‘LIQUID HISTORY’ - SMOKELONG QUARTERLY
SmokeLong Quarterly is my favourite literary magazine. I often ramble on at elegiac length about it being the Flash Fiction Holy Grail… so I will simply add that being published again in SmokeLong is a flash-writer career highlight.
The story is called ‘Liquid History’, and was selected by Guest Reader, Zach Powers. Here is what Zach had to say about this story:
“Who doesn't love a story about a vengeful shipwreck? But what caught my attention in Elisabeth's writing is how she incorporates the terminology of sailing and shipbuilding, and how that terminology creates a prose style that exists only within the confines of her particular story. She takes a strange and brilliant concept and uses that to push the bounds of language itself. She doesn't ignore plot, though, tying the word-building and wordplay together with a deft, human-scale narrative at the end.”
In December 2019, the story was selected by Marie Gethins in Banshee as one of her three ‘Best of 2019 Reading List,’ alongside Ann Enright with ’The Weight,’ in The New Yorker’s summer flash series, and ’The Ghost of a Very Small Thing’ by Cathy Ulrich, published in Lunate.
Ruby is a wreck. She lives in the Thames. Trout fish through her bilge tanks, turds flush past her decks.
Once, men lived inside her and plotted inky maps they could travel through; stargazed above her into Africa, to white beaches striped with zebra, sea-pigs singing, kraken rolling in the sand.
Now Ruby is lodged in a sludge of London slurry.
She is snapped, her skull six metres down, tiding with gravel. Her gut gurgling coke cans and Primark, plastic dental floss sticks, dead cats.
Her spine rests deep in the ice age, on a clam-fossil terrace, mainmast to mizzenmast knotting with eels.
In cold currents, she cracks, sends splinters of herself off to sea.
You can read the rest here.
You can read my author interview here.