Awarded second place in the Benedict Kiely Short Story Competition 2020

I am sitting at my desk in a red jumper. It is autumn and the leaves outside are a fierce burgundy. I am reporting on a murder. People mill about the coffee machine. I stare at a picture of a dead, heart-shaped face. It is one p.m. I lean towards the screen. Outside, the oak trees rustle.

The dead woman had cooked seafood on her last Saturday morning. She had placed four, delicate shrimps on a pan at low heat. The smell of butter flooded her kitchen. Fifteen minutes later, her body lay, with its various gashes, in the cooling water of a bath. The shrimps cooked in the pan, their pink exteriors gradually browning until they were charred, forgotten things, setting off the fire alarm.

An email flashes on my screen. It’s from my manager. It simply reads: No irony. I sit up and glance at my desk neighbour who is tapping a pen to her teeth. I ask her what she’s working on. She mentions a woman beating to death her dog, a Dalmatian, her voice peters off. Her eyes skirt mine to look out of the window. I hear music playing faintly from her headphones.

Another email appears. See me. I tug at my sleeves. The milieu of voices in the office rises then falls. I stand up. My manager’s office door is slightly ajar.

 

She stands beside her newly purchased red lily. The collars of her shirt are sharp and white. She tosses me the printed-out version of my first draft and shakes her head. She has drawn a large circle around a paragraph. I crane my neck and read:

Blood bloomed from the gashes, deep as poppies or winter berries all crushed together. I reflect on blood because it is the brightest form of gore, and one which pools in the collective memory of our society. We have all been hurt, but perhaps not murdered by a close relative…

She tells me to sit down. I perch hesitantly on the chair in front of her desk. She places a hand briefly on my shoulder.

‘Cut out the poetics,’ she says. ‘Think dry and to the point.’ I nod and make to leave. She pauses me with another gentle touch. I swallow. She pinches away a strand of hair that has fallen on my jumper.

 

The leaves outside are laced with gold. I glance at them longingly. The light is dimming as the afternoon fades. I click open a file containing a copy of the dead woman’s last diary entry. It is dated four months prior to her murder. Her thoughts are cluttered with images of ice and the concept of breaking open a deeper layer within herself. She found the heat unbearable. I tilt my head to decipher a string of words heavily knotted together. Her skin was covered in beads of sweat and she worried for her children. I shiver. I’m unsure of why I’m taking such a delicate approach to this case. People murmur around me.

 

My mother is here for dinner and she is carving a roast chicken. Folds of roasted flesh fall to a plate. Her lips are coated poppy-red. Both of her eyebrows are drawn on and her memory is slowly fading. Her hands are faintly trembling. I take the knife from her and pour out some water in a tumbler. The oven timer trills. I see our reflections in the darkened window panes.

  

Sunlight drifts through the trees, warm and unexpected. I think of a stranger dragging the woman’s body into the clear water of a bath. I take the elevator all the way up to the fifth floor before I remember I work on the first. I knock on my manager’s door when I arrive. My second draft lies on her desk. She has mauled it with a thousand red lines and scrawled, more gore at the bottom. Reclining on her chair, she rolls her eyes and passes it back to me. Her left eye seems to wink or twitch. I leave hurriedly. The coffee machine is broken. I stand next to it, tapping my nails against its misted exterior. My desk neighbour is wearing a polka dot blouse today. The sky outside is a wide, flat blue.

I take a flask of apple and cinnamon tea with me as I sit on the front steps of our office building. I wrap my jacket more firmly around my shoulders and take a few deep breathes. I expel little, quiet clouds. They falter underneath the city’s clamour and disappear. 

 

‘It’s lovely to meet you.’ I am being ushered into a sparse living room. My jacket is taken from me and hung up. A hand gestures at a low, white sofa. The dead woman’s daughter is sat opposite me with her legs tightly crossed, a hesitant blush lighting up her face. The coffee table separating us holds a jar of incense sticks. Every now and then I receive a strong aroma of eucalyptus. I cough discreetly and inquire how she would like her mother to be remembered.

‘Not dead of course. No one wants the afterimage of a corpse for a mother.’ The daughter doesn’t relax until I turn the topic of conversation onto herself. ‘I wear brown contact lenses,’ she informs me. She touches two fingers to her pupil and pops out a lens. ‘See.’ I try not to balk. It is as though she is holding her pupil’s outer-membrane. For a moment I stare at her blue eye, suddenly revealed. She tilts back her head and replaces the lens over her bright iris, disguising it completely.

 

I tighten my scarf and shuffle my notes. I’m sat on a bench in a perfectly oval park. Thick oak trees keep me company, their barks intricately gnarled. A man meditates a few feet away.  The dead woman’s funeral is tomorrow. A closed casket. Her body had become bloated with water, destroying her fine chiselled features. I close my eyes.

You have a leaf stuck to the bottom of your shoe. I click away my manager’s email and watch my desk neighbour massage her foot. She has a blister the size of a baby’s head. It feels very calm today, in the office.

 

My mother is wearing a frilled dress, the material almost transparent. Her skin is very cold. She has misplaced the season. I pull a thick cardigan over her frail shoulders and lead her to the sitting room. Her lips are a frosted pink. I pour her a cup of mint tea. Her head nods to her chest. I decide to sleep on her sofa. The night drifts by. My dreams are full of circular faces mutating into one another. In the morning I sit at her kitchen table, sipping coffee. It is very early. The cold margins of my page are pinpricked with poppies. I blink. They recede. I must not allow myself to see things.

 

On my walk to work I take a detour via a quiet street, set apart from the morning traffic. The pavements are flush with fallen, ochre leaves. I stop in front of a modest terrace house with lace curtains in its two front windows. Nobody is in of course; they are all at the service. I cup my hands over my eyes and peer through a window. A vase of dried flowers, that nobody has thought to change, is stood on a mantelpiece. Dust motes spiral freely. And then I notice the feet, crossed at the ankles. I step back immediately. They belong to the daughter, who is crying silently into the palm of her hands. My heart becomes incredibly quick tempered. I leave.

 

I am sat in a café. I receive two calls in the space of five minutes. I press mute both times. The face of the waitress is covered in tired lines; her fingers play uselessly with an old receipt. I don’t order a thing. I stroke the cover of my moleskin notebook until I am ready for work.

 

I detect tones of mustard and curled, crinkled brown as I tread over the grass in the park. My footfalls make a lot of noise. I am late. I increase my pace. The oak trees rustle in the strong breeze, conspiratorially. My sinuses sting. It is the middle of October and the days feel short. I imagine my mother picking poppies, slowly, almost cautiously. I bury my hands deep into my pockets. I think of her mind, getting tangled in dreams that linger somewhere between memory and death. I see the lights of the office in the distance.

Colin Barrett judged the Benedict Kiely Short Story Competition 2020 and remarked: ‘Cluster of Berries’ reminds me of the overlap between story and poetry. It is enigmatic, chilling and poignant, progressing by image and mood rather than the full working out of a narrative, and is all the more memorable for it’.