A Fullness in Brevity – Adam Byatt

This is the last of the #FictionFriday series. When I first started writing, I used Fiction Friday as an apprenticeship to learn the craft. This year it was a chance to experiment a little, and to keep my focus on stories I am working on. Other weeks are brief explorations of an idea using an object or idea as a metaphor to examine an aspect of life. I intend to turn it into a brief book in the near future.

I will not be continuing this experiment on in 2026 while I focus on a couple of current WIPs that warrant my attention.

Thus, the final Fiction Friday for 2025.

I kept the receipts from every transaction of my one wild and precious life thus far. Filed them under three categories: Things to Learn From, An Attempt Was Made, and Curiosity Is Never A Wasted Opportunity. I can point to certain parts of me that I made. Some of them are cack-handed, immature attempts at building something grand. But I am still proud of them. Others are fully refined, articulated, monuments of something I worked hard at. Some things I put on a shelf as a reminder. Others are boxed away and kept in storage. My life looked like George Costanza’s wallet, metaphorically speaking.

I also have a fourth category: A Cup of Tea and Vegemite Toast (aka Shit That Happened To Me That I Had No Control Over). The neglect, the abuse, the forgottenness. Some of them still fester and weep pus and blood and shit no matter how much I take care of it. I keep changing the bandage. I don’t like what made me but I have to accept it. Sometimes no amount of tender care or repair changed the fact that shit happened beyond my control.

Receipts make for great kindling to start a conflagration. Today is as good a day as any other to start anew.

This is the penultimate Fiction Friday for the year. Last one is next Friday, Boxing Day, then I will lay this experiment to rest. 

It started with a plastic bag full of oranges hung over the back fence. A new family had moved in, young couple with small kids. I thanked the wife when I saw her one afternoon as she pulled up after the school pick up run. I was introduced to their faces when the trampoline was built and they bounced up and down all afternoon. Then it was a bag of lemons in season. In return I made jars of marmalade. They became the neighbours you say hello to as you water the front garden or nod at when you’re mowing the lawn. It was handmade Christmas cards from the kids one year that I put on the dining room table. My wife loved the kids’ cards and made Mars Bar slice to take over. As the kids grew older, the trampoline was used less but bags of fruit were still hung over the back fence. When my wife died they all came to the front door to offer their condolences and brought with them homemade meals for the freezer. They moved away a little after that, new job opportunities for them both but at the last goodbye, he brought me another bag of oranges and I gave him the last couple of jars of marmalade.

FICTION FRIDAY – drought

It has slipped into your pockets and the grit caught under your fingernails causes you to notice the lawn is looking a bit brown and even though you start to give it attention and turn the sprinkler on with increasing frequency, the ground’s thirst is not slaked and the wind scrapes off the topsoil. Then you start to think of the last time it rained, properly rained, the type that soaks in gently and then it turns to a drenching getting from the car to the front door and turns the streets into the consistent static of tyres, and you can’t remember. And because the memory is some months back, you notice the dryness of your mouth and the cracks in the skin around your heels and the leaves that fall crack underfoot, lifeless, discarded in abandonment. On the fridge door is a child’s artwork with cotton balls stuck on as pretend clouds, and there is as much chance of rain from cotton balls as there is of love from the person whose breath condenses with yours as you sleep, falls to the pillows and dries out before dawn.