Kate Anderson Writes...
The Chain week three
Hi friends,
New here? Hi! We’re on week three of our six-week summer experiment in flash memoir co-creation called The Chain. This week’s prompt piece, first written by
in a 40 minute sprint last Sunday and since edited and redrafted, is free for all subscribers to read and I’d really appreciate you hitting the heart so others can find it.Head to last week’s post to read the piece written by
and upgrade to paid if you want access to our 33 writers’ own responses, posted to the comments after our weekly hour-long live writing sessions. There are also loads of free posts of mine to catch up on in the archive if you’ve subscribed for words on the peaks and troughs of early perimenopause, parenting, caring or the craft of memoir, including this one all about how when as much as what you write about from your life shows up in the work:
Here as a link in The Chain? Think about how you might want to use this week’s piece as a prompt for your own writing then join me and your fellow writers on Zoom at 11am or 8pm UK time for whichever of our discussion and writing sprints suit you today. Use the same link in your email for all sessions. You have half an hour following the close of our live session in which to post your writing as a comment on this piece if you’d like to enter it for consideration as next week’s prompt.
Dog
When I am apologising for Dog’s behaviour as she snarls yet again at an unsuspecting canine comrade, just come to sniff hello!, I often say, by way of explanation, that she was a ‘covid pup’, was locked in with the rest of us and poorly socialised as a result. Dog does not have the skills to navigate her little world with confidence. It’s almost the truth, I think, or at least a part of it.
I would like to tell you that my mother passed peacefully, but she did not; that her final moments were tranquil and easy, but they were not. I would like to tell you, that in the twelve weeks between her diagnosis and death, we made the most of every minute together. We did not. The woman who was my mother was already long gone before she was gone, turning in on herself, unreachable to the end.
After those hopeless hospital visits, I began to sense things I’d been dull to for a decade - the men who clicked to life in the clinical corridors and supermarket aisles, turning their heads as if attuned to some reckless desire in me, the need to feel something, anything, but that.
I stood at my living room window and watched a neighbour washing his car; very ordinary arms, elbow deep in suds. I wondered how his slippery hands might feel on my skin.
In the days and weeks that followed my mother’s death, I did not allow myself to cry in front of the children and carried on in a daze. The only sign that I was suffering at all was felt in the ball of muscle that constricted my oesophagus each time I tried to swallow. Eating was impossible. I was stick-man-thin. The months passed, and the blockage in my chest persisted, this physical manifestation of despair small consolation, evidence that I was not, in fact, coping at all.
Thirty-nine days after my mother took her last laboured breaths, Sunny brought Dog home in a wicker basket. He couldn’t bear the quiet house, would have done anything, he said, to make me happy, and if that anything had to be the long-longed for puppy, well, then... OK.
From the moment that she arrived with her perfect paws and her tight curly coat, I channelled all of my energy into Dog. Eyes that should have shed tears for my mother, burned unblinking instead as I watched her every waking move, fixated on getting it just right.
One evening, maudlin-drunk and home alone, I put Dog in her crate and, stumbling into bed, I burst at last - let go, released a wild, and wailing banshee. Dog whimpered for a while, then raged against her bars. She shrieked like a stuck pig.
I’m so sorry Dog, my poor wee whelp, weaned on grief - no small wonder, that you are as you are.
 | A guest post by
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"See, in the end it’ll be like we were never even here," he says. It’s not the first time we’ve had this conversation or versions of this conversation, but what I can say is we have far more of them these days.
With a blunt bone-handled knife, I cleave messy shards of butter from the hard, cold pat. Wonder how just an hour in the fridge can do this. In the milky morning light I’d found it, forgotten from last night, so soft and yielding on the countertop, a thin oil slick oozing along a seam in the foil. Cursed myself as though buttercare is my job. Cradled it in my palm like a baby as I put it away. Licked my fingers clean then dried them, ineffectively, on my bare thighs.
"Entire South American civilisations," he tells me, reading aloud from the book I’m yet to read – "whole ancient civilisations!" – uncovered by archaeologists who’d been told they were just stories. "It’s all stories anyway. Morals. Rules. We’ve made them all up."
I make the right noises from the other side of the kitchen.
"We’re just a speck," he’s saying, but what I hear is we might as well enjoy it, then.
It’s not my way to eat carbs first thing. I press the clumps down on the flat side of the rough oatcake and eat it quickly, at the island unit, off the cellophane. At times in my life, I’ve denied myself pleasure. Sensation. I’ve cut it off. Shut it down. Told it to stop.
"I still can’t get over that," I say, "not knowing how it will all turn out." I know how it sounds. What could I mean by “it all”? He tells me that the sun will collapse in on itself, creating a black hole that will instantaneously suck in everything in its orbit. That’s how it ends. I don’t know if I meant that, exactly.
A hand under my chin, I sprinkle caught crumbs back onto the gluey top. Turn the oatcake over for the butter to grab at the ones my hand missed. It reminds me of last night’s toothpaste when - distracted – it dripped out of my mouth and down my chin, though it’s not the same at all.
"Well, in that case," I say.
Beside me, my phone vibrates.
Not sure what this is but here goes...
The Overshare.
(A Gap Fill.)
Task instructions:
- You must fill each gap using 3 words or less.
- You may use a dictionary to check any words that are difficult to spell.
- You must not use AI to help you to complete this task.
- Extra points will be given for answers that are unexpected, amusing or creative.
- You should allow no more than 40 minutes for this task.
This week I kept returning to 'The Argonauts' by Maggie Nelson. In it, on a page that I have marked with red pen, she describes being drawn to bad ideas in her writing and she wonders about whether the ideas feel ‘bad’ because they have merit. It is an unexpected contrast of things that I find ______________. I wonder a lot about the ‘badness’ of my own ideas, both in my____________ and my ______________.
There was that day, for example, in the park after the summer holidays when I kept telling all the school mums about ________________________. I managed not to cry as spoke, but I could tell that some of them felt _____________________ anyway. My husband pulled me to one side and asked quietly whether or not I might regret having said too much.
Another day, another thing divulged; it had not been my intention to tell Laura about the __________________ over coffee but, I reasoned, she had always been so kind and was such a good listener. I was lighter after the confession, and did not stop to think how she ____________________.
And then there was the time outside the school gates when I told ________________ about old diaries I had found that described some sordid _____________________ in graphic detail. I knew that he was __________________ and that to share such information was akin to dangling a ___________________ in front of a ___________________, but I couldn’t seem to help myself…
The stories too, (both fictional and non) have become vehicles for this growing urge to divulge and be damned. At a writing group I shared a piece that blended fact and fiction, the toxic mess of __________________, an account of a fight during which he’d called me a ________________ and thrown _________________. I was not hurt, but humiliated. I shared my work, baring my soul to a room full of strangers, the intimate details of my past now fodder for critical evaluation, Easter eggs buried in so many lines of prose.
Is it a need for catharsis that ___________________? An attempt to divest myself of ____________? Or is it nothing more than a way to deal with all the gaps I am seeking desperately ________________?