HIGHLY COMMENDED
in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025!
Listen to Jo reading her story:
The night before my funeral you snatch a single round of REM in the thinnest hours of daylight and dream of lanky grey aliens stalking through cornfields. You’re still stuck in sleep paralysis when you see them slipping into your room — not your room — the tiny box room in your mother's house. I know you've been avoiding coming here since you left, but you can blame me for the necessity of this visit. The aliens and I watch you panic for a while before you realise where you are, what day it is, and that there's no point closing your eyes again.
The day of my funeral your mother looks at your hangdog face and asks what's the matter with you, as if the dissipated matter of me is not obvious enough. You don't tell her about the aliens in your room or how you nearly puked on the train down here when you passed the spot where it happened. You don't know yet that you will feel the track-rattling impact in your guts every time you pass through a tunnel for the next ten years.
Your mother says you should eat something but you're still young enough to survive on coffee and a cigarette which should make you feel worse although maybe there's not much worse to be felt today. I should be sorry about that but I don’t have the synapses anymore. If I did, I’d tell you the nothingness you think you’re feeling is an oxymoron and you’d probably tell me to go fuck myself.
The day of my funeral I'm still young enough that I’m wearing school uniform in ninety per cent of the photos in the memorial collage. There’s only one friend-of-a-friend who can drive but her shitty little red Citroen breaks down on the way and you want to hit her over the back of the head with the car jack when she acts like the whole thing is a fucking adventure. You don't want to be funnelled off to the overflow in the community hall with the rest of the latecomers — so many people are sad about me they don't even fit in the church — but my mother has saved you and the others a space in the third row.
I'm still young enough that all they talk about is the future I almost had. My mother picks a song we danced to in the kitchen a few days before because it’s the last good memory she has. She invites everyone to sing along but nobody can, and you all sit there for the whole three minutes while she taps the offbeat on the lid of my coffin. You don't know yet that you will forget what you wrote in your letter to my mother. That you will lose the reply she sent back, somewhere between houses, between decades. That you will often wonder how she kept standing as she sang along by herself, staring back at a wash of faces just wishing the song would end.
My sister and her friends shave their heads to match mine; to raise money for the kids' charity I'd been volunteering for — turning my life around, except for the part where I fucked it up — and you wonder if you'd have had the balls to join them if you'd hadn't moved away.
You never knew my sister very well and you'll forget what she looks like eventually, but the haunting on her face will indelibly imprint on your brain when she tells you what they found on the train tracks afterwards. Scraps of my t-shirt. A shoe full of blood. They don't talk about that at my funeral, or what I’d taken that night, or if someone tried to talk me out of it, or what the fuck possessed me to climb out the window of a moving train. The news clipping from the local paper says it wasn’t the first time I’d done it. You’ve climbed over enough padlocked fences with me that you can believe that, but you wonder still if you'd have been able to stop me if you'd been there. Or if you’d have taken the bait, too.
You're wearing kitten heels because you're young enough not to have a proper funeral outfit and they’re the only formal shoes you could find at your mother’s house. They sink into the dirt in the graveyard with every step. You want to yank them off and shotput them over the hedge. You wonder if it’s weird to walk barefoot on soil full of dead people. If anyone would say anything. You can’t look at the hole they’ve dug for me — too square and too neat, edged with plastic astroturf — so you squint at the cloud cover and imagine your shoes soaring above the crowd in a perfect arc.
The church is surrounded on three sides by greyscale farmland. They’re not cornfields but you look for aliens anyway; for a sign you’re still back in the dream. You look for me, tightrope-walking the flint wall, losing my balance because I’m laughing at your stupid shoes, saying let’s go make crop circles.
You're young enough that none of you know what to do afterwards. You manage one drink at the local where we used to play pool, except it’s been gentrified since you were last here and the daylight is far too loud and no one has anything worth saying to each other. You can’t actually remember when you were last here. Or when we last spoke. Or when you started telling stories about the things we did instead of being in them.
You stare at my sister’s soft-stubbled head and wish you were already on the train back. Except you don’t — you wish you never had to get on another train ever again. You wish you’d never come down in the first place. Wish you’d never had to. Wish we were all still young enough to be satisfied with climbing fences. That we’d all got to escape. That there’d been enough to stay for.
You wish you could ask me what the fuck I was thinking. Except you don’t, because you already know. And maybe, if I still had the synapses, I’d be sorry about that too.
On the drive back, the friend-of-a-friend puts on the radio to fill the chloroform nothingness and the kitchen-dancing-coffin-tapping song starts playing. The fields swim by on either side and you all shut up even harder. The air hardens, as if it might crack. As if you might somehow hold your breath for the whole three minutes. And if you can do that, if you can stay upright like my mother, then in the space between this song and the next, you might just hear me say hey.
Jo Gatford is a short writer who writes (mostly) short things. Her work has most recently been published by The Fiction Desk, HAD, Flash Frog, and was selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfictions 2024. She has been teaching creative writing for over 15 years, edits other people's words for her supper and chases creative glimmers at The Joy of Fixion on Substack. Read more of her work at www.jogatford.com or find her on various socials @jmgatford
wow what an experience to read this. So beautifully done. I’ll be thinking about this piece for a while