Up and Over: flash fiction by me
In October, I was long-listed for the Sheffield Short Story Award with my 700-word story, ‘Up and Over’, which I wrote one morning in Hillsborough Park’s cafe. Since it was written especially for the competition, I’m unlikely to bother submitting it elsewhere, so I thought I’d share it here. I hope you enjoy it.
“What’s the big deal?” her nephew asks.
They’re in the basement of the Arts Tower staring at the rising and falling cubicles of the paternoster lift. On the way there, she told him the folktales of crushed skulls, severed limbs, and gruesome deaths incurred by misjudged boardings of the human-size dumbwaiter. Now, looking at it after all these years, she wonders, Did it always move so fast? Perhaps her perception of its speed has increased with age, like her perception of the aging process itself.
“It’s kind of cool, that’s all,” she says. “Go on.”
As impressed by the contraption as he is of anything, her nephew shrugs and steps aboard, losing his head, then torso, legs, and feet as he elevates. Twenty seconds later, he rematerializes in reverse order and jumps off looking nonplussed. Of course it’s not cool – not to a generation accustomed to accessing greater thrills with the touch of their thumbs. Pity pinches her heart as she realises that university won’t ever be as exciting for him as it was for her.
While he’s in the lecture theatre being sold on studying Politics and International Relations at the university, she buys a coffee and wanders the subterranean floor of the tower, among the quarter-century-old ghosts of her own student days, mustering the courage to ride the lift again. In the many years since she last rode the paternoster, she’s dreamed of it countless times. In those dreams, she’s trying and failing to step into or out of the moving compartment or repeatedly jumping off at the wrong floor and missing a critical exam. Just the thought of it makes her palms damp.
It’s a dim November day. Through the windows above her, she can see that the fog is still dense. She looks forward to the time when the timid would-be students and their overanxious parents fill the space once again.
Knowing she’s got only twenty minutes before the lecture ends and her nephew will want lunch, she steels herself. She may not get this chance again. But for this to count, she can’t just travel a few floors. She must go up and over the top; she must see for herself if there was ever anything to be afraid of. It seems like an important mission if she is to live through her midlife with more courage than she’s lived until now.
In the central lobby, the standard lifts taunt her. She keeps her back to them and breathes, watching the perpetual motion of the elevator, as paralysed as she has been in so many dreams. Her heart rate climbs; her stomach drops. But as she’s about to walk away, she feels a presence beside her, a shadow, a wisp of fog. It’s familiar, comforting. She can feel it wants what she wants, and together they step into a compartment.
The lift clunks and wobbles as each floor flashes past. The journey seems endless, as if travelling into another dimension. As the summit nears, her silent companion urges her to hold her nerve. Only a few floors until she’s potentially tipped onto her head.
Then there is darkness and a reversal of trajectory that makes her intestines lurch. She realises that her mute companion is no longer in the capsule. Maybe it slipped out on the mythic floor at the apex of the tower where lost youth gathers.
But she has survived, and now the descent. Her success gives her the courage to go down and under, too. Again, she emerges unscathed and elated. After the final short ascension, she steps off the lift into the tower’s basement now filled with chattering people.
He is there, her nephew: the almost-grown man who, as a toddler, liked to sleep with underpants on his head. She wonders who he might be in twenty-five years; hopefully, someone who doesn’t let opportunities pass him by, who knows when to jump and when to wait, who isn’t afraid to change direction.
“How was it?” she asks.
“Good,” he replies, economical as ever.
She smiles. Maybe that’s what’s needed in international relations: someone who’ll just get to the bloody point.
“Tell me all about it over lunch,” she says, slapping his shoulder as they merge with the flow of students and parents.
Outside, the fog is lifting.
Inside, the paternoster keeps turning in never-ending loops.