Best British Short Stories 2020 by Nicholas Royle (best novels to read for students txt) 📕

He is smiling. His mind is distracted by the lobster dangling from his fingers, dripping rivulets of water onto his feet. Badly injured, the lobster is attempting to escape to the second shoreline the carrier pigeons have drawn with their beaks.

Kiru re-enacts his most indelible teenage memory: when he rescues a boy from a house fire. It was terrifying, exciting. He was driven by instinct, recklessness, adrenalin. He watches open-mouthed, astounded that she knows this. Her blue shift rides up her thighs a little as she performs.

Later, she discovers that Patrice’s wife died five years before. Of course he is saddened by his loss. She is sad about this unfortunate turn of events.

She cannot compete with his dead wife or the memories she left behind that float and duck between his organs. She wants to leave a bite mark on his collarbone that he will stroke even after they’ve faded. She wants to breathe against the pulse in his neck as though she can tame its movements with her breaths.

I’ll build a new penis for you from a current, she says. Not leave you with the old one that still carries the touch of your wife’s fingertips.

He laughs uncomfortably, replying, When I was a teenager I used to dream of Pam Grier sitting on the edge of my bed holding a rocket.

She smiles at this. It is a sincere curving of her plump lips, which are intoxicating to him. Kiru wants to apologise for the things she cannot tell him.

If only you could hit your head on rocks below shimmering surfaces of water and not be fazed by the impact or your blood momentarily blinding fish.

If only you were how I imagined you to be.

What do I do with the disappointment of this? With the gap in between?

What do I store there for cold, isolating winters you will not be a part of?

She eats half of Patrice’s heart in the early hours of the morning when the island is still asleep. She dumps the other half in the waters of the blue sea for a whale that has recently given birth in the Pacific, longing for the call of its young. She recalls the gathering of carrier pigeons swallowing patterns of nudibranch-shaped smoke from Patrice’s chest, the shed feather turning to gold in the darkened vacuum of his chest.

Small, golden triangles rise to the surface of Kiru’s skin. She glows in the hazy grey light of dawn, watching mist softening the lines of mountains for what the day will bring. The island’s creatures create a gentle din to run her fingers over.

A tear runs down Kiru’s cheek. She is lonely. She wants to fill the ache that grows inside her, that isn’t knowable no matter which corner of herself she reaches it from, no matter whose footsteps she temporarily borrows to do so. It is vast. And she is like a small chess queen loose in the sky, clutching at shapes, at possibilities which amount to nothing as she opens her hand on the crash down.

After she sheds her skin, she watches it in the water. It is like a diving suit with a face, carried away by ripples.

She does not know what it is like to have female friends. She spends two to three hours interacting with the soft-bodied women who speak as if words are foreign objects in their mouths, whose lungs she can hear shrinking while the iguanas crawl around the island without heads that have vanished.

Late in the afternoon Kiru rests in one of several boats moored on the island. She thinks of the stray items the soft-bodied women have begun to stash away: two fire extinguishers, a telescope, a high wooden chair with a dirty velvet seat, three propellers, and two cable cars. She panics with her eyes closed, as she is prone to doing occasionally. She is tired from the energy she expends prowling the island. Her tiredness results in strange visions that carve a path through the day. She dreams of a catastrophic darkness where everything falls away one by one, orbiting in a black star-studded distance above the earth with warped frequencies that result in it all falling down again in the wrong place: with the sea now a glimmering sky, the sky a weightless, cloud-filled ground, rock faces hiding in caves, mountains made of the island’s creatures leaking tree sap, trees uprooted in panicked flight, alcohol bottles filled with new weather shot through with spots of ice, eunuchs emerging from a fire charred, offering to hide bits of their lives in shed skin. When light from the black star-studded space above the earth threatens to split her head in two, Kiru sees herself sitting on top of the mountain of island creatures eating fossils one by one, but she knows this will not do. She clambers out of the boat.

By the time she finds Ray from Madagascar fixing one leg of the stage at the far end of the beach, Kiru is

A curvy Mediterranean

Beauty with a

Boyishly short

Pixie cut.

Amber nudibranch from the telescope lens have made their way to them but Ray has not spotted this. He is wiry, handsome, a little sweaty from his efforts. He has a brutish slash of a mouth. As if things had accidents there. Other men pass to wander the island’s pathways, mountains and peaks. Some emerge from the beach huts with daylight waning in their eyes. By now the soft-bodied women, her competitors, are gasping for air between conversations, grabbing bits of sand that slide through their fingers.

Can I help you? Kiru tugs down her shift, watching Ray’s head.

No, thanks. Don’t move, though, he instructs. Somehow you standing there is making this task more bearable.

Why are you fixing the stage?

He chuckles, throws her a bemused look. Because if I don’t, some musicians among us might get injured.

You cannot fix all the world’s stages. What do they do when you are not there to help? Injury is part of living.

This is true but I can’t just