walk, I do yoga, light weights. I meditate. I spend hours trying not to get worse. There is so much work to be at this level of nonfunction.
My mother loved many in her life, her parents, her brother, her children. Her former husband (our father), banded with hurt even decades after the divorce. But mostly she loved her son. They were a unit that could not be severed.
In the months between his death and her turn in the hospital he died in, we grew closer. The relationship between she and Jim an invisible wall the rest of us couldn’t breach and because they had each other, we didn’t try too hard. With his physical absence the wall came down and small communications flowed, emails of beautiful things, photos of flowers or birds or trees taken on those daily walks to stay in place. She was an immensely practical person with a whimsy, a poetry, a love of joy and things that shimmer and glint in the light. I found in her someone I could share those things with. It was a walk through grief but also a walk closer to each other.
From the window of her crowded hospital room less than five months later she can see the ward where her son lived his last weeks. She tells nurses and doctors about it. My son was here too.
Her illness, a small stroke, reveals the surprise of a well-developed cancer. A naturally curious person with an intellect and interest that in a different time would have led to a different life made her view her condition with a kind of surprised awe. She chose no treatment including food, a route that should have seen her wither in a matter of double-digit days. But she died after one.
Grief doubled. Grief complicated, they call it. A complicated grief.
The helpful guides say to keep the deaths separated, to mourn them individually. But it can be hard to untwine. The nausea, barely diminished in those five months, slams back. The heaviness. The impossibility of movement.
It’s approaching a year now since my mother died, almost 18 months since my brother did. I grieve them entwined and separately. I miss her every day, I want to tell her something I saw or did or talk to her of baseball or current events. My brother is less often but is disembowelling when present. Like a movie in which the character is thrust through the gut with a sword and when the blade is pulled out blood jets out. There is no softening it. When I don’t think of his death, the blade remains in me. When I do, it withdraws and blood tumbles like a river.
Every grief is different. My dog’s absence is like an extra part of me. My brother’s is flesh hacked out of me, a void with no hope of closing, like a cartoon character with a big round hole where the cannon blew through. My mother’s absence is a shimmer of undelivered thoughts and messages, a conversation with no one at the other end. This may be why my readings on grief were futile, no grief is the same. There’s a loneliness even talking with my sister, her experience of our brother and mother is not the same as mine, her grief s as real and as different as those perceptions.
Grief reveals contours you didn’t know existed. At a small but significant moment of my brother’s estate, by no means the end of this harrowing and repellant process in which the person dies again and again and again with each account to close, bill to pay, passport to destroy, I was overcome. Tears in the bank where his account was closed, on the street, down the sidewalks leading home. So this is sorrow, I thought. This is the difference between sorrow and sadness. I looked it up after and there is a difference, like between pond and ocean. I had known sadness but not sorrow. And now I do.
Helpful guides suggest leaning on faith. Afterlife, reincarnation, the presence of ancestors, angels or god, I was willing to accept any of the possibilities most my life. But an openness to all, I learn, is a belief in none. Maybe they’re in heaven also means maybe there’s no heaven. Maybe they’ll come back in a different life means maybe they won’t. Maybe they’re a presence around us means maybe they’re not. I want to think of them happy somewhere. Of course I do. But I find no solace in what I don’t feel. There is no ritual or path to follow.
That finality, I learn, is an agony. Living is an endless stream of chances to fix things, change things, have another go, make another start, see the sun, feel the breeze, hear the call of a cardinal, recover from that blunder, get over that slight, make up for that hurt. I yearn for my brother and mother to have the chance for mundane happiness, moments of warmth, love, even a good cup of coffee. If afterlives and reincarnation are man-made fantasies, this is why. It’s the redemptive necessity after a life of hardship to receive contentment, a life of worry to know ease. Grief is not just the loss of them but the loss for them. What they lose in not being able to try again. Grief jolts you with an electric awareness of the importance of being happy at the time when happiness is most out of reach.
Helpful guides say you are changed by grief. You will never be who you were before. This in my experience is entirely true. It has changed me fundamentally. My fairly deep sense of self and belief in my core competency evaporated. Sometimes I still speak with authority or find myself taking charge like I used to but it’s muscle memory. The ache of a phantom limb.
Words I used to live by, like truth, justice, good are like spilled jars. I don’t know what they mean. In this is opportunity, to redefine. If I don’t know anything anymore including myself, my job is to find out.
I’ve written all my life. I’ve been a journalist and editor my entire career. But words dried up the first year of loss. They’ve returned but with a different purpose. The statue of justice, blindfolded with sword and scales, is tattooed on my arm. The words often used in the act of journalism are martial. Journalists are frontline. The pursuit of attention is a battlefield. News is breaking. Editing is cutting. Change happens when those in power have their back to the wall. The arena of journalism was my fight, my sword, for many years, and it’s impossible for me to think of it as anything but a battle. Journalism needs to evolve, and is, and so do I.
Today my sword is put away, I think forever. I’m taking up the slower tools of planting and building. I won’t extract but will look for ways to add. I won’t appeal to the intellect but to our humanity, the one thing that may still pull us back from this brink. I lost faith not only in myself but also in the human mind, I’ve seen where that takes us. I hope to find some faith again in a common heart. I’m starting from nothing, but I’m starting. If there is a gift of grief I haven’t found it but through grief is a glimpse of the gift of life. In pure stubborn existence there is the chance to redo, reassess, reorder, retreat, regroup, restart. Another word for life is again. The sun rises again, you breathe again. Again is the burden and gift of living, unbearable, amazing.
Irene Gentle is a writer, editor and journalist based in Toronto, Canada. Former editor in chief of the Toronto Star, words of a different kind currently in The Eunoia Review, The Hooghly Review, Litro Magazine and JAKE.
About writing, with The Hooghly Review
That stupid song
Where all the broken things go
Crash
He drives away again, always again. Me at the window, waving. Good girls wave at windows to show love. Words streak like tears, like ache, like why. Why does he go?
Work, she says. To buy you shoes, she says, and complains he doesn’t give her enough to pay for them. Soon she’ll fade into a grief that doesn’t include us, a private grief for a family before ours in a land far away as a fairy tale. Not again. I will not wave in windows. I will drive away. I will do the leaving.
But being left happens anyway. I hate gardens because flowers die, I hate winter because it makes you feel dead. I hate the word I, you is more comforting. You is a cool, distant mountain, I is a lava spill cooling itself with gin and after gin, trying to drown in moonlight. Police will come. They’ll note the gin. They won’t consider the moon a suspect. That’s the kind of police we’re left with. I’ll send them away because you can’t investigate a live body. But that’s tomorrow.
Today dementia exhales memories like dandelion fluff of the one who drove away because, fucking work. Even memories ghost you given time. I drink the poison I traveled miles to leave behind. It all comes for you anyway. It waits inside yourself.
Some learn this early and don’t leave at all, others take it to an extreme. Of the three of us, my sister brother and me, I traveled miles, another stayed put, the third died, though not right away. You know how it goes, you learn your alphabet as a kid, A B C, string them into words, then sentences, deck your body and home with them, there is a literal wall of books here, life is a trail of words snaking here and there, I climb into words and drive off in them. Then they stop.
Words die in a spectacular crash in the hospital room where my brother lies with a trach jammed in his throat. There are no words in a trach. Even his texts melt into simple emojis. A thumbs up, hearts, once a heart inadvertently unhearted and how that guts me the second before I understand he’s in his hospital bed scrolling as best he can with his pounding head and swelling, jabbing the wrong thing.
Then the emojis go too, there’s nothing but the rasp of oxygen slipping the bonds of his blood as his body strains for breath, then stops.
When we were kids you asked in the high piping voice of a child for ice cream. They thought it was me who spoke, so I got it. I said nothing, neither did you. It was worse for you to sound like a girl than lose ice cream. I knew that and said nothing, this is how children are, pathetic, I’d give you ice cream now if I could, but of course it’s too late to bargain.
Also my sister had chicken pox once and I was jealous of her illness, I said the spots weren’t real. She still hasn’t forgiven it. That’s what words do, create situations where you steal ice cream and deny illness but disease has the last laugh. If there’s anything you feel bad about doing to me as a kid, you can forget it, I should say but it’s too late for him and if my sister says nah, there’s nothing would that make me feel better, or worse?
The Japanese had a tradition of death poems once, a haiku for the last moments of earth. All that blood and bone summed up in 5-7-5, and I wonder if the authors regret those words, if they think I should have gone EPIC. Or just shut up.
If you did something you feel bad about to me, don’t worry, I’ve forgotten it, and it wouldn’t matter anyway I just wish I hadn’t taken that ice cream, or at least said can he have some too. Then I might stop trying to be murdered by moon. I might like gardens, or the word I as much as You.
Words are such killers. I liked sanctuary as a kid, redemption too. I like absolution now. I don’t even need a haiku. A single word will do.
First published in The Hooghly Review @HooghlyReview
The Ambassador
The Ambassador
They recalled the ambassador last night.
By the time it hit the news, he was gone.
It’s still always a ‘he’ when it comes to ambassadors here. They don’t trust ‘shes’ yet.
They don’t trust him either, now.
The ambassador was recalled last night and has not been seen since.
Probably a spy, someone says.
Probably a poet: someone else.
Only the sun knows where he is now and the sun is hiding today. Maybe only the moon then. The moon always watches, even when it’s not there.
….
Day breaks, watery, spindly, like limbs not yet formed. A flailing, falling down foal of a day.
I like these days. They make us seem more complete.
…
It’s a small city. Practically a village when you’re young, city limits closed in as a closet.
They pass time by passing ordinances. So many ordinances. There is an ordinance on allowable door colours. It’s buried in the books. I hope no one notices because I have a non-compliant door colour. My door colour is scofflaw. That colour is the last thing I see before I fall asleep.
…
The ambassador had a small black car and wore a grey overcoat. He did not have a dog. I note if ambassadors have dogs. Can you be a real ambassador if you don’t have a dog? I don’t see it.
In other aspects this ambassador was as grey as his coat, as the pale, sickly sky. He took his work seriously, which is to say he shut up and kept quiet. Both things, they are not the same. He shut up, IE he did not continue speaking in the present. He kept quiet, IE he did not reveal what he knows from before. He got a small ambassadorship in a small city with a small grey sky and a small car. And now he does not have those things.
…
There is an ordinance in this small city, verging on a village if you are very young, which I am not any longer, that you cannot trim your neighbour’s tree. I often think of this. There is no ordinance against chopping it down. Removal is fine. Modification is not.
I picture how this ordinance came to be. Which spiteful neighbour prevailed. I search our historical archives. I don’t have the answer.
When I learned this I went to the small scrubby patch of green outside the door I share with two others and planted a tree. It’s a ridiculous specimen, barely a tree, more a branch with a few sprouts still weighing whether to emerge. It may not make the winter. Maybe it will. Maybe it will grow. Maybe one of my door mates will decide to trim it and I will test the ordinance. Can a door mate be considered a neighbour? It’s a technicality but ordinances thrive on technicalities.
…
Unexpected development. Much excitement. Much speculation. They are tearing down the house in which the ambassador stayed. It served as home and office. Unobtrusive from the outside other than a small plaque declaring the small country the ambassador represented. Technically this house represents that country’s land. Yet here we are, clawing at it with big machinery. It’s impossible to hear the clang of that plaque as it tumbles to the earth amid the big machinery, yet I think I do. Tinny, like one of those fake sheriff’s badges children wear. The sound stays with me. It joins the colour of my door as the last things I am conscious of before sleep.
We will be at war soon, someone says, watching debris tumble.
Too much effort: someone else.
War’s old fashioned, I say.
No one argues.
Later, in the archives, I look up the address. Something has been on that patch of land roughly 300 years. It has no great historical value. Nothing great happened there. That particular building was built 120 years before. It became an ambassador’s residence 43 years ago. This ambassador, with his small black car, grey coat and no dog, arrived 5 years ago. The building served as his home and his office. He has not been seen since he was recalled.
…
The building is no more. They cleaned up most of the rubble. It looks like a chipped tooth on the street now, a gap where the tongue travels in search of what was. No one noticed that unobtrusive building for years. Now they speak of it in coffee shops and kitchens.
At night I see the colour of my door. I hear the tinny fall of a plaque as a building falls all around it.
…
I look at the clock. It’s 11:46 pm but it feels like 1970. Or like I think 1970 felt. From above, door mate one plays a radio. I can’t hear words, more like a hum. Beside me door mate two keeps crying. The pity I once felt has hardened into boredom. I don’t know the source of their tears, only that there are so many of them. I don’t know the source of anything, even when it is plentiful. It has been 72 days since the ambassador was recalled, 69 days since his house was demolished and 147 days since I planted the little tree. All this seems to merit more than the mumble of radio and useless nights of tears.
There is no ordinance against crying, not even in this small city. I searched quite extensively. The closest is an ordinance against group singing after midnight. Hastily passed in 1996 on the verge of civil unrest when the bravest of people got together to sing in the town square. When they blocked off the square they sang in the streets. Then they passed the ordinance, and they sang during the day. Enforcement at that time however failed to observe the time written into the legislation and simply rounded up choristers whenever. Overachievers by training, they entered churches and social clubs too. Grandparents drinking coffee found themselves slapped with warnings and mug shots to show their grandchildren today.
The ordinance continues to say midnight, but people don’t sing. They put on the radio. Radio the collective song in this small city. They caught onto that also. Now radios just talk. No one listens. They sing quietly alone while the radio speaks.
…
2:45 am and, unusually, I can’t sleep. I think of the tree ordinance. Removal is fine. Modification is not.
How different would it be if I cried, instead of door mate two? What if I played the radio, instead of door mate one? Would either of them dig into the ordinances? Would they haunt the archives?
Would we be removed?
Would we find the ambassador?
Would they tear down our home?
No. They wouldn’t notice at all. We are not poets, not spies. We are only the past. Only the archives see the past, and only I see them. Everyone else has forgotten.
…
It is an unseasonable day. The sun shines. It has blown apart the clouds. Like Hercules breaking free of fetters. It blazes free and alone in the sky.
It’s appearance is too little to warm the soil but it unearths people. We emerge from our homes, unbelieving, but unable to not emerge. Hello neighbour, hello friend, hello, daughter. Greetings all around as we float down streets bathed in summer sun in a winter month. Door mates one and two are out. We smile on the street in the sun, like we never do at the door.
The town square, unboarded since the ‘90s, is vibing. There is chatter, mostly idle. Sunshine is made for idle chatter, winter for silence. There is no in-between. People use the space where a house used to sit and the ambassador used to live as a pass-through, from one street to another. Someone brings beer. Someone sells sandwiches. Children pick amid the remaining rubble. There’s not much of it but they lift it, hurl it, inspect it. The youngest place their mouths to it, like candy. Such a day, people say. Fates are smiling today. God is happy today. Hello neighbour. Hello friend. Hello daughter.
Even when night falls, people remain, unwilling to release the memory of sun rays. Children will be born 9 months from this day, they say. People say such ludicrous things.
…
The next day is seasonal. Mid-grey clouds tie up the sun again. It pulses feebly, then vanishes. Amid this gloom we discover a TV station has been shut down.
No one watched it: someone says.
On its own airwaves the state announces it’s taking over another digital newsroom.
No one read it: Someone else.
The sun shone on that, like it shone on our greetings in the street. The sun doesn’t care what it shines on.
At home I have a secret. It sits on the table beside my bed. I stole rubble from the old ambassador’s house. Just a little piece. I slipped it into a pocket when no one was looking. It weighed there all night until I removed it, placed on the table by the bed. Is it wrong to take a piece of rubble? I search the ordinances but find nothing about such an act. For once the omnipresent and officious council did not foresee something. They did not anticipate a recalled ambassador, a demolished house, a sunny winter day, and me. It feels like a triumph. I sleep soundly. The last things I’m conscious of is the colour of the door and the sound of a fallen plaque, like a piece of tin hitting a breastbone.
…
I don’t go out today. Not even to the archives. I stay inside and think rubble. I sweep it in my mind, pick over it like the children. Move debris from one side of the gap tooth to the other, like a child who tidies by moving toys to a different part of the floor. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know what I’ve found. I found a mistake. In their hasty clearing, they left something behind. They failed to remove.
If they made one mistake, they can make another. I think of rubble and no longer live in this place by door mate one and door mate two. I live in the space of the error. I live in what the ordinances fail to predict.
You can’t see me.
You can’t see me here.
I’m in the space you think doesn’t exist.
I’m invisible.
The sun emerges, slicing through clouds, blade sharp.
I feel exposed. The sun sees.
…
The small country that bore and subsequently lost the ambassador was founded 568 years ago. It has undergone several name changes and several more border changes. The border is now irregular, like a broken block. So much of the world formed by a clumsy child.
It imports a lot, exports a little. It has a paltry GDP but quite beautiful beaches. Two official languages. Several unofficial ones. The climate is generally pleasant. Maybe that’s how they lost an ambassador, they are unused to this level of cloud cover. It has not had a revolution in some time. Maybe that’s how they lost an ambassador. Peace makes you careless.
I don’t read their language but do my best to scour their news for reports on the missing ambassador. Diplomats don’t disappear in thin air like ordinary folk.
I find nothing.
Maybe they don’t know he’s missing.
I search the archives. The small country does not have many ambassadors.
…
My mobile rings. It is door mate two. We exchanged numbers in the giddy summer sunshine of that winter day. Frivolity. They live in the unit next door. I hear the hum of their voice both over the phone and through the wall. It’s strange and comforting. I sit with my back against that wall. It’s possible they do too. It’s possible we’re back-to-back against the wall, murmuring into the telephone like the walls might hear us. After 12 minutes we hang up. There’s not much to say.
…
A bad night. Feverish. I’m rarely sick, and squirrely with it. I pace, collapse on the bed, pace again. From the covers I see a small slice of sky through the window. It’s blank, like a stare. No point of light. No moon no stars. The sun is held hostage somewhere and the night doesn’t care. Pace, collapse, stare. I must doze, I must dream, I wake enraged. I am a fury. A cautious fury, I want to destroy but not break. I don’t want to clean up. Cleaning is already tedious, cleaning up adds shame to tedium. I will not be party to shameful tedium. I will not clean up. I am a fury. I seize rubble, the proof of the mistake I live within, the space they can’t see. I remember the phone call, 12 minutes speaking with my back to the murmuring wall. I don’t want to live in the absence anymore, I don’t want to be invisible. The talisman of the invisibility is the rubble. I seize it. I am fury. I throw it. Seize it. Throw it. I am not a person, I am fever. I am fury. I lie in my bed and throw it against the ceiling. Door mate one will be livid. Their fury will join mine.
What is all this communion all of a sudden? No more ceiling throws.
I switch direction. Throw with all my might against the wall that faces outside. On the other side of the wall is the tree I planted, barely a tree like this is barely a life and this is barely a rage.
The rubble smashes. The talisman breaks. The fever breaks. The fury breaks.
Inside the rubble there is a finger.
On the finger there is a ring.
On the ring there is a name.
It is not the ambassador’s name.
The ordinances have nothing to say about this.
…
First, the ring.
It’s simple. Unremarkable. It doesn’t look particularly expensive. It’s silver. Unless it’s white gold. Unless it’s platinum. I’m no jeweler. I think it’s silver.
It has no stone. It has no crest. No tell-tale sign of why the wearer wore it, or of the jeweler who crafted it. The name is ambiguous, it could be a girls’ name, or a boy’s name. It could be a mother, or a father, a brother, a sister, a lover, a spouse. It could be second hand, the name belonging to someone unrelated to the missing ambassador.
Even the size is ambiguous. It is too big for me, but my hands are small, my fingers weak, made for scraping through archives, not the heavy lifting of life. A large woman, a small man, I don’t know.
As for the finger. I am no anatomist. It has been encased in rubble, who can tell the gender of such a finger. I believe it is a ring finger. I don’t know of which hand, right or left. Left or right. The finger itself does not interest me. What interests me is it is here, in my room, having been carried by me under a summer sun in winter, in a bed of rubble, now smashed against the wall that on the other side faces the tree I illicitly planted. In each of these cases, the ordinance is in tatters. Smashed to more pieces than the rubble. Stomped under clumsy feet. Scraped so thin it’s like it never existed.
Someone thought the person this finger belonged to was removed. In fact, they were modified. A finger remains. Where there remains a finger, there may, still, remain a person. Instead of nothing, there is a trace. Paltry as the tree outside the wall. But existing.
Removal is fine. Modification is not.
I climb into bed. This requires thought, and I am cold. I am tired.
…
Dear Editor
I have come into the possession of a finger. I do not know who the finger belongs to but wish to. The finger possessed a ring. At least it wore one. I don’t know if it is theirs. I would like to advertise the finger in hopes of repatriating it with its owner. How may I go about this?
Sincerely,
…
Dear editor
Thank you for your prompt reply. No, I will not disclose details. How will I know if the rightful owner comes forward if I advertise details? I have no wish to return the finger to the wrong person.
Sincerely,
…
Dear editor
Thank you for your continued correspondence, though it is becoming tiresome. If you do not want me to advertise this in your publication, just say so. The finger’s owner probably doesn’t read it anyway.
Sincerely,
…
Excitement. Door mate one has a sister! She arrives at our door in a blue coat, unbuttoned though it’s cold. Door mate one greets her with much fuss to ensure no one misses that she has a visitor. Two, even. Clasped unhappily in the sister’s hand is the hand of a child. I’m no child expert but it looked about age 9. Crimson with horror of holding his mother’s hand and visiting her sister, which he had not done, I learned, since before his baptismal.
I haven’t been baptized: The child
You have. You had ice cream after: The mother
I don’t like ice cream: The child
You didn’t like being baptized: The mother
Door mate one, her sister and child enter her unit. I heard them talking from my ceiling. It sounds like the radio and I forget they’re there and go out to look at my tree.
It is as it was yesterday, and the day before. Trees don’t grow in winter. It would be hard to tell if it is dying.
As an experiment I tie a small piece of string to a small sprout. A modification of the modification. A dare to the universe. To watchful and ordinance-heavy city leaders.
I am incautious. When I turn, the child is there, with silent eyes. He says nothing.
Distract him, I tell myself.
I have a severed finger, I say.
I show him.
I want to find the owner but the paper won’t let me advertise, I tell him.
It’s pleasant talking to a child. You assume they won’t listen so it’s like talking to yourself but with someone there.
I’ll help, he said. The only words I hear him speak.
But he must talk somewhere because the very next day, the knocks come at the door.
The first an old woman. Too old. Wrong absent finger.
I send her away.
Then a man with no right-hand ring finger. I do not reveal the ring but make a string circle the same size for people to try on. Too small. I send him away.
This continues for some weeks. I did not know so many in this country were missing fingers and interested in reuniting with them.
I make a list.
35 women
8 old
27 middle age
0 young.
Notes: Either the new generation are less careless than we or finger loss increases with age in the female population
61 men, 10 accompanied by women pushing at their backs to ensure they knock on the door
15 old
25 middle age
21 in their 20s or less
Notes: The new generation are just as careless as we in the male population
Total missing fingers: 104 (some lacked more than one)
Ring fingers: 30
Index fingers: 20
Middle fingers: 48
Thumbs: 6
Little finger: 0
Notes: There is an epidemic of missing middle fingers in this country
Conversely, there is a wall of protection around little fingers which, despite their paltry size and precarious hand position, retain a remarkable record of intactness.
None of these 104 missing fingers are my finger.
Conclusion: Plan B required.
…
The child returns weekly to my window. Knocks on it until I let him in.
I give him bad news. Still no match.
I give him bad news. I have no new fingers.
He is resourceful but still a child and thinks if I have found one missing finger, more will soon follow.
This is not a museum for missing body parts, I tell him. I am stern. I think I have settled the matter.
He returns the next week. Knocks on my window until I let him.
Unbuttons his red jacket and extracts from his unpleasant looking sweater three chunks of rubble.
Maybe there’s more here, he says.
No one notices a child picking around the rubble, he says.
I can bring more each week, he says.
Maybe there will be a clue, he says.
That finger wanted to be found, he says. Why else would it have found its way into your pocket? Why else would my mother have visited her sister? Why else would I be here?
His sense of causation is impressive, so I don’t tell him it’s nonsense.
Maybe the finger did want to be found. It’s the owner who’s proving stubborn.
…
We smash rubble together. There’s an art to it. Forceful enough to smash the debris, not so forceful any body part smashes with it. We are archaeologists of flesh and bone, I tell him. Maybe we’ll discover a lost city.
He is interested only in body parts. Children are grisly. No wonder I don’t have them.
The debris of the debris we place in the small patch near the tree I planted. The string I tied is still there. No one has noticed.
Each week he brings more. There won’t be any left at the gapped tooth soon. We are doing for them what they failed at. We are removing. If we strip the site bare, I fear the ambassador will be lost for good.
…
We must stop this, I tell the child. We must save the ambassador.
Conclusion: Plan C required
…
Winter desolation grips the country. All is grey and wet-cold. Silences roll over words in waves. No one wants to see their breath. No one wants to hear. It’s 1:45 pm. It feels like 1980.
It has been 114 days since the ambassador was recalled, 111 days since his home and office was demolished, 94 days that I have lived with this finger, 56 days since I last breathed. 189 days since I planted the tree. 15 days since I visited the archives or combed through the ordinances.
On the 16th day they call.
Are you ill: Them
I am not ill, I am oppressed: Me
Ah. Poetry season: Them
That gives me an idea.
When the child visits, I ask: Are you afraid of jail?
Jail is an abstract concept to a nine-year-old, which is perfect because abstract concepts is Plan C.
We will cease being archaeologists, I say. We will start being artists. On sidewalks and walls. We will write and we will draw. Or you will. I’m too old. They will come for me. You they will just return to your mother. Are you afraid of your mother?
He burns crimson. Young boys are unwilling to fear mothers.
…
Winter desolation grips the country. All is grey and wet-cold. All but the walls and sidewalks we splash with words and colour.
Words like the name of the missing ambassador. Words like the name on the ring. Nonsense words we make up just to splash on walls and sidewalks. The small city cloaked in ice and weighed under by cloud erupts with names and nonsense words. I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep. What will they do, the city leaders, with this unexpected jumble? With what will they react? I am so excited I lock myself in the archives and wait.
This is what happens:
The small city awakes.
It gathers in small groups.
It wrestles through silence to chatter.
The chatter rises in the air and settles on the scrawled and painted words.
And adds to them.
New names. New words.
Names of the missing appear as though conjured all over the small city. On benches, sidewalks, walls, storefronts, bus stops. So many names. So much nonsense. Even the sun struggles through its fetters enough to peer at the commotion. The sun sees. The moon always watches. The city centre of power jolts into action.
Council members and bureaucrats struggle from their beds and chairs to gather in hallways. They pore through ordinances searching for the sufficiently ominous to strike against this unseemly explosion of names and nonsense with the cold fury of written authority.
But they do not find it. They cannot find it. I have removed it. I have modified the ordinances by removal. I have modified and removed.
They did not know how many words were sitting in the chests of its citizens.
They did not know such nonsense was barely below the calm surface of its people.
They did not know the ambassador would cause such trouble when they removed him.
They did not realize what they modified when they failed to sufficiently remove.
…
Word spreads. Words spread. Other nations report on the strange uprising of words in our small country. The small country of the missing ambassador at last files a story. It mentions his name. It laments their lost contact with him. His mother, aged and determined, pleads for information. The small country demands answers. It demands justice. It demands to know not only where the ambassador is but also his brother. Who had a wife. Who died unfortunately two years ago. Who this brother grieved for terribly and went to his brother in our small country awash in his grief. Whose name is on the ring. Two brothers and one dead wife. The end of our line, the mother pleads. Find them or we will have no chance to replenish. Find them or our name will cease to exist.
Find him or we have no choice but to extinguish.
Her small country has no interest in her grief or her line. The international community has no interest in her grief or her line. But they share an interest in ambassadors who disappear. There are international ordinances against this. The international community demands investigation. They appoint investigators from third party nations.
The child and I confer. We pack up the finger and the ring and send it anonymously to the investigators. They seal off the gapped tooth as a scene of interest.
The worst of winter is over. Sun cracks through its prison of cloud and breathes warmth on the soil. Soon there will be crocuses. Soon after, lilacs.
Outside the door with the non-compliant colour is the tree I planted 300 days ago.
It’s alive.
(Published first in the Eunoia Review @EunoiaReview
Behind the story is another story
https://buttondown.com/EireneEleni/archive/a-writers-dream-is-to-publish
Witnessing descent into suffering is one thing, seeing the joy of those unleashing it, wittingly or unwittingly, is another level of dystopia. I originally called this first story Lamentation because that’s how it felt to me. But I couldn’t get the question out of my mind. How do they sing?