This selection, chosen by guest editor Kirsten Kowalewski, is from If No One Speaks by Sam Szanto (Alien Buddha Press 2022).
Palimpsest
(excerpts)
Do I throw?’ I asked Marina, who shrugged.
‘Get on with it, Sofa,’ Carrie called.
She called me Sofa because, like a sofa, I was fat and squashy. Keeley laughed, as if Carrie had pressed a button on her back to make her do so. I had a doll like that when I was little, except she cried rather than laughed.
I picked up the javelin, cold and smooth beneath my hot fingers, its point a pencil with which I could write I’m not a loser, bitches. I held it along the length of my palm and gripped the back of the cord with my thumb, the first two joints of my index finger behind the cord.
Carrie and Keeley resumed their chat. Were they talking about me?
I pulled my arm back as far as I could, arching my body, legs scissoring. Power flowed into and through me. I took the run-up and hurled the javelin.
It flew; it would be my best throw ever.
And then, the javelin went the wrong way. It should have gone left but veered to the right.
I could see what was going to happen, and screamed her name. Everyone else must have seen it too; they screamed her name. She ducked and I thought, thank God, it’ll miss her.
But it didn’t miss her.
The javelin struck Keeley above her eye. She stumbled and fell. There was so much blood.
The screaming went on and on.
I wanted to help, to do something for Keeley, but couldn’t put my body in the right place. Mrs Milleen appeared at my side.
‘Come on, Sofia,’ she said, ‘let’s take you inside and sit you down.’
Mrs Milleen and I crossed the field as the ambulances were coming down the school’s long driveway. I looked at Keeley’s prone body then flicked a glance at Carrie, whose hands were covering her face.
People made space for Mrs Milleen and me to pass. Only once, when I played the Tin Man in my primary school’s production of The Wizard of Oz had so many people looked at me.
Mrs Milleen took me into the staff room. It was empty and smelled of old food. I sat on the edge of a scratchy green chair, as Mrs Milleen used a machine to make tea. I had never drunk tea before. It scalded my mouth, but it was good to have something to hold.
‘She’ll be okay, Sofia,’ said Mrs Milleen, sitting opposite me. ‘She’s in the best hands. It was an accident; you mustn’t blame yourself.’
She couldn’t say Keeley’s name, I realised. I couldn’t speak, I just held the tea. My head felt as if it were full of the thick padding my parents laid in the loft.
And then Mum was there. As she wrapped her arms around me, the tears came.
Keeley died in hospital three days’ later. I hadn’t gone back to school in that time, and knew I wouldn’t return before the summer holidays.
I tried to read – I was on Lord of the Flies – but the words wouldn’t stick in my mind. I thought about Keeley, all the time, thoughts that were rainbow-quick, faint as a heart. I remembered the time we had to give speeches about our holidays and she talked about a family trip to Greece; her younger brother would only eat chips (everyone laughed at that) but she loved halloumi cheese and taramasalata, and I wanted to ask what those fantastic foods were, but thought Carrie would mock me if I did; also the time she came to school on her birthday wearing scarlet lipstick, which made her look prettier and older, and was told to remove it by a teacher; I wished there were more memories.
I also thought of Keeley’s family, who I had never seen, so my thoughts were just fantasies: I imagined her nameless brother and their parents, who must surely be crying non-stop, stopping all the clocks, cutting off the telephone, preventing the dog from barking with a juicy bone. I thought of how Carrie must hate me, even more than she did already, and what she would do when she saw me.
In September, I walked into the Year Eight classroom for registration and the first person I saw was Carrie. There was an empty chair next to her. I sat as far away from her as possible and took out my pencil case, pretending to search for something in it. Girls came into the classroom, some talking, some in groups, some alone. No one took the chair beside Carrie. There was an empty one beside me, too, but then I felt a hovering presence. For a second, I had a crazy thought that it was Keeley. I saw her everywhere. When I walked, she walked with me; we were two pieces of a broken line.
Every desk was taken now, except the one beside Carrie. She was staring straight ahead. Our new teacher came in and the chatter faded. My chest constricted, expecting that the teacher would say something about Keeley, but she didn’t. For the whole day, no one did. In every class that I had with Carrie, there was an empty chair beside her. She didn’t make eye contact with me, and I tried not to look at her. I wondered what she would say if she knew that I had written letters to Keeley all through the summer holidays. My therapist had suggested it: I liked writing the letters more than the therapy sessions.
By the time the bell rang for the end of school, no one had mentioned Keeley. Had I erased her when I killed her? I thought of the word I had learned in the summer, from The Handmaid’s Tale: palimpsest. Had Keeley’s life been a manuscript page erased so that mine could be written on it? It didn’t seem fair, given what I had done; but then life was not.
Sam Szanto is a short story writer, poet and PhD researcher who lives in Durham (UK) with her husband and two children. Her short story collection, If No One Speaks, was published in 2022 by Alien Buddha Press; her poetry pamphlet ‘Splashing Pink‘ by Hedgehog Press in 2023 (and was a Poetry Society Winter Pamphlet Choice) and another pamphlet ‘This Was Your Mother‘ by Dreich Press in 2024. She won the Charroux Poetry Prize and the First Writer’s International Prize for Poetry. Her poems and stories have been published widely in international literary journals. She also runs a blog to promote independent authors.
