Guest Post - Virginia Moffatt

Today I've a very special guest post from a writer and twitter friend Virginia Moffatt to celebrate the publication of her debut collection of stories. The book is a fascinating pairing of stories that partner or respond to one another, all about the theme of love and relationships and pleasingly offers a very realistic and truthful view of love rather than overly-romanticising it.

I first met Virginia through the Friday Flash writing community via Twitter the history of how she came by it echoes very much with that of my own. We've become good friends discussing politics, protest, family and whether there artists (particularly comedians) are entitled to a right to cause offence, in addition to reading each other's work during the writing process. It was entirely down to Virginia that I'm also being published by Gumbo Press with a collection of flash stories, since she encouraged me to submit when I'd already decided I didn't have a chance of submitting successfully.

So I'm delighted to welcome Virginia to talk about how the book came about and to wish her all the best not only with publication, but also with her live reading at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford this Saturday for National Flash Fiction Day.

Thanks Marc for this opportunity to share some thoughts about the launch of my  collection, "Rapture and what comes after" (published by Gumbo Press). 

I became a flash fiction writer by chance.  In 2009, following advice from my twin sister, Julia Williams, a successful novelist, I set up my blog "A Room of My Own" as a way of promoting my work. I started posting in July, but I was still building my social media presence and finding it difficult to attract visitors. Then my husband, Chris, noticed a friend of his taking part in Friday Flash and suggested I give it a try. I had nothing to lose, so I posted my first story "Happy New Year" on New Year's Day, 2010. To my delight, I received loads of comments and was welcomed into the community with open arms. What started as an experiment soon became a fixture, and for six months I posted pretty much every week.  I soon built up a list of regular readers with fellow writers like Marc, whose stories helped shape my own, and a writing group with whom I felt at home. And although I don't write flash quite so often now, Friday Flash is still a huge part of my writing life. 

"Rapture and what comes after" is drawn from many of these Friday Flash posts. I began putting it together last year, when I realised that I had unintentionally created a number of paired stories, revealing the light and dark sides of love. There weren't enough for a collection, so I looked at pieces that I particularly liked and began writing partners for them.  The result is fifteen stories where the characters are relatively happy in their relationships and fifteen where they definitely aren't. Some stories feature the same characters ("Rapture/"What comes after", "Happy Birthday Darling" and "Telling the Family") . Some, use similar motifs such as an item of clothing, ("The Scarf/The Jumper") or the weather ("Let it Snow/Waiting for the Thaw"). And some are linked by a theme such as gender expectations ("A Woman's Work"/"A Man's Job") or the difficulty of coming to a decision ("No doubt about it/"Hesitation").  

Despite the dark tone of the second part, I believe in love. But, I also know it's not easy. I know that even the happiest and most devoted couples have their struggles. I know that often love doesn't work out the way people hoped, and, though that can be terrible, it's not always a bad thing. Stories should entertain, move, or amuse the reader. I hope this collection does all of those things, whilst providing a true reflection of what it means to live and love.

Stained Glass - Friday Flash

He stood in the centre of the church’s murk. The heavy wooden pews were empty, but he conceived the devotees kneeling there would be swathed in darkness. Only the votive candles gave any illumination. Kindling the memories of the dead in order to light the ways of the still living. And thereby keeping them plunged in gloom.

As he moved he saw he cast no shadow. No place for light and shade in this particular realm he mused. He studied the stained glass windows. The only stab of colour in a world of black or white truth. The reds and blues were heavy and thick. They absorbed all the brightness from outside and devoured it. Imagine that, windows that actually served to stop up the light. The lapis lazuli ultramarine was very pure, untainted. While the cochineal reds were smoky, full of tiny grains. The reds were mainly used for the clothes of supplicants and the headwear of women, covering up the sinful flesh. Blue was for the garb of the saints. It was crystal clear to his eye the message of the glass. Only the halos were yellow and less dense, admitting a tiny amount of light to make them glow. 

He looked up into the heart of the cupola. There the colour was in the murals, while clear glass allowed the light to stream down into the upper reaches of the church in ribbons. The dizzying heights where man could not scale and approach the face of god. They would have to content themselves with contemplating him from far below on their knees. Looking up into the divine light as insects. The architecture of power was so transparent. How could people have fallen for this? Did they really believe this to be the natural order of how matter was arranged? One step outside of the church’s heavy wooden portal would have delivered them into the blinding sunlight of summer. That should have informed them of the artificial manipulation of light and dark they had just exited.

“Let there be light” the holy writ had commanded. So he picked up a floor candelabra and swung it at the stained glass. The glass shattered with a dull tintinnabulation. Ha he thought, let these serve as a call to prayer. He continued striking at each window in turn. The light outside seemed almost tentative, as if it were unsure whether flooding in might be a trespass. This only enraged him more.

“What are you doing?” spluttered the priest who had been summoned by the bruit. The man turned to face him and struck him with the iron candelabra. The priest fell straight to the ground groaning. The man leaned down and picked up a shard of the broken glass and drove it into the priest’s neck. The holy man’s white collar began to stain red. The red against the blood was of a light hue. The man studied the glass in his hand. It was a red slither and he regarded how the man’s blood was the same shade as the dark cochineal and couldn’t be picked out against it. Just as he imagined it would be. He drove it back into the man’s jugular.

He examined his hand as it too was bleeding. He was about to bring the cut to his mouth, when he caught himself. Leaded windows and five hundred year of insect dye was probably not conducive to his future wellbeing. He smirked and moved to exit the church. As his last act of desecration, he blew out each of the votive candles. Extinction was the only indisputable truth. He turned back into the interior of the church and was delighted to see that the light had apologetically begun to flow through the broken windows and begin to lift the gloom.

*

With slides spotted with red under microscopic lenses and the DNA drawn from his blood on the glass shard recovered from the dead priest’s neck, forensic science were able to bring the man to book. This was the natural arrangement of matter. And god’s, or was it man’s, arrangement of justice.

Blood Angel - Friday Flash

We followed the book’s prescriptions faithfully. Having done so we feel honour bound to recommend the following corrigenda as a result of our experiences.

The first mistake was ours and ours alone. We decided on an evening enactment. I think the elders were concerned that the villagers remain working during daylight, rather than being drawn like moths to this particular flame while the sun was still high up in the sky to light their labour in the fields.  Additionally I think they were also keen on the further benison, or perhaps expedience is more fitting, of keeping them out of the tavern  for a single night, though many I’m certain smuggled in their own firkins and flasks of ale. Still, spiting the profits of the taverner could never be a bad thing.

So we convened justice when it was dark. Which only compounded the second erratum, the invocation to punish by fire. In other countries we know they lop off the offender’s head with an axe or dangle them from a gibbet until death. We respectfully feel that there can be no miscues with such straightforward orderliness. Yet in our case, we only fanned the flames of incitement in favour of that which we were seeking to expunge.

She stood there against the stake, arms strapped out either side of her in unwitting simulacrum of our own Messiah’s death, as the flames began to lick around her feet. Yet her flaxen hair, (I ought to remark that this specimen was not possessed of any gnarled, wen-covered crone’s visage), billowed out around her, presumably driven by the flow of the heated air. Now the effect of this was that her locks echoed and mocked the flames still trying to fully catch. It suggested that she was not only embracing the flames, but merrily encouraging them under her control. Was her hair on fire, or was it made of fire, indicative of her whole body being forged from the abyss itself? The red balefire against the darkness only augmented the impression that we were in the realm of those from the infernal place and they were in their element, whereas we in the village were far from home. We had surrendered the night to its denizens rather than brand our purifying mark upon it.

Her eyes too were blazing in the most diabolic fashion, even though we few men of learning present, appreciated that this was just the effect of the flames being reflected in her dead lenses. Their cowering effect still struck home amongst our populace though I could see. Many arms were raised to try and fortify themselves by quaffing on their home-made brews, as they perceived her to be glaring at  them each with a most furious evil eye. We had staged this spectacle to demonstrate the power of Christ to defeat his foes, yet it was they who seemed to have inverted every one of our attributes and were demonstrating their own fiendish puissance through them.

Some said they heard her screaming her pain as you would hope, while others reported it as a wicked cackling. Again here was the cozening play of the image of her up on that pile perverting the minds of simple folk.  I myself don’t remember any sound emitted from her at all, as if she was drawing demonic strength that even with her final breath she was still performing the devil’s work. That she was to be sacrificed in order to sow demonic diabolic seeds was exactly how Beelzebub always treated his minions, yet the perniciousness of such a fatal contract passed right over the heads of our people slathering near the stake.

Another fallacy was when these people at the front were dancing in what they credited to be blood and other boiled juices pressed out of her body by the heat of the blaze, actually turned out to be leaking pitch from the barrels fashioned with the usual slipshod craft by our village cooper. So that when a stray spark or two landed upon the liquid pool, up they went in a conflagration claiming their lives, which only seemed to offer another possible demonstration of supernatural forces at work.

And when the inferno had finished its ministrations and burned itself out by dawn’s first light, we were left with two further scathing impressions. The first was that when the flames had burned though her rope shackles and allowed her leaden carcass to topple forward to the earth, we had naturally assumed that the spark of life had left her. And yet the imprint on the soil disabused us of such reasoning, since she must have been able to move her arms and tried crawling away even though she had no legs to propel her. Since there in blood were outlines like snow angels, only red. An abomination of the very notion of an angel, here again to taunt  us, but also stamping the notion of a fallen angel, one of Hell’s legions marked out for all to see. The second, that despite the fire reducing everything of her to ashes and powder, there in the middle of the blood angel was her perfectly preserved, albeit singed, black heart.

Brazenly presented with such sigils of damnable pre-eminence, the villagers fell under its spell at once. They started fornicating among the ashes hoping to absorb the occult powers. The black heart was borne to the church and placed on the altar, while the crucifixes within were all inverted. And finally I was forced to make the amendments you read in this book, transcribing in her dark angel blood. Before they mean to burn me on a pyre and challenge our lord of mercy to such a display of sovereignty to rival theirs.