Too Menny by Kristen Loesch
Highly Commended in the third Lunate 500 competition
‘The depth and scale of this intimate and closely observed tour de force… So many stories of this type, thick with interiority, succumb to cheap tricks: heartsick regret; a distancing (for the reader) sourness; thinly sketched (and distracting) supporting characters. Too Menny eschews convention, choosing to explore a multitude of beguiling side roads. The beautiful, exacting nature of the language is something to behold: ‘the kind of day that rainfall might actually brighten’, a character who smells ‘like someone’s murder basement’. That head-spinning final line that places a cool palm on your neck, forces you to re-read, re-read, searching for… clues? A colossal undertaking in barely four hundred words. Magnificent.
In a first for the Lunate 500, we are delighted to mark Too Menny as Highly Commended.’
Lunate Editors
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The lady next to me on the park bench says she sees me here every day and should she read my tea leaves. I ask who wrote it. She guffaws, throws her head back hard. No, no, she’ll scavenge in the leaves, tell me about all my former selves. I might have been a warlord in a past life! Or a lowly housemaid! Or a famous painter! She smells of bleach and sawdust, like a butcher shop, like someone’s murder basement. My therapist wouldn’t like that comparison. Would say it’s an unnecessary thought. Tea Lady leans forward far enough to tip over. She offers again. I say that I don’t drink tea. She sighs, says something rueful about coffee people. I think of how my former self liked to take coffee as black and glossy as her hair, would drink it down in one gulp before her teenage son woke up. Her hair, her son. That’s probably another unnecessary thought. Tea Lady attempts small talk, comments on the weather, how it’s the kind of day that rainfall might actually brighten. She doesn’t know that my therapist tells me not to talk about the weather, says I shouldn’t discuss things that are happening to everybody, just to me, but then who knows how many of me there are. Warlord, housemaid, painter. Last time my therapist asked about my ex-husband, who has just moved into a house that has a shiny roof and heated floors and high ceilings, the ceilings we should have had, and maybe that counts as an unnecessary thought too but then so am I, to my ex-husband. Tea Lady says wow, you’re very quiet, but I’m not quiet. I am just blank as the walls in my therapist’s office, which are whitewashed enough that after our sessions I see white everywhere and the world around me has no colour at all, so no wonder I don’t drink black coffees anymore. Tea Lady has given up and has taken out a bag of crisps and is chewing loudly, crack, crack, crack, like small bones snapping. She should be happy because it’s starting to rain. My cheeks already feel damp and sticky. Tea Lady stops chewing. Have I offended you somehow? she asks. No, I say, I was just thinking what if it were possible to return to a past life, but I guess it isn’t. And now I don’t want to see the look on her face anymore even if it’s diluted by rainwater, so I look at my hands, turn them over, try to find some paint under my fingernails, maybe some rough skin from tending a fire.