97
You stay up all night, watching as Tory behemoths are slain one by one, waltzing around his living room in your underwear as he sings ‘The Internationale’. It’s safe to make babies now, he says, shaping your breasts as if they are clay.
33
Cyprus Avenue. Friends scowl a little at your haste to cohabit. But it’s the same as the song, you say (you still believe in portents). He exposes floorboards while you resuscitate the garden. Parents pronounce you a triumph. You assemble all the ingredients for a life.
3
The number of children you want. They will squabble and scream and belly-laugh. Get sick and sleep furled into one another. Come home with blooded knees and tales of near misses and you’ll pretend to breathe. They will avoid abduction and ring each other when you’re eighty and had a fall.
5
The times he tells you to stop folding down pages of books before you lose your shit. He buys bookmarks, loiters them in every room. You dream of moving through a cavernous library, making small paper triangles wherever you chose. If you’re going to compromise, it’ll be on the big things.
4
You consider the lovers you had before him. How cruelly you treated them at the end. The marriage proposals you trampled on.
50
We have to limit guests, he says. It makes no sense to lavish all that free food and wine on a school friend you haven’t seen for a decade. No, you think, far better his moronic friends from golf attend. (You laugh with his younger socialist self at his new hobby.)
1
The number of breasts your mother exits the world with.
1,000,000
The number of Earths that can fit into the Sun. You think about this when you want to feel small.
14
The times each week you check for a lump.
-3°
A honeymoon in Reykjavik. You are blue from the spa, skin shrunk taut, and it is back in the boutique shower with its rose head spray that you find one.
7
Days spent waiting for the test results.
Bolts of lightning striking Earth each second. Yet she turns in spite of the onslaught.
8
The hours you’re not allowed food before the procedure. They remove both unhealthy and healthy tissue. You’re told you’ll receive a pathology report, detailing the characteristics of the mass.
400
After the surgery, you learn to play chess on your laptop. It astonishes you, the possible positions on the board after just one move each. The moves are simple, yet the game seems infinite in its depth. One day you play an old Korean man, the next a girl in Brazil. Despite the pain and nausea, the games furnish you with the disembodiment you crave.
You ask him to stop, your body recoiling, but he continues, for long seconds, hoping the momentum crescendos, a tipping point reached where you’ll yield. When he does finally quit, there’s a scene and before you head to the spare room, he tells you how many days it’s been.
6
The times he says he still loves you before you return the phrase, if only to fill the silence. Relief flares on his face like an acquittal.
9
To one. The odds of a new tumour appearing in the next ten years.
10
The days of a vipassana you attend in Nagpur, where time morphs and spins and clusters. They say many don’t make it to the end, the mind insane for stimulation. It is deep into a 6am meditation, facing the same mottled point on the ashram’s wall, that you decide to leave him.
0
The number of children you have. Who will ring around, you think, when you’ve had a fall?
93
Your mother’s mother, bowing out a nonagenarian, the curse skipping a generation, like a foxglove lying dormant for a season.
8
The agent hands you the keys. It’s a little damp, he says, but it has a courtyard, which you sit in once he’s left, removing your socks and shoes, the few fronds to penetrate the gravel bisecting your toes. The upstairs neighbours are in the foothills of an argument; laughter unspools from a nearby playground. You consider another cuspal period in your life, relish being ‘estranged’, remember that the light now warming your face left the sun eight minutes ago. Unpacking, you open a book, turn down a page’s corner.
The use of numbers works on many levels first as a form but more importantly, it reveals the idiosyncrasies of the character. The numbers also act as a speed device moving us back and forth through time allowing us to fuse all these vignettes into one thought.
Nick Makoha
This piece approaches a common theme from a unique perspective, filtering a very personal story through the numbers and figures encountered by the main character on her journey. I love the experiment with form, and I also love the way the use of the second person ‘you’ makes the story feel all the more urgent and personal.
Ingrid Jendrzejewski
Tom Vowler is the author of 3 novels and 2 story collections. His fiction has appeared on Radio 4 and been translated into multiple languages. He has a PhD in creative writing from Plymouth University, where he is an associate lecturer. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk
Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 