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Loss and Love
- 17th October 2022
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Each week, we pick a short fiction piece from our Fairlight Shorts archives to feature as our story of the week. This week, we’ve chosen a story about perspective by Artemis.
Artemis is a high school student pursuing writing. Their favourite types of writing are short stories and poetry, and their favourite elements of writing are clever word plays and irony. When they’re not writing, they spend their days creating resin dolls and sewing clothes.
Artemis started writing their first novel Twin Blades in seventh grade, but has been passionate about reading and writing for much longer than that. They have been published in The Thread 2020, The Thread 2021, The Sky’s the Limit and Fahmidan Review. Their writing is forthcoming in The Bezine, Open Door Magazine and Book of Matches.
‘Loss and Love’ follows a woman as she tries to find something she has been missing.
Enjoy!
I once lost something of mine, and it was nowhere to be found. Problem was, I didn’t know what it was that I was looking for. I searched through my whole house: under the couch cushions, in the kitchen cabinets, under my bed. I rifled through countless documents − taxes, old schoolwork, art − in case a snippet of something, anything, had slipped in between the pages. I took a ladder to crawl in the attic, and anti-anxiety meds to creep into the basement. I dusted the furniture, mopped the floors and washed the windows. I got more desperate at one point, and peeled up the floorboards; it was like picking splinters from flesh: painful, tiring, fruitless.
I walked these halls with eyes old and new. I looked at photographs of everyone I’ve ever met. I turned those photographs upside down, sideways, tore them to pieces and reassembled them… Nothing.
I clung to light fixtures and ceiling fans alike, hoping to see the world from a different perspective. I dug tunnels beneath my house. I found hidden treasure, dead bodies, and many shiny pebbles lodged underneath my fingernails. I didn’t find what I lost. But I did figure out what I was looking for.