Centuries, in Burnt Sienna
My sister devoured
all history, beginning in the summer vacation when she was six. The century
soon ending was Tabitha’s starter. She told me barbed wire cut her lip and toxic fumes tainted
everything. Some of it was outer-space-cold, some burning-rainforest-hot.
I was five at the
time and unimpressed, particularly when she commandeered my Lego train bricks
to show me what a concentration camp looked like. ‘Only it wouldn’t be these bright colours,’ she said.
Then Tabitha ate the
preceding century. The first tastes were all right: ocean salt and prairie
grass. But it got worse. She choked on hot metal chains. Cotton stopped her
tongue for a while, and she insisted if I didn’t see steam or coal smoke coming out her ears, I wasn’t looking hard enough.
‘Why would I look for that?’ I went back to playing Barbies.
Tabitha was rubbish
at Barbies. As soon as I got Cindy into a hot pink strapless gown and tiny gold
heels, Tabitha snatched her away. ‘Those clothes are pointless.’
‘Nuh-uh, she’s going to a ball.’ I grabbed Cindy by her skirt, and the dress came off in my hand as
Tabitha peeled it back.
‘That’s boring. She’s going West on the Oregon trail with the others, and at least three of
them will die. She won’t even have toilet paper.’
In September she
went back another century, to make sure her new teachers recognised how smart
she was. This wedge of history had nice spices and silken textures apparently,
but ended with gunpowder singeing her throat and blades scalding her tongue.
I didn’t look up from my colouring. Dad had brought home a whole printer paper
ream, perforations on the sides, and I tried our jumbo crayon set on it. Some
colours got only patches, some I gave great swathes.
‘April,’ Tabitha said, ‘you’re not even making anything.’
‘I’m making colours.’ I scowled at her and ripped off a side strip, slowly and menacingly.
Tabitha ate two more
centuries that school year. ‘It’s partly because there’s less available to read about them,’ she explained, ‘so I might as well do two.’ She had splinters of shipmast in her cheek and warm winds of
exploration dispelled revolutionary smoke, until she uncovered blazes of
execution. She grimaced at the sourness of disease, cruelty delivered in iambic
pentameter. She wiped thick oil paint and plaster dust from her lips. ‘At least people did a few good things, too.’
‘Whoop-de-doo.’ I spun my homework book, unopened, on the kitchen table.
‘Don’t you want to improve your reading?’ my parents and teacher had said at the latest meeting. ‘You could be as talented as your sister if you tried.’
While Mom and Dad
positioned Tabitha’s report card on the fridge and she opened the encyclopaedia to learn
more about Japan’s Onin War, I flipped to the back of the picture book assigned to me
and drew clown shoes on the prince’s feet.
In third grade,
Tabitha gulped down at least a millennium, gritty with dirt and wriggling with
jungle flavours from civilisations flourishing elsewhere, all awash on streams
of Communion wine. ‘The further back I go, people find weirder ways to hurt each other,’ she told me, slumped on the stone wall, fingering a volume about human
sacrifices in old Central America.
I jumped with both
feet into the pile of leaves Mom had raked in the back yard. ‘So why read that stuff?’
‘Everyone says people used to be good, and not obsessed with silly
things like TV and shopping. I just haven’t found when they were actually better.’
I rolled onto my back and made an angel, swishing my arms and legs,
squinting through falling leaf matter at the cloudy November sky. ‘That’s what you get for listening to grown-ups.’ I let the leaf pile collapse over me. So many shades of brown on the
ground, and greys in the sky. I loved them all, as much as the last yellows and
reds grasping the trees, and the blue failing to elbow through the storm.
Yet when I drew a
November picture for school, using every hue of umber and sienna and chestnut
and chocolate and charcoal I could find, my teacher said it wasn’t bright enough for the classroom display. ‘You couldn’t have coloured a sunny day?’
I blew a raspberry
at her and and walked out, taking myself to the principal’s office without being told. While he lectured me, I watched my frown
reflected in his black shoes, shiny to the point of colourlessness. I drew
sunny days sometimes. I just didn’t want to overlook grey.
Tabitha ate as far
back as she could. She finished elementary school with neolithic boulders in
her stomach and saber-toothed tiger gristle in her teeth. By the time I joined
her at the Junior High, she’d regurgitated everything she read, and the things once stuck in her
throat muffled the teachers’ ears from hearing me. I slouched at my desk and doodled, ignoring
assignments.
Ivy League colleges
courted Tabitha before she was sixteen. History had only been the first course;
she was invited to an event Washington, D.C. and began devouring politics. ‘When we call something unprecedented,’ she said, ‘all this means is our contemporary human brains can’t grasp the magnitude of events, many of them tragic, which have come
before.’
‘Right.’ I slid a pastel over my paper. I’d graduated from crayons but remembered all the names, reciting them in
my head when I was bored at school or couldn’t sleep. When sleep overtook me, sometimes the colours married and
birthed beautiful new hues I couldn’t recall in the morning.
‘Let’s talk about your goals,’ said the high school guidance counsellor.
I kicked my metal
chair legs and shrugged at the dingy floor tiles. ‘I’m going to refurbish an abandoned shed and call it Burnt Sienna. I’ll live there and do art with a puppy named Periwinkle and a pygmy goat
named Ochre.’
Meanwhile, Tabitha
was a Model Congress star headed to Yale on a full scholarship. ‘It’s not enough to read everything,’ she informed me as if I were at risk of doing that. ‘I need the right letters after my name, so people will listen, and then
maybe I can make everyone stop blindly swallowing reckless indulgences, as
humanity has done since crawling out of the oceans.’
I paused while
painting in my left eyebrow. ‘Wasn’t crawling out of the ocean an indulgence in the first place?’
‘Of course. I’m not against progress, April; there’s not much in those earlier times I wish to return to. But history
teaches that we’re not infallible, and a modicum of awareness is…’
I smothered her
justifications in a crackling cloud of hairspray. Tabitha choked. ‘You look like a sarcophagus,’ she snapped on her way out of my room.
Whatever I looked
like, boys enjoyed it. I experimented with at least a third of the boys in my
class, allowing them space on the long printer paper roll of my life. A few
bright ones I scribbled with briefly, but mostly they were greys and browns: C
students driving beat-up Fords or Pontiacs and still imitating Kurt Cobain
several years after his death.
‘Who are you looking for?’ Tabitha asked. ‘It’s not good for you, all this…playing around.’ After her first couple years of college, missing my high school
graduation while interning at the Capitol, she visited home with a studious
girlfriend.
The girlfriend was
listening politely while Dad showed off the refinished kitchen cupboards. Her
hands, clasped behind her back, were chapped and fidgeting.
I straightened my
Craftworld tabard, on my way to eight hours of telling people which aisle had
glitter pens, and arguing with expectant mothers about an extra half-inch of
Winnie-the-Pooh fabric. ‘It’s not bad for me, either. You’ve found someone just as scared of the world as you are—congratulations. I don’t need to because it doesn’t scare me, since I wasn’t stupid enough to learn all about it.’
But as Tabitha began
her third year at college, the world got my attention. The store was quiet that
Tuesday morning, just a few moms enjoying their regained time now kids were
back in school. The manager rushed us through checking out their orders and locked
the doors. On the computer in the back office we watched the first tower fall.
The pixellated screen showed ominous greys roiling over the perfect blue sky,
just a four-hour drive away.
My parents were
frantic. Tabitha had been visiting Washington, scheduled to fly home that
afternoon. She was so extraordinary, you’d think the terrorists organised the whole thing to take Tabitha down.
She was fine, of course.
‘Did you know this would happen?’ I asked when she called. Behind me, CNN repeated footage of bodies
leaping past blue, disappearing into grey. ‘You must have read about precedents.’
‘Enough to know that what’s next is bound to hurt even more people.’
She took a train
home. We sat beside each other at the kitchen table with the newspaper in front
of us. She guzzled the mini-biographies of the dead while I drank the faces in
their many shades. ‘I don’t blame you for being mad at me.’ Tabitha clutched her stomach. I could taste what she did; I knew how
bitterly the ash lingered, how warped rebar scraped her insides.
‘I’m not.’ I turned the page. More faces. ‘It wasn’t your job to stop this, Tabitha. You’re not that important.’
I felt her relax
next to me, her grip on her abdomen slacking. She stared ahead at the kitchen
window, for once not swallowing every printed word placed before her. ‘Thanks. Sometimes I’m sad you don’t do art anymore.’
‘I do art. Yesterday I arranged the fabric paint shelf so all the tubes
are in colour order.’
It wasn’t enough now, though. I felt what Tabitha must have, most of her life:
full of something I must somehow bleed out. I stayed up late, sketching those
faces from the newspaper. Tabitha finished college, alternating between Yale
and Washington. I enrolled in an LNA course to help at hospitals when the next
attack came. It might be biological, nuclear… I tried not to doodle too much in my anatomy textbooks.
‘There won’t be more attacks,’ Tabitha informed me as the Taliban fled to their caves. ‘Great empires always extinguish external threats after an incursion. We’ll crumble eventually, but from within.’ She sighed over the phone from Washington, where she tried to schedule
meetings and work her way up to talk to more important people. ‘The deaths don’t seem to mean much to them.’
‘They probably only read about things, they never ate it.’ My diagram of the circulatory system swam before my tired eyes. The
body was portrayed in such garish colours.
Again Tabitha
thanked me, as if I’d said something profound. She reformed her whole Master’s thesis. Instead of some vast inedible mess charting humanity through
history, it became a pedagogical work on making history’s lessons palatable for the War on Terror.
She graduated with
top honours in the winter. Mom made a big cave cake to celebrate, complete with
fondant neanderthals and a strawberry bloom fire. I don’t think my parents read the thesis. I never got my bedpan-handling
fingers on it either, my eyes done at the end of long shifts seeking veins and
checking bedsores. We weren’t her target audience, anyway. Tabitha brought her work to the capital,
delivering presentations in identical hotel conference rooms, treading
cautiously around fleur-de-lys carpet patterns and politicians’ convictions. Wood panel polish fumes, waxy fruit, and civil servant
cologne sustained her.
Meanwhile the rest
of the nation subsisted on a diet of beefed-up intelligence. The War on Terror
expanded. At first I gobbled it up, as our parents did. I was ready for
anything that would inject more meaning into my work, and apparently several
former classmates were too. Boys I sometimes still met in Pontiac backseats
hoiked up their trousers, cut their hair, and enlisted.
Tabitha pried the
notions from our jaws. ‘The confidence you see on TV—it’s different here,’ she noted. ‘They’re nervous.’ Beneath the shock and awe spices and the Mission Accomplished frosting,
she detected resistance, from the flinty flavours of the Celts defying the
Romans, to the poison vapours of the Iraq-Iran war.
Twenty years after
eating all of history, Tabitha changed her diet. She gorged on the Mesopotamian
Arabic language in just one month, peppered by palatals and pharyngeals. She
unhinged her jaws to gulp construction manuals, steadily imbibed security contracts,
and spewed out funding pages. Then she left, to build her girls’ school near Mosul, including a teaching institute, sowing a scholarly
crop on The Fertile Crescent.
I visited annually
to give courses on feminine health. Tabitha also had me lead art therapy
groups. I supplied Crayola sets. Raw sienna was a favourite, and sea green.
Tabitha and I watched sunrises over Ninevah on the opposite bank of the Tigris
before each busy workday, days interrupted by power outages, updates on insurgency movements, or ‘friendly’ fire nearby.
Tabitha was among
the first to taste the changes in the musky air. She raised extra money for a
compound, starting with huts for Yazidis and others fleeing from the West.
Insurgency leavened and baked into a caliphate. Tabitha made an emergency trip
to Washington but found no answers to sink her teeth into.
On my last visit, I
lay on my back by the Tigris. I waved my arms till they tingled, and I could
barely indent the packed sand on its banks. It was grey-brown, the colour of
falling asleep, and the sky a dim yellow-pink, obscuring any hints of which way
the weather would turn. I remembered my childhood leaf angel drawing. I might
occasionally have hoped, but never dreamed, that Tabitha and her home would one
day be as unappreciated as I felt then.
‘Assyrians marched along here,’ Tabitha said, ‘And Babylonians, Persians, Turks and Mongols. This beach is ground down
from seashells, you know.’
‘Maybe the same ones our ancestors wore when they crawled out of the
sea?’
She laughed. ‘They wouldn’t have had shells, silly.’
Before I left I drew
a shell for her on a sheet of construction paper, earthy umber on the outside
but pastel pearlescent within. It was no match for the shells Daesh fired. Some
of Tabitha’s students and their families escaped. She’d found homes overseas for a few of the already-orphaned, her old DC
contacts finally proving useful at circumventing red tape. The so-called
caliphate devoured priceless Assyrian artefacts, the remaining Christians and
hundreds more, and my sister. It vomited more atrocities onto our screens,
until my parents and I were glad Tabitha didn’t survive the first missiles. What came after looked worse.
My grief was gritty
and frantic, metallic and hot. The turmoil of my new daily life ground it down
to a powder through which I moved in slow-motion. But I keep moving.
I bought a mobile home and I’m taking a break from my hospital job. I make some money doing pet
portraits, late at night, no bright colours necessary. Plus, Tabitha left me
what she could. My parents found me a puppy I named Periwinkle, and in my
trailer’s kitchen, I have a jar for loose change. I’m saving for a pygmy goat. The girls will love it.
‘Aunt April, Periwinkle tried to eat the cornflower crayon.’ Eskere brings me the crayon, its paper scraped away by canine fangs.
Cornflower is her colour; we use it on the family calendar to mark Girl Scout
meetings, drum lessons, and Yazidi holidays.
‘Crayons are good,’ Rahima says. ‘They make my teeth rub smooth together.’ Her Sunni holidays and dance classes are cerise on the calendar.
Our calendar is also
filled with therapy appointments and check-ups. The girls have gulped down
English and have a healthy appetite for TV, but they still bear the teethmarks
of loss and trauma. They may never call me Mom, but when they say ‘Aunt April,’ it sounds like spring green.
‘Don’t eat crayons,’ Eskere chides.
‘I just tasted it…’ They exchange Arabic insults not included in the guides Tabitha sent
me, arguing as only sisters can. Black ponytails swish and hand-painted
macaroni necklaces rattle.
I step away from
stacking lunchtime dishes. The sink is currently in use as a deep sea diving
site for Barbies to investigate Lego Atlantis. We chose dolls in shades from
tumbleweed to Van Dyke brown. They’re wearing evening gowns, plus hard hats to protect against sharks. We
pass the afternoon cradling Periwinkle, watching for blue flowers sprouting
from his tummy, because when you swallow something, you never know how it can
change you.
Published in The Weight of Feathers, a Retreat West anthology edited by Gaynor Jones and released in 2021.
Everything Must Go
Fed
up with maintenance issues and clutter, the Owner announced a Clearance Sale.
Climate
Change took her time browsing the merchandise. You’d think she wasn’t even there.
Quick-tempered
and preemptively covetous of anyone else’s gains, Disaster followed, along
with his sister Disease. She made her vast selection with surprising speed for
one so pale and yawning.
Conflict,
though never picky, gave the remaining wares a vigorous rattle before sweeping
up discounted masses.
Only
the most elite items went unpurchased. The Owner looked on them with distaste.
He should have known.
Climate
Change lingered, fanning herself. ‘Tell you what, I’ll take the last lot
and redecorate the place for you in exchange. I’m thinking high contrasting
tones: some icy blues there, broiling orange-red here.’
The
Owner accepted the bargain.
‘You got your eyes on a new place?’ Climate
Change asked as she set about her work.
‘I might stay and enjoy the quiet.’
Published
as part of the 14th June 2024 FlashFlood from the National Flash Fiction Day blog -
https://flashfloodjournal.blogspot.com/2024/06/everything-must-go-by-nastasya-parker.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
******
And finally we come to The Big
Interview, in which Nastasya kindly
answers writing-related
questions and lets us into
some of her writing secrets...
******
1.
How
old were you when you first knew you wanted to be a writer, and what set you
off down that journey?
Stories and books always had a massive pull
for me, so much so that I started reading when I was 3 years old. I started in
quite a dorky way: first, I counted all the times I found ‘the’ in books, then
‘there.’ By the time I’d reached a hundred or so ‘thens’, I stopped because I
was too busy reading.
As for writing, I practised worldbuilding
when I was young, incorporating my favourite characters with the plot twists I
found most exciting. As I got older, my stories became a way to bring together
real people I cared about that I was separated from, or places left behind,
until I learned to truly cultivate my own ideas.
2.
Tell
us about the books and writers that have shaped your life and your writing
career.
My parents read to us a lot. C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles
of Narnia were formative with their vast scope and underlying message. I
found an abridged, illustrated copy of Little Women at my grandparents’
house and I loved Jo and her passion for writing.
One great thing about my American high school
education was how much we read. With no GCSE exams to bother us, our
upper-level English classes ploughed through at least twenty literary works per
year. I loved the voices I read, from Jane Eyre to Catcher in the Rye.
In university, I discovered writers like Kafka and Isabel Allende, taking in a
mix of surreal contemporary literature and magical realism.
3.
Have
your children, other family members, friends or teachers inspired any of your
writing? In what way?
I had great storytellers in my family. My Grammy (that
copy of Little Women must have been hers), my Aunt Laurel, my dad, my
siblings—I have their voices fixed in my head because of the tales they
recounted so well.
I do love featuring children or parent-child
relationships in my stories since being a mum is my absolute favourite thing, even
better than writing. My kiddo is quite grown up now and decided to settle in
the U.S., so featuring the parent-child dynamic in stories helps me channel my
motherly feelings a bit.
4.
How
would you describe your own writing?
My writing is contemporary in pace, incorporating some
literary motifs and themes. There’s usually a warmth to it, and I do love
crafting dialogue. My short stories often centre around a particular image and
I follow a character through its relationship to that. Novels happen when
characters are bigger than one set of images, when I can’t bear to be parted
from them yet.
5.
Are
there certain themes that draw you to them when you are writing?
There’s often a spectre of separation, due to being
split between two countries I suppose.
View of the White Mountains from Mount Washington, New Hampshire
[photo taken by Nastasya Parker]
6.
Tell
us about how you approach your writing. Are you a planner or a pantser?
I do plan, partly to ensure I’ve come up with
something exciting enough, something with enough push/ pull between needs/
wants, to be a full story. So I do some plotting, but I’m flexible as it
develops. I also write many pages of character sketches. That’s a lot of fun. I
like to consider what a character’s worst memory is, their biggest fear, their
best memory, and strongest desire. Then I see how my story idea may align with
those, and sometimes there are surprises.
7.
Are
you, or have you been in the past, a member of any writing groups, online or
face-to-face?
Online, I’m part of the Women Writers Network, currently on BlueSky,
formerly on Twitter.
https://www.womenwritersnetwork.com/.
We support and promote
fellow creatives, hosting monthly discussions as well as author interviews, and
we take turns running the BlueSky channel week to week.
Snail in the woods beneath Cam Peak, in Gloucestershire, where Nastasya now lives [photo taken by Nastasya Parker]
8. What do you think about getting feedback on
your work from other writers and/or non-writers?
I’m also part of a couple of writing feedback groups. New
insight into my work helps so much. When feedback is positive, it can
absolutely turn my day around. I’ve learned to use negative feedback as a
galvanising force.
I tend to see a story in my head, and especially if
I’m trying to recreate a place I know myself, it might not come across clearly
at first and feedback helps point that out.
Reading other writers’ work and providing feedback
stretches me to troubleshoot. It forces me into a constructive mindset for when
I tackle my own. We’d never want to discourage someone who allows us the
privilege of reading their words—and it’s truly a privilege; I see a marvellous
variety of projects. We ought to be constructive and encouraging to our own
work, too.
9. Where do you get your ideas from?
I scribble daily about events and thoughts from the
day. Ideas can emerge from these reflections. Certainly, through my work in the
local secondary school, I meet brave, frightened, struggling, inspiring
students. Sometimes I see an interaction or hear a background detail and I
wonder: what if it had transpired in a different way, or happened to a person
with a different mindset?
Cam Peak with bluebells, in Gloucestershire.
[photo taken by Nastasya Parker]
10. They say that successful writers need to be
selfish. How far do you agree with this?
This is something I’ve thought about a lot,
especially when my kiddo was younger. A story idea would come to me so
tantalisingly, I’d want to sink into it, inhabit it. Sometimes, I seemed to
have no choice but to barely function through the fog of an imagined alternate
reality. I did feel selfish when that happened. And I’m sure even now, my
husband is not thrilled when I say, ‘I need to do lots of writing work this
weekend.’
I think I’m pretty good at throwing myself
into whatever I’m doing, though, and that goes for spending time with loved
ones as much as for writing. Also, I plan my schedule meticulously. I’ll be
doing chores after work every weekday to ensure I have time to write at the
weekend, and I’ll cook meals ahead so no one is inconvenienced too much.
11. Would you describe yourself as a ‘cultured’
person?
I love a theatre trip or a museum visit to recharge my
creative batteries and feel connected to something bigger than myself. For
example, in the May-June half-term week off, I took an overnight trip to Oxford
to see a wonderful, energetic touring production of Little Women, and
spent hours looking at art and artefacts in the Ashmolean Museum. It’s so
inspiring to see work others have created, in any medium, and to consider what
inspired them.
Likewise, I do enjoy literary novels and sometimes
feel I grow from reading them. But I appreciate writing of any genre,
especially if it has that warmth, if there’s a spark of hope or tenderness to
it.
Literature has inspired a couple of my stories that
appeared in the online magazine The Phare. I did a reversal of Kafka’s
‘Metamorphosis,’ writing a story called ‘The Anthropomorphosis,’ in which a
beetle bears the indignity of transforming overnight into a human. And ‘The
Albatross of Albany High School,’ a story of a girl who’s survived not one, but
two, school shootings. Her efforts to cope are intertwined with lines from
Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ which she’s studying at her
third high school:
https://www.thephare.com/ss/the-albatross-of-albany-high-school
12. There is a lot of talk at the moment. in
the publishing world and elsewhere, about political correctness, the Woke
movement, cultural appropriation, ‘cancel culture’, ‘trigger warnings’,
sensitivity readers and the importance of diversity. What are your thoughts on
this, with regard to writing?
It’s quite tricky. In my imagination and
ideas-gathering process, my What Ifs know no bounds and I’m curious about any
kind of life. I don’t want to leave out underrepresented groups from my work.
But if I write about them as major characters, will I be making assumptions? If
I keep them visible but not as major characters, are they sidelined?
Of course, my novel about Eve is entirely
populated by characters with skin a different colour from mine. No blonde,
blue-eyed prehistoric people there. But that was pre-race, so I think I can
write about them without appropriation.
I’m in favour of content warnings. Because
I’m quite sensitive, certain types of violence upset me terribly. For example,
if I read something with a prolonged or gruesome execution, I will literally
lose sleep over that, potentially for weeks. I believe life’s too short to do
that to each other. If we can warn someone away from agony, why not do so?
Ricker Pond, Vermont [photo taken by Nastasya Parker]
