Huzzah! My flash fiction has been published on Litro Magazine ahead of schedule!
I’m a writer who is interested in relationships on the brink of breaking, and human boundaries. I like to write about people who are confessing something about themselves – confessing that they’ve found themselves stepping tentatively across a boundary of their own identity, sexuality – or sometimes simply meeting a moment in life where we know that things are about to burst open. Chicken Limbo is one of these stories.
I wrote this so long ago that I couldn’t tell you the way it came about originally. But I can tell you that it started off with the title ‘Rat Tank’. I wrote about how the protagonist was in the shower, and her confessions were like dirty rats that she wanted to wash away. After a few drafts, this idea was abandoned for something warmer, something that made me feel that I wanted to wrap my protagonist in a blanket because of how she stood facing her own boundaries.
Stories seem to have their own heartbeat. They’re born and they have this tiny little beat that you can feel and you want to keep it alive. So, you write. I nursed this little piece of flash, fed it tiny inky words and kept it warm until its heartbeat was strong enough for me to feel it could go out into the world. And submitting a story feels like you’re sending your kid to school. You see it all dressed up, all tidy in its little Microsoft coat and off it goes, ready for the teachers to see it. You wait anxiously for a school report. If it’s bad, you work on it. You nurture it some more. Sometimes, you withdraw it from that school because it needs somewhere else. But sometimes the report comes back good and you feel so, so proud that your little story has made it.
And when it’s published, you hope all the school kids will be nice to it.
I hadn’t read this story since I submitted it to Litro last year and its publication couldn’t have been timed any better. I seem to find that when I am having a particularly bad day – which recently, I have been having plenty of – the universe does something tiny to just remind me, you’re okay really. Here’s a hug.
Thank God for the literary community.
Annabelle Carvell 