Solstice Shorts: Sixteen Stories About Time

By David Mathews, Dizz Tate, Tannith Perry and 14 more

Sixteen short stories that chart the meaning of time, and explore what it can do to us, and for us.

Broken hearts, lives lived on fastforward, missed chances, and catastrophic meetings on the road. Time stolen, time wasted, time captured and time lost. A warning from the past, a second that changes a life, a failed glimpse into the future and a study of funeral rites. Ready-made families, weekly liaisons, and an all-night radio show.

From the First ever Solstice Shorts Festival originally read live in 2014 on the Greenwich Meridian, on the shortest day of the year, from sunrise to sunset.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arachne Press
• Release date: Nov 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781909208247

David Mathews

David Mathews is one of the winners of the Solstice Shorts Festival Short Story Competition. His story in Solstice Shorts: Sixteen Stories about Time is Wednesday Afternoon. For 35 years David was a work psychologist. That gave him a license to mind other people’s business. He comes from Wales and lives in Bath and SW France. Recently his collection of short stories was shortlisted for the Impress Prize, Brittle Star magazine published his story ‘Florence, who made mustard’, and Audio Arcadia are currently recording ‘Removed’ about a man who looks for stones.

Book preview

SOLSTICE SHORTS

16 Stories About Time

Edited by

Alison Moore, Cherry Potts, Imogen Robertson, Anita Sethi, and Robert Shearman

Arachne Press

CONTENTS

Introduction: Solstice Shorts – Cherry Potts

The Largest Sundial in the World – Anita Sethi

Time Man – Dizz Tate

Stars – Emma Timpany

Measuring Time – Jayne Pickering

Grange Lodge – Imogen Robertson

With You Through the Night – Cindy George

Death and Other Rituals – Tannith Perry

Simultaneous – Robert Shearman

Wednesday Afternoon – David Mathews

Duration (4) – Andrew Gepp

A Few Minutes of Your Time – David Turnbull

A Month of Sundays – Alison Moore

I Thought I Had Time – Helen Morris

Stone Baby – Sarah Evans

If You Were a Train – William Davidson

Winter’s Evening in Békéscsaba – Pippa Gladhill

About the Authors

More from Arachne Press

Introduction: Solstice Shorts

Cherry Potts

The idea for the Solstice Shorts festival, came from my realisation in December 2013 (too late to do anything) that the shortest day of the year had been designated as Short Story Day.

I’ve celebrated the winter solstice for years (known as Wintermiddle in our house, in reference to a poem by Michael Rosen) and I love a hook on which to hang a book. My first thought was darn, the second was oh well, next year, and over the course of the Christmas festivities this mad idea took form – why not have an event on the solstice reading short stories? And then, because it is the shortest day, why not an all-day event, and why not start at sunrise and finish at sunset? And if that’s the case, why not on the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, just down the road? Why not indeed? Which (obviously!) meant that the theme had to be Time.

I tested the idea on a few people, all of whom shrieked with enthusiasm, and we started exploring what kind of event we could manage, and what kind of event it could be if it was funded.

Months passed in research, form filling, asking favours, software wrangling, serendipity, crowdfunding and finally we had a fully-formed, funded festival of short stories and folk music.

Of course, Arachne Press is a publishing house, not an events management company, so part of the deal was that there would be a book, and since we needed to find the stories to be read on the day, we decided to have a competition. Judges were surprisingly easy to find – not because they are two a penny as they are emphatically not – but because everyone I approached said yes or, if they were busy, suggested someone else. I actually had too many at one point. Having found such brilliant authors to judge the competition it seemed an unnmissable opportunity to invite them to contribute, which meant that the backbone of the book was already there.

We had 106 entries to the competition. These were whittled down to 31 by the whittling team, during a fevered day of argument and cross-referencing, and passed on to the judges for their final decisions. A two-hour conference call got us down to our final twelve.

I would like to say we settled on twelve in order to have one for each month of the year, or one for each hour on the clock, but it wouldn’t be true; it was entirely fortuitous that a story every half hour on the shortest day of the year (08:04 to 15:53), worked out to sixteen, and with four judges that left us twelve to find, but it pleased me to have such an appropriate number nonetheless.

Never having been on this side of the competition process before, I have learnt a great deal and read a lot of stories in a very short space of time. I hope we will do it again. I have been introduced to some very talented writers and found some delightful stories, and what better way to spend the dark days of winter than to curl up with a really satisfying book?

The Largest Sundial in the World

Anita Sethi

The car stopped as we became stuck in a football match traffic jam and I watched a red and white Manchester United scarf fluttering out of the window of the car beside me, flapping in the rain which started to plummet down, rapidly making the colours fade as if they were trickling out of the scarf, not really a permanent part of the scarf but liable to be lost in a downpour, as if the whole world might melt away at any moment. Dad’s voice tugged at me suddenly: ‘Roshni are you still there? Rosh, have you vanished?’ he teased.

A long time later, after waiting in the traffic jam until day turned into darkness, we arrived at our Grandmother Mamee’s house, which curved around a corner of Stretford, near to the Lancashire Cricket Ground and not far from the football stadium. Mamee lived above a corner shop, which she worked in every day, a corner shop with a small, wild overgrown garden behind it and a deep cellar full of ghosts and wine bottles beneath it and a patch of sky often thundering and crying above it.

The shop shared its patch of pavement with a chippy, a newsagent and an old man who sat on the bench all day, deep in a perpetual monologue. The shop was stacked thick with tins of food, sacks of potatoes that I often helped to weigh out into smaller bags, and best of all, sweets. Our necks were forever draped with love-heart necklaces with slogans like BITE ME, LOVE YOU, YOU ARE SWEET, our heads exploding with the Space Crackle sweets which fizzed as soon as they touched the tongue. I devoured the sweetness, as if it might counteract the bitterness which had begun to seep into our lives like a poison.

The living room directly above the shop had a thick, woolly, chocolate-brown carpet covering the whole room, thick like the fur of an animal so that bits of food, penny pieces, spiders, were forever being lost in there.

Mamee doesn’t know anything about what has happened. She doesn’t know that Mum has vanished into the hungry air of Manchester. I don’t know whether or not to tell her, because Dad said it was a secret that must never be told. Never, he said. Don’t breathe a word. So many things that happened to us we were sworn to secrecy about. So many things were sealed away, separated from the external narrative. Don’t breathe a word.

Ashish the astrologer is visiting from Jaipur and we gather in the lounge above the shop, which is now shut for the evening. Ashish has known Dad for almost half their lives. Mamee is draped in a white sari, with a jumper pouring slowly, painfully, thread by thread from her fingers, until she suddenly gives up and lays the half-made sweater and the knitting needles to one side and sinks back into herself. The gas fire is lit and roaring and the television flickers away furiously in the corner of the room, Mamee’s glittering eyes fixed on it, laughing at the sad bits of Coronation Street since she doesn’t understand much English. I watch the TV through watching Mamee’s eyes, wondering where mum is, where Mum is, where Mum is. The phrase thuds in my heartbeat, where is mum, where is mum, where is Mum. Soon enough, though, it becomes part and parcel of myself. It becomes the ghost making my heart tick.

‘Right, everybody. Enough of gazing at the box,’ the Astrologer announces, clapping his hands together, his white moustache twitching against his brown face. ‘Let’s gaze at the stars.’ I peer through the window but can’t see any stars lurking in the muggy black sky. There is a sliver of a moon but not so much of it that you can see its full face.

Dr Ashish Kumar teaches astronomy in Jaipur as well as working as an astrologer selling readings to punters.

‘The largest sundial in the world sits in Jaipur, a city in India known as the ‘pink city’ due to the huge buildings built out of pink stone or painted pink,’ says Ashish. ‘The sundial is larger than each of you, larger than this house, and is a thing of great beauty. It has been measuring time for hundreds of years.’

Ashish tells us how he still visits sundials every single morning at sunrise when he is in India, watching the changing shapes of the shadows on the earth, potential lives and paths stretching themselves out, or shrinking and shrivelling up. He translates the patterns of light and dark into astrological readings, which he gives to his clients who pay him to see their lives mapped out before them, feeling comforted that they can at least see a shape in the great nothingness which they can then fill in; like number colouring for those fearful of the future.

‘The lines on the palm have already settled, you know, beti,’ he says to Sohni. ‘Even on a little girl like you, even on a baby still in the womb.’

Sohni stretches out her arm to him fearfully, part of her hand covered in ink smudges. I wonder if that is the part showing the path to where mum is, when she will be coming back. The heart line?

‘Hmmm – let’s see. When were you born?’

‘July,’ says my sister.

‘No, no, precise times, child, we need to know the exact precise time.’

‘24th July,’ she beams, proud that she has remembered the date, which she was always forgetting.

‘Hare Ram, child, we need to know the exact second the clock struck, to be able to trace the way the sun was falling, what planets were colliding, exactly where the light and darkness was and where the darkness and the light will be. Accha? How will we know that unless we have that time at our fingertips? Prem! Don’t worry, Sohni, your dad will know. Prem.’

He beckons to dad who is sitting with his new girlfriend Juana on the sofa. I can see