One in which her mother doesn’t die tragically giving birth even though it means sacrificing any likeness to Mary Shelley. One in which her father spends weekends at home (like other dads) instead of showing people Grand-Design houses he wants himself. One in which her older brother isn’t in his room all day listening to Dark Side of the Moon but takes her cycling on the bike she’s cleaning now, upturned on the drive, just as a red car motors up the cul-de-sac towards her house, the one right at the end with the navy front door as if the road leads here and only here and the car has come for her.
It stops. Engine idling. Time tick, ticking over.
And her narrative trajectory goes into freefall, spiralling wordlessly —
until grabbed by
a gravitational pull so strong she’s like a moon compelled to orbit an unknown planet.
Because this is where she gets in the car.
Because yes, she would like to go for a spin and the driver looks so hauntingly familiar, like a wayward maiden aunt she didn’t know she had, with a snake tail necklace, fringing on her jacket and two Diet Cokes up front. (Though they need something stronger, the woman says, now she’s old enough, if not quite legally, to make the world spin.)
If the girl had vocabulary enough, she’d say planetary gears in the car’s transmission keep it moving optimally, but the best she can manage is it floats. So they float to the Spar on the edge of town where the woman hands her a Take That tote; she’ll need it, though she won’t be shopping exactly. And while the woman talks rum with the shopkeeper, the girl takes chicken sandwiches and crisps and fat black grapes, mindless of a business owner’s need to balance the books.
They picnic by the reservoir in long, summer-scented grass beyond a danger sign. Arctic terns swoop over the water. Just passing through, says the woman with tanned feet so effortlessly bare. There’s Bacardi and Coke in paper cups and the lurch of the world. Splashes of sunshine through trees bright as revelations.
And there’s the time it takes the girl to unbuckle her sandals.
Because here is where she realises something of Mary Shelley might yet linger in the narrative of her life. So she swims, naked, slick-skinned, rising through rings on the water’s surface to take oxygen from the air, warmed by rum and the thrill of drinking it despite knowing, for now at least, the road leads home.
Other than the angle of the sun, nothing has changed in the cul-de-sac when the red car pulls up at the kerb. The bike is how she left it and she spins its front wheel like a game of chance at the fair, letting it whir to a stop before tossing her sandals in the bin. She knows without seeing the woman is watching, knows without hearing the car is floating away. And she walks back into her old life, the one in which no one has noticed her absence, bare feet on cool grass, cotton dress awry, the touch of a hand still warm on her arm.
Both a ghost story and a familial love story, “She Writes Herself a Different Life” perfectly captures the sweet, wild places grief may take us.
Deesha Philyaw
This queer awakening is a gem. A beguiling aunt lookalike stops by in a red car and offers a ride and a picnic. This quick detour from life’s routines results in a transformed internal life—a metamorphosis that does not require a witness.
Avi Ben-Zeev
Susan’s writing has been published, placed or listed by Reflex Fiction, Oxford Flash Fiction, the Fish Short Story Prize, Mslexia, Retreat West, the Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize and The Daily Telegraph Short Story Competition. She won inclusion in the first Fractured Lit Anthology, the Fish Flash Prize 2023 and the Globe Soup Short Memoir 2022. A flash non-fiction piece was shortlisted for the 2022 QuietManDave Prize. Her novella-in-flash was long-listed for the Bath Award 2024.
Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 