Falling to Pieces

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Our story of the week is a story about a breakdown from the writer Tamsin Partington.

Tamsin Partington is a creative writing Master’s student, child tamer, cat wrangler and wife. Her passion is the short story, but she also loves to write longer sci-fi and fantasy fiction for children and young adults. She started writing as soon as she could spell, and when her children started primary school she knew she needed to pursue her passion, enrolling on an access course and then a BA in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. She is now working on her Master’s degree and several writing projects, including a short story collection themed around mental health and a post-apocalyptic YA novel.

Falling to Pieces is a surreal piece of flash fiction that explores how it feels to fall apart.

It was a quiet Sunday morning when bits of me began to fall off.

I put that first finger on the kitchen worktop. It wobbled for a moment before rolling off and onto the floor. The worktop wasn’t level.

I found my big toe from my right foot in my sock at bedtime. I supposed that I should wash the sock, so I removed the toe first. But there was another in there that I hadn’t noticed, and it broke the machine. The door wouldn’t open while the machine was full of water. I sat on the cold kitchen tiles for a while, just looking. But I could see that pesky toe floating in the stagnant suds behind the glass. So I got up, shut the light off and closed the door behind me.

It was cold, but my left ear got stuck to the boiler when I leant in to listen. And when I went to check on the hot water, I lost an eye down the plughole. With my one lonely ear, I stood and listened to it gurgle all the way along the pipes.Read more…

 

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