Uneasy

Uneasy

By Vanessa Jones

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Uneasy is a collection of dark short stories with an undercurrent of suburban ennui and the uneasiness that comes from ordinary life. It includes my signature darkness and poetic style, whilst tackling centuries old themes that are still relevant today, such as unrequited love, deep domestic unhappiness and the desperate and misguided strive for normality.

THE WAR GIFT

Winner of National Year of Reading short story competition, 2011

The peaky walls of Kazia’s room were the colour of cardboard, similar to the type of boxes that she’d seen Mr Nowak use in his store. The only wall that faced the street was adorned with a small window which held a picture of the square below; amass with ratty pigeons surrounding a mossy water fountain that had been inactive since the war began. It seemed futile to care about whether the water endlessly cycled for no other purpose than to catch the eye since lives were being harvested. That’s the odd thing about war; everyone assumes that it would be much worse if another country was to take the reins for a while but how can it be worse than the middle ground of painful constant battle and a country that had split at the seams?

Another cardboard like wall connected Kazia’s room to the parlour room, where Agnieszka and her spinster twin, Felka, lived. Agnieszka had sent her husband off to war and was heavy with their first child. Kazia pretended not to notice that she wailed herself to sleep most nights.

Beside the window in Kazia’s one room, lay a single bed; its iron skeleton showed strips of bloody rust materialising from beneath the black paint. Across its body lay a heavy, brittle blanket that matched the colour of the walls. Partnered with the bed was a thin empty potato crate, probably stolen from the back of Mr Nowak’s store before it crumbled in a bomb attack. The crate lay on its thinnest side, keeping the bed company and providing a resting place for the apartment’s solitary tatty novel.

The novel was encased in a hard jade cover which was delicately frayed at the base of the spine and round silver letters rolled onto the front, declaring Great Expectations were to be had. It was well worked through many times before Kazia had ever first peeled it open, upon which her mind had never worked the same since. After the twelfth reading, it became a particular ritual; where she would absorb a chapter or two each night, laying it to sleep for a week (if she could wait that long) and then began the literary candy once again.

Each time she ploughed through the story, she would alternate which character saw the world through; sometimes it would be Pip with all his agonising heartbreak and desperate attempts to win Estella over and over again. Sometimes Kazia sank into the knowledge that Miss Haversham was her destiny and pretended to get comfortable with the way she thought and felt but mainly, she got accustomed to being Estella, for that was not a huge stretch of the imagination. The war had frozen her heart rigid, just like Estella’s, and had spared her no one to begin to melt it.

Kazia took better care of that book than her only dress and the one life saving pea green coat that hung, like a corpse, on the back of her door. For although the clothing kept her alive by providing much-needed warmth against the bite of winter, the book provided her mind with the warmth that it craved.

One day she returned from her daily activity of walking past the local wise woman to check that she was still alive. It distressed Kazia at nights to think of the aging woman that crouched in the bank’s decrepit alleyway, would just pass into the night and no one would be there to move her body into the shadows. Or, at least, cover her cracked face with her shawl.

And there it was. Gracing her stoop, like a gift, from an unknown sender. She fantasised that it came