Day 21” - A Short Story by Ruby Cowling - first published in Wasafiri - A Journal of Contemporary International Writing - May 21, 2018 - By the Author of This Paradise

  Day 21” - A Short Story by Ruby Cowling - first published in Wasafiri - A Journal of Contemporary International Writing - May 21, 2018 - By the Author of This Paradise

I completely endorse Ruby Cowling's collection of short stories, This Paradise to all lovers of the form.

You may read this wonderful story here 

My post on Biophile by Ruby Cowling includes a link to the story

This is a story those for those who sometimes feel boxed in, trapped by the consequences of the pandemic.  If you ever seek refuge in the internet, in your devices, as I for sure do, or wish others in your world sometimes had off switches you could flick when they annoy you, tben you will relate to the troubled mother and wife narrating "On Day 21".  The story is about what happens on the 21st Day in a row rain has kept her inside.  

As I read this very intriguing story for the third time, I was faced with the same question the narrator was, has she been driven crazy.  Like most of us she has a machine that sends her notices.  She has three  young children, she calls them C, D, and E.  Here is where I began to wonder has she gone mad or is this a slightly alternative world where children come with off switches.  

"The switch was my secret. I’d told myself I wouldn’t resort to it so much, especially with E, who was already small for her age, and such a lovely, milk-scented little thing – though so were the other two; don’t get me wrong, they were the sun in my sky. But the minutes of my days were long and difficult, full of complexity and murk, and the switch was a way to get through. It was a way to sharpen the edges of life, to know where and who I was when things got fuzzy. It cleaned; it freshened. What helped wasn’t the switching off as such, it was the fact of the switch itself.

I’d come to rely on it. And now, for the first time, I’d used the switch on all three children at once.

I arranged C and D’s little limbs so they wouldn’t cramp. Then I returned to the machine. It was the machine that had shown me the possibility of this kind of ease. The machine’s world was either/or, yes or no, on or off, zero or one. It was the antidote to uncertainty: that devious mould that grew everywhere if I didn’t keep on top of it."

Now the narrator begins to snap.  Her husband, who is a department head in some sort of technical company, that is all she knows, comes home.

"Darkness was coming when my bladder forced me up from the chair. I’d left my phone in the bathroom, and there was a text from B saying he’d be home early. My husband was a departmental head – some technical department, I wasn’t sure which. He said his responsibilities ‘spilled over’. When he came home tired I’d tell him he should have boundaries, but he’d say it wasn’t that simple. I didn’t see why not. His days were a grid of meetings and targets; the entire company was founded on crisp, black numbers. It should be wonderful."

  On day twenty she takes the children shopping and her escape device fails her along with her precarious hold on to what passes for reality:

"On day twenty the sky lifted to dove grey, and I drove us out to the big Asda, spinning arcs of water from the wheel-arches. As I parked, the rain hardened again. C thought his cagoule felt ‘squishy’ and refused to put it on, then refused to be put into it, and when he started shouting my fingers reached for the switch, and nothing happened.

I flicked it up and down, up and down, but nothing. I took hold of his contorting face and turned it to me, looking for an answer from him, as if he had overcome the switch by his own will. This sudden gesture took him aback, and he did in fact stop crying. For a second we held each other’s gaze and I was struck by the absolute strangeness of him, this person who had come from me, and it seemed he saw the same strangeness in me.

I lifted his sister from the other side. I tried the switch. Nothing happened. She squirmed away from me and went to peer into the tiny convex mirror set in the side mirror, enjoying her own distorted face. E was asleep in her carseat and I didn’t want to trouble her.

I looked around the car park, hoping perhaps to see another woman in the same situation.

There must have been others like me, but who would admit it? Certainly those around me seemed fine. They sloshed back and forward with the tides of each day like happy seaweed, while I was up there on the surface, clinging to a broken raft, gazing into tarry liquid that would one day take me down. Without the switch, I couldn’t see how I’d be able to navigate the days."

I will leave further event of Day 21  for you to discover.  

"On Day 21" was written before the Covid 19 pandemic changed the lives of millions, maybe billions but it is a perfect story for these times.  

It is a puzzle, do the children really have off switches or is this just the way the harried narrator tries to cope?

She does live in a very confined way, no books, no stories, no music, no Netflix to help her keep her sanity.

Ruby Cowling was born in Bradford and now lives in London. This Paradise is her first book. Her stories have won The White Review Prize (2014) and the London Short Story Prize (2014) among others and been widely published in journals and anthologies, including Lighthouse, The Letters Page, Unthology, and The Lonely Crowd. . 

Print Media Praise

‘Admirably ambitious in scope, Ruby Cowling explores big themes – climate change and natural disaster, technology and survival – using strange and sometimes fantastical imagery to trace the obscure edges of human experience.’ Alice Ash, Times Literary Supplement

‘The most original short stories I’ve read in a long time … current, entertaining, and relevant. Highly recommended.’ Jimena Gorraez, Litro

‘The range of Cowling’s style and subject matter is impressive … This Paradise is a beautiful and highly original collection.’ The Spectator

‘Ruby Cowling offers a call-to-arms, an urgent encouragement to breathe complexity back into a human experience made simple. We will be recorded, we will be flattened and reduced. But we can record too.’ Jon Doyle, Review 31

‘Most stories have their ‘home’ audience. But when fiction crosses that inner ring, and survives to tell its tale, well – that’s art. And This Paradise achieves that handsomely.’

Tamim Sadikali, Open Pen

I look forward to following her work long after this 

period is just a memory.

Mel u