Some Shape of Beauty

By Oslo Writers' League

A journey is a walk in the woods. It is a flight across the world. It is a descent into darkness, and it is the desperate scrabbling of clawed hands determined to reach the light. It is a tiny rowboat on a crystal lake and a sailing ship wildly tossed at sea. It is a war to end the world as we know it, and it is a small, many-legged creature marching across a leaf.
Every story is a journey. Every journey brings about change. And every change can, if we let it, become a metamorphosis.

Oslo Writers League contributors are: Audrey Camp, Tone Belsvik, E.R. Enoksen, Oliver Ferrie, Mathilde Skjerpen Fongen, Margrete Vik Gagama, A.R. Hankin, Zoë Harris, Karen Havelin, Srividya Karthik, MJ Kobernus, Anthony Nichols, André Sevenius Nilsen, Lilliana Rasmussen, Kirstin J. Reed, Maddie Lama Sjåtil, Bree Switzer, Brian M. Talgo and Hedvig Webster

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grimbold Books
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911497202

Book preview

Some Shape of Beauty

An Oslo Writers’ League anthology

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

These Things by Karen Havelin

Sublimation by Oliver Ferrie

Paati by Srividya Karthik

Kepler's Graea by Anthony Grant Nichols

The Room That Bled by Mathilde Skjerpen Fongen

Night Folk by MJ Kobernus

Lonely Hearts Club by André Sevenius Nilsen

Waiting for Her by Zoë Harris

Reeling by Audrey Camp

New Moon by Lilliana Rasmussen

The Lioness by Hedvig Webster

Winter Light by Brian M. Talgo

The Duffel Bag was Free by Kirstin Reed

Familiar by Margrete Vik Gagama

Breathing Lessons by Bree Switzer

Under a Cloudless Sky by Maddie Lama Sjåtil

Reconstruction Almost Complete by E.R. Enoksen

Bucket List by Tone Belsvik

Unchosen by A.R. Hankin

About the Authors

Some Shape of Beauty: An Oslo Writers’ League Anthology

Copyright © 2016 Grimbold Books

The authors of these works assert their moral right to be identified as the joint authors of this book.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-911497-18-9

Hardback ISBN 978-1-911497-19-6

EPUB ISBN 978-1-911497-20-2

These Things © 2014 Karen Havelin, first published by narrativenortheast.com

Sublimation © 2016 Oliver Ferrie

Paati ©2016 Srividya Karthik

Kepler’s Graea © 2016 Anthony Nichols

The Room that Bled © 2016 Mathilde Skjerpen Fongen

Night Folk © 2016 MJ Kobernus

Lonely Hearts Club © 2016 André Sevenius Nilsen

Waiting for Her © 2016 Zoë Harris

Reeling © 2016 Audrey Camp

New Moon © 2016 Lilliana Rasmussen

The Lioness © 2016 Hedvig Webster

Winter Light © 2016 Brian M. Talgo

The Duffel Bag was Free © 2016 Kirstin J. Reed

Familiar © 2016 Margrete Vik Gagama

Breathing Lessons © 2016 Bree Switzer

Under a Cloudless Sky © 2016 Maddie Lama Sjåtil

Reconstruction Almost Complete © 2016 E.R. Enoksen

Bucket List © 2016 Tone Belsvik

Unchosen © 2016 A.R. Hankin

Cover art by Evelinn Enoksen

Typesetting and cover design by Zoë Harris

Grimbold Books

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Banbury

Oxfordshire

OX16 9TY

United Kingdom

www.grimboldbooks.com

All profits from the sale of this book go to Redd Barna (Save the Children) to aid children and families affected by ongoing conflict in Syria.

Acknowledgements

Our sincerest thanks to everyone who has donated time, work, money and more to make this book possible. Special thanks to:

Evelinn Enoksen for the beautiful cover art.

Audrey Camp, Sari Cunningham, Karen Havelin, Srividya Karthik and Bree Switzer for mentoring our authors and editing their work.

Everyone at Deichmanske Biblioteket for providing us with a home base, hosting our launch, and supporting us as we grow and develop.

The members of OWL, who continue to hone their craft, inspire one another, and make a community out of an often lonely pursuit.

Everyone who has contributed to this book has done so at no cost to the project, making it possible to donate 100% of sales profits to Redd Barna.

Thank you.

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Introduction

Zoë Harris

Director, OWL

Change. There is nothing more inevitable in the world. The young become old. Empires rise and fall. Days fade into nights and winters melt into springs. We may fear change, and we may resist it, but we must all face it. Change is, perhaps, the only true constant.

When the world shifts under our feet, the paths we walk upon tremble. Or quake. Or crack open and threaten to pull us in. One man is offered a job in another country, another is told he has cancer. One woman wakes from a long coma, another is grabbed on her daily run in the park. Call it fate, call it chaos, meant-to-be or random, when change crosses the path of life’s journey, one of two things happens: either we remain passive and are changed by mere circumstance, or we embrace, and resist, and learn. It is then that we transform. And whatever form the creature that crawls out of the dry, scaly shell of the past may take, it will be its own shape of beauty.

It is the role of the writer to capture a journey, and to document or create the conflicts that transform our characters and subjects. In this fourth anthology from the Oslo Writers’ League, we have drawn on the themes of Journey and Metamorphosis to bring you a collection that demonstrates how fundamental change and movement are, not only to stories but to every human experience. From personal essays and poetry to literary explorations and speculative fiction, we will take you on a unique journey, and show you our own metamorphoses.

The Oslo Writers’ League, formed in 2012 with a beginning membership of five, has now grown to over three hundred members and has been generously granted a home base at Deichmanske Hovedbiblioteket in central Oslo. In 2015, our members were deeply moved by the plight of the millions of refugees fleeing Syria in search of peace. As travelers, immigrants, expatriates and global citizens ourselves, we are in strong agreement that the profits from this year’s anthology should once again be directed to helping these people, especially children journeying alone. As such, we are proud to continue working with Save the Children (Redd Barna in Norway) who had this to say about our partnership:

Continued conflict, oppression, human rights violations and entrenched poverty in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa have driven millions of children and adults from their homes to seek safety in the countries around Syria and in Europe. Since January 2016, more than 292,620 people have attempted to cross the sea into Europe. Those who survive face unparalleled challenges: from unsanitary conditions in temporary camps and shelters, to journeys through transit countries in summer heat and winter cold, to arrival in strange new countries. Girls and boys who are making this journey, either alone or with their families, face additional risks of exploitation, abuse and denial of their basic rights.

With brutal conflict, persecution and violence in parts of the Middle East and Africa showing no signs of abating, millions of people are protecting themselves and their children in the only way they can: fleeing their homes and everything they once knew, and seeking safety elsewhere. Often, this results in starting life over again in a camp or a host community—environments that are often overcrowded, with stretched resources, a lack of educational and livelihood opportunities, high tensions and extreme child-protection concerns.

Save the Children is steadfastly committed to helping restore stolen childhoods—and securing the quality education, protection and health services children need to survive and live to their full potential. Hundreds of thousands of children and adults seeking an escape from war and oppression and the chance to live in safety and with dignity.

Your purchase of this anthology will help create a better future for children on the move whose lives have already been irrevocably altered. The Oslo Writers’ League will contribute all profits from book sales to Save the Children.

The Oslo Writers’ League is committed to supporting writers of all skill and experience levels, of all forms, and of all backgrounds, by offering community, critique, education and friendship.

www.oslowritersleague.org

These Things

Karen Havelin

Fiction

Laura considered it an established fact that the female body was a pain in the ass. From youth it was constantly wracked by hurricanes, snow and rain—cramps and pains, premenstrual craziness, menstrual craziness, post-menstrual craziness, Pill-related craziness, loss and gain of weight and libido, urinary tract infections, yeast infections, not to mention the smorgasbord of ridiculous changes that was pregnancy. So many things that ached, cramped and eventually drooped. So many places an eponymous cancer could settle—breasts, uterus, ovaries—and so many specifically female illnesses. The male body seemed like a sunny campsite in comparison.

But for weeks that fall—or was it actually months?—the suspicion that something was wrong kept resurfacing. Some kind of hormonal surge was making her strangely angry in ordinary situations, like the weekly meetings at work. She hadn’t felt anything similarly uncontrollable since she was pregnant with Ella.

When Laura finally did see a specialist in late November, it became clear that she was in fact leaving the troubling days of having a female body behind. She was only thirty-six, but was in menopause—or experiencing premature ovary failure.

Sometimes these things just happen, the doctor said.

Laura’s daughter, Ella, was almost four. She was very pale and often quiet. Her hair was fine and light. During winter, she sometimes reminded Laura of a little jellyfish. She was beautiful and perfectly formed, neither plump nor limp, but it was as if her small doll features were made of something a bit too fragile. As if, if you pricked her, clear liquid would leak out and she might disappear completely. As she gazed at Ella picking at her oatmeal, what her mother used to say to her when she was little would pop up in her mind: You have to eat your dinner or you’ll shrink until there’s nothing left of you but a little wet spot!

Mornings alone with Ella were Laura’s favorite time of day. She would wake to the alarm and pad quietly into Ella’s bedroom, a converted dressing room with soft yellow wallpaper. Soon the apartment would be too small for them. It had been too small for them before Rob moved out. She would lift Ella out of her bed in the corner and carry the lovely sleep-scented bundle of her into the warm bathroom, then set her carefully down on her feet in the middle of the floor. Ella would stand there quietly blinking and yawning while Laura unbuttoned her footie pajamas and dressed her while NPR played at low volume on the radio. It took about half an hour before Ella started speaking in the mornings. Before that, the only noise that came from her was the sound of her small breaths when your ear was next to her mouth. She was perfectly self-contained, like a peaceful little animal.

The first hot flash arrived at work, and was nothing more than a little frisson, like blushing. Finally something that isn’t as bad as they say, she’d actually dared to think. Two months later she was waking up glowing with heat every night, the bed soaked with sweat. At any moment during the day, a wave of intense heat could start on her back below her bra and spread up the back of her neck and over her forehead, and sweat would break out all over her body. It seemed predominantly to happen when she was out somewhere, in the supermarket, at work, or having a conversation with someone in Ella’s day-care. Clothes became a sudden terror. All these garments hemmed her in, clasps and belts and zippers and buttons choking her. Even if she could have undressed, she couldn’t have gotten them off fast enough. Her hair was in her face all the time, and this cut didn’t even look good. It was January but she’d never sweated so much in her life, fourteen New York summers included.

There were other changes. She was aware that her face was becoming drawn, like when you put your fingers on a face of clay and pull so its entire character is changed. She was aging. A deep frown was settling. Her eyes were irrevocably starting to belong to a sad face. A face people might snag on and look again, because she looked really awful, heartbroken. She would see people like that, people who couldn’t muster up the energy to conform their faces to what the world expected, and she’d imagine that they were going through a divorce or, God forbid, that their child had died. She’d sat across from a stylish middle-aged lady with sharp Louise Brooks hair on the subway one day. The toes of her lace-up boots were turned towards each other. Her perfectly painted mouth suddenly opened like she was about to scream for her life. Laura braced herself, but it was just a yawn, just what a yawn looked like for someone for whom nothing was ever all right.

The subway in particular was becoming intolerable; the need to keep track of Ella and two sets of gloves, scarves and hats for the freezing wind outside, while all the time angling her shoulder for her purse and carrying bags of heavy groceries, always in a crowd. People never gave up their seats. Not to mention refraining from snapping at Ella for all her sudden three-year-old projects that slowed them down and created chaos. So many parts of maintaining daily life were painful and annoying. A sudden enormous anger at it all would arrive with an intense desire to tear, kick and push. People in her way, the paper bags containing heavy red cabbage she had bought to get some of those healthy whatevers it was that dark colored vegetables had. Did the cabbage even have it? Devoid of antioxidants, heavy, upsetting to the stomach. Why had she even bought the stupid thing! Oh, for the love of GOD! She found herself more and more often thundering curses at inanimate objects that didn’t work, things that spilled and fell, stinky staining oil from the expensive sardines she tried to eat for her bone density’s sake. Objects dropped, broken and trailing behind her, stacks of clothes falling out of the closet when she was trying to get a box of papers down without bothering to get a chair to stand on. Fuuucckk you, fucking behave your fucking self you fucking goddamn piece of shit! She had to invent new curses to fit all her anger, the indignity of it all. They melded with her attempts to not swear in front of Ella into strangely inventive and sometimes extremely crude words. Ratmonster fuckshit! Assbastardbloodycrapfuck!

She had lots of time to ruminate. While her workdays at the bank were long, they were also dull, and the evenings were her own. There were friends, but you always had to plan things a long time in advance. Somehow when it came down to setting something up, it seemed easier to just postpone making a call. In the end she often watched TV for hours in the evenings in their tiny living room, restlessly getting up from the couch to tidy a drawer or to lean over the dinner table and look out the window onto the street.

Her friends had been telling her to start dating again, and one morning in the privacy of her cubicle, walls covered in Ella’s drawings, she finally created a profile on an online dating service. She spent a half hour trying to come up with a good username while overhearing her boss on the phone a few doors down. Finally, the rather awkward UWSmom was the best she could do. Something made her check all the boxes: Short and long term dating, activity partners, and after hovering over it for a while, casual sex. After a lot of doubt, she included a blurry full-figure photo from an old vacation email. She was pretty sure her face couldn’t be completely recognized. She only filled in the profile with a few brief sentences about liking to read and listen to music. Still, within the day, the inbox steadily filled with messages from men who politely inquired about her day and her preferences in literature. Amazingly enough, none of the messages were crude, even though they were probably only writing to her because of the casual sex. She clicked on their profiles and looked at all these young attractive men she in theory could go out and meet as soon as she could get a babysitter. There they were, displaying their tan, ripped bellies at what seemed to be an eternal barbecue party chock full of young handsome men laughing at the camera with raised beer glasses. She leaned close to the screen, tilting her head with her mouth open. How much would she have to do to her body before she could show it to anyone? Would her razor and a month of nightly Pilates in front of the TV do it? What an idiotic waste to wait until now to do this.

Sublimation

Oliver Ferrie

Fiction

Malia was all alone in the ship’s mess hall when she realised she could not breathe. The attack hit her like a stealth bomber, screaming in out of nowhere and stripping the air from her lungs as she reached for her drink. Within seconds, her fingers and toes were tingling and her throat was about to cave in from the pressure. She kicked defiant limbs into motion and scrambled for her inhaler.

The first puff gave instant relief, but it wasn’t enough. Depressing the blue cylinder again, she took another, and another. She clutched her chest, felt it rise and fall, breathing in delicious air. After a moment, she wiped the sweat from her forehead, sat straight, and glanced at her cup.

It had tipped over, sending water across the countertop. The ship rocked gently and the cup rolled back and forth between the toaster and the coffee machine. She knew she should mop up the spill before it affected any of the electrics. She eyed the towels behind the sink as her chest heaved in time with the soft sway of the ship. When she felt she could handle moving again, she retrieved a towel and began wiping up the mess.

How did I end up here? I always wanted to go out to sea.

She remembered her parents taking her to Scarborough as a child. She saw the ocean for the first time. It was such a sunny day, a rarity for English weather, yet that was the year of her first asthma attack and she had been too scared to swim. She spent the whole time sitting by the rocks, watching the boats on the horizon, almost falling into a sort of trance. Her mother had fussed over her so much. But she wouldn’t