Body Shell by Emma Kinnear
Shortlisted for the third Lunate 500 competition
‘Our judge, Alan Michael Parker was taken, primarily, with the language of Emma Kinnear’s exceptional flash piece. “The sentences… they’re just beautiful. Very beautifully done,” he felt. And we have to agree. Its prose sings, but there is so much to admire in this sensual, atmospherically rich work. Readers unfamiliar with its real world setting might be forgiven for thinking it a work of fantasy such is the effect of its folkloric detailing, its rich and affecting sense of shared personal history. Small in scale, but epic in nature, Body Shell conveys a quest-like quality to its characters’ journeying.’
Lunate Editors
***
Protected, inside his aluminium Johnboat. His feet rest on her silver hull and back against her wooden ribs. Those hands with fish-bone cuts, untangle nets. There he drifts patiently, in our horseshoe harbour, waiting for the Varagen.
The metal giantess blasts her horn, then sails off to other islands. He too leaves. Eventually gaining speed, heading out to higher seas. Disappearing from me. Gulls and guillemots scream and cry, as the tide surges by. On the beach, two teenagers gather up shells, sea coal and driftwood. They set up a line for fish, build a fire, then huddle together.
I wait for him all day beside the shore; placing pebbles into piles, searching for crabs, drawing shapes in the sand, which the waves erase. Sometimes, he comes back after dark. On those days I grow so tired that I head outwith, across the dunes alone, winding my way through Pierowall, into our home. There I collapse by the hearth, and wait.
Today at twilight, he reappears. At first a grainy speck in the faraway distance, then a metallic glimmer floating in, and eventually as a grey-haired man with shiny sea-polished skin, bone thin. The blue of his eyes has become so pale and washed-away with age. He peels down his orange breaches, reels in those fishing nets, fills hessian bags with mackerel.
He follows me, though we do not talk. Farm dogs rush to their gates to greet us, big-boned auburn cattle stare. He pushes open our stable cottage door. Straight to the bathroom, he scours the stench of fish from his skin. But that chemical excretion of death etches itself in.
He yawns, chucks logs from the old fallen oak into our burner. Soon he slips to sleep. When he awakes, he chops himself some half-stale bread and ripe blue cheese, drinks milky malt, much as we always did. Nothing really has changed.
Upstairs is drenched in darkness. The heating still doesn’t work, so he clutches a hot water bottle and lies with this in our empty, cold, metal bed. But now he is there, he wriggles and turns. Twisting his body from left, back to right. Shivering; the saline breeze blowing in. I sit nearby, clutching the shells we’d once gathered together.