Joplin

Novel in progress, shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, 2018

“Until I was twenty-one the most trouble I’d ever made was being born. Mill never tired of reminding me of it. How I’d been feet first, which I must have got from my run-off father, and Mill herself had to reach in and turn me—like catching hold of a wet cat, she said. How Marie, who was my mother, fainted dead away and was no help at all—which just like her, a little sister weaselling from chores and falling asleep in mass.

“How asleep she’d bled right through the tick mattress and onto the rug and can you see the blotch there, in the room you sleep in—faint and the colour of liver, stubborn against vinegar, lye, steel wool, every solution in the magazines?

“How high the late February snow was: up to the porch rails on the house on 2nd Street, so the doctor couldn’t come and none of the aunts. How the blotch between the carpet roses grew and grew and my mother shrank and shrank, and left Mill to deal with the scandal of me, and all that mess. She’d had to burn the mattress in the yard.”