Sam Redlark

Towards the end of 2020, I wrote a novella by accident. Which is a cutesy way of saying that, either on a whim, or as a dedicated act of procrastination to avoid doing something else, I dragged the mothballed fragments of an unfinished piece of fiction out from the archives, and worked on it until it was well over 30,000 words and no longer viable as a short story. During the decade or so since its conception, the story had acquired a number of notations that had been tagged piecemeal onto the end. Among these was the outline for a new opening paragraph that went on to become chapter one. A sketch of a scene that was intended to amount to nothing more than a couple of paragraphs, swelled to immense proportions and became chapter three, which remains my favourite part of the book. There was a point where I had to make a decision: Do I cram the story back into the vaults, or do I continue adding to it, in the knowledge that it is too large for any literary journal to even consider, and w...

When was the last time that you shrugged in real life, or were present when somebody else did? And was it before or after the most recent appearance of Halley's Comet? Shrugging as a gesture has fallen into disuse, rightly so in my opinion. It is a glib embodiment of half-baked defeat that is, in and of itself, defeatist to the core; a method of using your entire upper body to communicate to other people in your vicinity that, not only are you an idiot, but that you are also shaking off any responsibility to mitigate your ignorance. I have resorted to shrugging in the past and, in doing so, have caused irreparable damage to my immortal soul. Whether this wilful self-injury is sufficient to deny me access to the Kingdom of Heaven, after my death, only time will tell. At present, if I was given an option between expressing my helplessness either by shrugging or by punching a wall, I would bear the skinned knuckles and keep my dignity. I would also pay for any damage that I caused to ...

  A few days ago, my Great Uncle Perce passed away in hospital. His death did not come as a surprise. In August of this year, he had turned 105. He had received his customary birthday card from the Queen – his sixth – which he had given to my Father. His final days were quiet. His lungs were unable to draw in enough oxygen to sustain him. In the wake of his final shallow breath, an immense archive of knowledge and experience was irrevocably stricken from the living memory of our species, and lost in time forever. Friedrich Nietzsche advised that one should aim to die at the appropriate time. In most cases, whether one has succeed or failed in this endeavour is left to the retrospective judgement of others. My great uncle would probably have been the first to agree that he had lingered on this earth for too long. He was the unwilling inheritor of a double-edged set of genetics that maintained a tenacious grip on life, regardless of its quality. His body simply didn't know how to die...