Guest Post - Tim Taylor's Short Story, 'About Time'

I'd like to welcome the poet and author, Tim Taylor, to my blog today. Tim is sharing his new flash fiction piece, 'About Time', from the speculative charity anthology, Darkness.

 

Hi Amanda, thanks ever so much for hosting me today. I’d like to share a very short story from a new anthology of speculative fiction that I’ve been involved in. The title – and theme – of the book is Darkness, and all profits will go to mental health charity MIND. The stories are a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, horror and … well, speculative, like this one:

About Time

by Tim Taylor

Darkness is seeping round the edges of my vision. It takes all my strength now to keep it at bay. Just as the world I inhabit has shrunk to these four walls, what I see is being squeezed into an ever tighter space. But I can still see my daughter, red-eyed and moist cheeked, but still somehow smiling, and talking in a trembling voice about whatever comes into her head: anything but me, now, this. I don’t say much in reply, but I don’t have to. She talks as if her words are a lifeline and she cannot lose me as long as they are there. 
    “… do you remember Jason, Dad? Richard’s youngest. Tall lad, blond hair. Always in trouble at school. Set himself up as a carpenter…” 
    I try to think who this Jason is, to put a face to the name, but I am so tired, clinging to consciousness by my fingernails. I can only raise the vaguest wraith of memory, but it will have to do. I nod.
    “… well, he’s been living with this girl for three years – Rebecca, she’s called, Becca for short, works at the pharmacy – and they’ve finally decided to get married. The wedding’s in March next…”
    I can’t hold back the dark any more. It closes in, creeping over her face and now covering everything. But there are holes in the blackness: stars and a moon. Air is rushing over my face – I’m swooping on long feathered wings, down to an ocean, silver striped by moonlight. Then, with a single beat, I soar into the sky once more. 
    Ahead, pyramids of deeper black blot out the stars. I ascend to fly over them, but they are too vast, too tall. Only by straining every muscle can I raise myself enough to enter the valley between them. As I do, a pale dawn light reveals them as grim rocky peaks, their bare flanks crowned by citadels of snow and ice. 
    I fly on, over boulder fields and mountain streams, threadbare grass and stunted plants. The distant glow seems to be getting brighter, and mile by mile the valley descends and grows lighter, greener, wider, until I’m flying over forests and rolling hills, waterfalls and luminous blue lakes. The light ahead is brilliant now but not harsh; a warming light that floods the whole landscape with colour. A wonderful place! I want to explore every inch of it, every tree, every flower. But I am so tired, and the earth is pulling me down. There is a faint touch on my wingtip …
    “Are you still with us, Dad? I was just saying, it’s about time, if you ask me.”
    “About time for what, love? I seem to have nodded off.”
    “It’s about time Jason got married.”
    “You’re still talking about Jason?”  
    “Dad, I’ve only just mentioned him!”
    How can that be? While I’ve been on my long, lonely voyage, she has spoken just a couple of words. A second passed for her, hours for me. How curious to discover, at this stage of my life, that when I close my eyes I am no longer bound to a rigid matrix of seconds, minutes, hours. So perhaps, when I leave this room for good, time will go on for me, not in some mythical place of angels, but as the infinite stretching of a single moment.
    It is a beautiful thought. I don’t need to fight any more. I feel my face subside into an expression it has not worn for some time. She sees it, and stops talking. A smile appears upon her face: not a brave smile but an honest one. She clasps my hand, and I tighten my fingers around hers. It is all we need to say.  
    The darkness is coming. But it comes in peace; I no longer fear it. A slight curl of puzzlement appears on my daughter’s lips. They part as if to speak, but so slowly. As my arms become wings once more, I see that her mouth is frozen, halfway to uttering a word. And I know that she has become trapped for ever in this instant but I, at last, am free.

Darkness is published by Twisted Fate Publishing and is available on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback via this link.

 

Tim (T. E.) Taylor lives in Meltham, West Yorkshire with his wife Rosa and 14 guitars. He divides his time between creative writing, academic research and teaching Ethics part-time at Leeds University. Tim’s novels Zeus of Ithome and Revolution Day were published by Crooked Cat. His first poetry collection, Sea Without a Shore, was published in 2019 by Maytree Press.  

Website: https: https://www.tetaylor.co.uk/
Blog: https://timwordsblog.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/timtaylornovels/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/timetaylor1

Guest Post - Reflecting the Times by Cath Barton

Lockdown isn't the best time to launch a new book – as I know from my own experience earlier this year – so now is the time for everyone to give a shout out to all those brilliant novels and short story collections which may slip under the lockdown radar and not receive the recognition they deserve. Indie publishers and their authors need all the help they can get at the best of times, so this year has been particularly challenging.

With that in mind, today's guest post is by the talented Cath Barton, whose own book, In the Sweep of the Bay, is published on 23rd November by Louise Walters Books. Cath discusses the changing role of women and relationships in the latter half of the 20th century and how those changes are reflected in her novella. I loved this book – you can read my review below. It has the depth and scope of a much longer novel, and is so beautifully written. Highly recommended!

 

From the blurb:
This warm-hearted tale explores marriage, love, and longing, set against the backdrop of Morecambe Bay, the Lakeland Fells, and the faded splendour of the Midland Hotel.

My review: 

"A moving and honest portrait of a marriage, set against the backdrop of the wide sweep of Morecambe Bay. Cath Barton expertly captures the vagaries of the human condition in this insightful tale of love, loyalty and longing, of lost opportunities, of a relationship worn down at the heel by everyday life. Beautifully written, gentle and thoughtful, this slender novella is a must-read."

 

Reflecting the Times
Cath Barton

My new novella, In the Sweep of the Bay, is the story of a long marriage. Ted and Rene meet in a dance hall. It’s the early 1950s. Not, at least amongst the working classes which these two come from, a time of arranged marriages, but the coming together of couples was not dissimilar: ‘Rene was to Ted, from that very first dance, inevitable.’ Later in life, when Rene looks back, she says ‘It wasn’t meant to be for life, only that dance. But one thing led to another, like it does.’
    Ted and Rene diligently follow the roles which society in Britain expected of them at the time: he the breadwinner, she a housewife.
    I feel that in many real-life marriages both men’s and women’s lives were constrained during that period by social norms, but women’s much the more so. In writing about Ted and Rene’s life together, I have tried to convey the mix of their feelings, feelings which they largely kept to themselves. Not that they don’t genuinely care for one another. But for both of them there is a sense of frustration, not that either of them would have used the word, maybe not even to themselves. Rene says later: ‘I suppose if we’d talked more. But what with the cooking, the cleaning, the washing and then the two children, so four of us to keep in clean outer and underwear, how could there have been time for talking?’
    By the time their daughters Peg and Dot are ready to leave home, in the 1970s, things are different for women; opportunities have opened up. Dot gets a place at university, which is a bone of contention between her parents, as her father had hopes of her going into the family firm. But life is more complicated. I’m not going to give away everything that happens in the story – suffice it to say that Dot finds herself married young, as her mother was, and her life does not go in the direction she had expected. But she is not discontented, and nor is her sister Peg, who makes different choices about men.
    Madge, Ted’s assistant at the factory, doesn’t marry. Like all the women in the book, she has her own hopes and dreams. By the 1990s women’s expectations have moved on again: now Dot’s daughter Cecily is in charge at the family firm, and she has a husband who’s a member of a book group, something that would probably have completely mystified Ted.  Actually, her grandfather’s Aunt Lavinia was head of the firm in the 1950s, so, as in real life, nothing is simple in the shifting power balance between men and women.

I didn’t plan to write a book about how things changed for women over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. But when you write about people and their relationships, which is what I am most interested in exploring in my fiction, you must reflect the times in which they live. And how the changes in individuals’ lives relate to changes in the wider society.  I’ve always tended to say I didn’t like historical fiction but now I find that is exactly what I’ve written, so I’ve amended my view! It is, though, the history of the times I’ve lived through myself which continues to be my primary fascination.


In the Sweep of the Bay is published by Louise Walters Books in paperback and ebook on 23rd November 2020 and pre-publication copies can be purchased direct from the publisher here
 

 

Cath Barton is an English writer who lives in Wales. She won the New Welsh Writing AmeriCymru Prize for the Novella 2017 for The Plankton Collector, now published by New Welsh Review. She particularly enjoys writing in the short form, be it novella, short story or flash. She has completed a collection of short stories inspired by the work of the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch. Some of these have been published in The Lonely Crowd, Strix and the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize Anthology 2019. Most recently she has had stories selected for publication in Fictive Dream, the first Cranked Anvil Short Story Anthology, and the forthcoming season of Open Book Unbound.