GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE winner 2022/23
TIMNA FIBERT
‘Signs and Wonders’
WITH MY EARLY MIRACLES I BLESSED THE TOTE-BAG OVEREDUCATED MEN OF LONDON IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT, when all the grown-ups who might have ratified my sainthood were well on their way towards sunrise clean and worshipful.
It took a long time to recognise something was happening to me. That’s not unusual – sometimes I only realise my stomach aches because curled like a fingernail clipping over the toilet bowl, I give out little mewlings to let myself know. Sometimes when I’m thirsty I think I want to slit my wrists.
There were some things I always liked about sex. I liked that you could verify everything was working as it should. The relief when he put it in and told you how wet you were. Affirmation that there really were cogs aclank inside which didn’t need to be instructed. Also when he told you to climb down from on top so he could overwhelm you, and as you lay flat and buffeted from behind you knew with absolute certainty you hadn’t overstayed your welcome.
But after you’ve loved someone for too long the signs and wonders of the body gradually recede and leave you empty headed and unknowing. For a while there were dry mouths and wrist spasms to spell things out for you. Sleepless nights and days without food. And yes if you must know a wet pussy and oh I used to love when he told me about it. Beautiful machines of love we were. For a while.
The last time we fucked it was winter dusk. The rooms in our flat were almost dark, but not so dark that we needed to turn the lights on, so the sky watched us in sad evening blue, admonishing my pale and drooping body.
He didn’t tell me to climb down for what seemed like hours.
After everything that had fallen apart, I felt the need to rediscover early dogmas. I apped my way through bus journeys to and from work, refusing to accept that the twin motions of swaying and swiping were building deposits of sick in my oesophagus and my ankles. When I finally got to the office I rested my cheek against the laminate of the desk wood and the world slanted right like a keeling frigate.
The first man lived in the theatre district and his houseplants were made of plastic. He was a software developer and when he came in five pumps I laughed but in a kind way. Afterwards smoking out his window we talked about city birdwatching, and how he defined success now he made enough money for the answer to be unquantifiable. From his flat we could see the red stubbled lights of the Soho Windmill, the liquid glow of TABLES & DANCING. I had my own little religious experience thinking how many things about this man I already knew that his mother never would.
Swiping fast and queasy on the top deck, holding my phone against the glass in the hope that the leaves hurrying behind the screen would combat nausea, I selected my disciples from job titles between the ages of 22 and 38. Cloud Architect. Prison Librarian. Writer @ the Wrestling Industry. I couldn’t tell you exactly what I was looking for, except perhaps other People.
Clever and naked, I drank bottled wine in strange bedrooms with lips beardburnt red. Browsed hunchbacked book-spines to learn the soul of a man. Slick and strong as a wrung cloth, I found that where once I had been anxious and overkeen, suddenly I knew the wittiest thing to say. The most luminous thing. The funniest thing. And if he called me a whore I took his head on my lap and told him nothing he had done to me was wasted. And if he spat on me I would moan and put his hands around my neck.
Those were my first wonders, which I came to know by the stiffening cocks that passed like water through my hands. I shone over the metropolis like a second angel, rewarding the firstborn sons of faithful parents for outliving another plague.
I noticed that I was thinner after sex. My skin was tauter, and I could lift heavy objects with astonishing ease. Once with a man I lost the condom wrapper in his living room, and he was so humiliated at the thought of his housemate discovering it, I lifted every item of furniture, one by one, using only the middle and index fingers on my right hand. A sofa, a chest of drawers, an upright piano. Squatting naked looking under each I splaying my buttocks to the room. Beneath the piano I found the wrapper, on top of the Order of Service for his great aunt’s funeral, and with a kiss kind and wise I handed both back to him before setting down the instrument. He took me in his arms and we went at it again, this time without the artifice of condoms. Every plant in his house was the same cutting of Devils Ivy, in different stages of burgeoning. In the kitchen the original cast dusty tendrils over the cutlery. His housemate’s hair-ties piled up in the corners of his room like dead spiders.
Still I didn’t realise what was going on with me – too high with the triumph of rediscovering that I had functions. Hypnotized by swinging bare-bulb ceiling lights and tower blocks alive on the night’s horizon. Then one morning 3am, after fucking a barrel-chested civil servant in his kitchenette populated by low maintenance succulents, I found myself levitating a caged hen’s egg above the faux-marble countertop. It revolved, top down, brown and speckled. I was impressed by how American it looked – a flying saucer over Nevada skies.
He swiped his hands around the shell. “How are you doing that?” he asked.
I shrugged at him and smiled, pure and small and kind and good. But he didn’t believe me and looked annoyed, and after a minute the egg fell out of the air like a rotten tooth from an old man’s skull.
Raised an atheist Jew, I had always thought of miracles as metaphors for bitter herbs, so I decided my wonders must be Catholic. One day I hoped to fuck the Pope and have him confirm that yes, what I’d done was truly Christian, and when I died, he’d take my body and distribute its relics amongst the speechless nuns of hot and pious countries.
I saw that the wonders didn’t happen every time, and some of them were more dazzling than others. Through careful observation I understood that there were certain conditions under which my best and brightest wonders forthcame. For optimum results he would be well educated – preferably he would have a PhD. Perhaps that sounds snobbish but I didn’t make the rules, in fact it would been easier if it wasn’t that way. The fact was with a PhD I could almost guarantee something impressive – a Greek language one-woman of Aristophanes’ Clouds, or a divine realignment of his rugby-broke nose. Once with a PhD I shook him awake in the darkness, and when I told him to follow, he got dressed without question. I led him through witching hour alleyways to a street built for restaurant waste, where a mound of designer furniture glittered amongst the peelings, thousands of pounds worth sacrificed to street-gods that they might grant triumph in a messy divorce. Claiming the oxblood chesterfield we huddled under the lukewarm sky, and as he taught me about the Anabaptist siege of Münster I turned the cobblestones to gold.
If I was given only an MA to work with, the wonders were usually smaller; the raffle numbers for a school fête in Tooting Bec, or a gymnastic tumble down the hall between his bedroom and the loo. And with an undergrad alone the effect was almost always negligible – a reduction in cellulite, maybe, but nothing more.
Once or twice I fucked a man without formal qualifications, but the results tended to be unpredictable. I had a lovely time with a delivery driver when I was woken by the cushioned palms of a Syrian hamster on my forehead, scrabbling to get purchase as it disgorged Christmas cracker puns from its cheek-pouches onto my eyelids before curling up in the bed between us as we traded snowman jokes until worktime. As far as I know, it still lives in the delivery driver’s overclean bedroom above the underclean laundromat, testing his commitment to sweeping by hurling sawdust out of its cage.
But they were risky, the unqualified. It find it hard to forget the night that I returned from post-coital urination to find my sous-chef lover pawing at his face, and looking around at me in horror as purpling bruises seeped into the pools of his eye-bags, stippled with gunshots of underskin blood.
On top of all this I discovered I had a problem with gluten. It made my tummy giggle during crucial moments and shot through my concentration, so in the end I thought it best to cut it out of my diet completely. This gave me more energy, meaning that I managed just about to stay awake at my desk, even when the night before I had been up fucking and demonstrating grand-master chess to a world leading expert in Forensic Dentistry. I became a gluten-free evangelist, and I know my friends talked about it behind my back. Every time I saw them they touched my flabby elbow and asked if I was eating enough.
The final condition for a miracle was out of my hands;
“Did you cum?” he needs to ask.
If he doesn’t ask, there will be no great mysteries that night.
“I can’t,” I always tell him. “I never have.”
I watch his face. He doesn’t think he cares but I know better. It’s not trivial, what he’s going through. He’s realising there’s nothing he can do for me, because I don’t want anything from him he can choose to give. Between us there will be no easy exchange of gifts, no duties done, no boxes ticked. He’s realising we’re not equals, he and I.
In his face I can see him grappling with grotesque hypotheticals; what if this night never comes to an end, and I stay in his bed demanding to be fucked for weeks on end? What if instead of getting married and having kids he lives to be a hundred, trapped here with me and my hips rocking without crescendo, back and forth, back and forth, the lonely donkey of keeping on? What if the comforting horsemen of apocalypse never show up to collect him, and I’m here unsatisfied forever as the world spins without slowing and the sun just doesn’t die?
I can see all this in his eyes and I don’t blame him for being scared. Now he has a heroic decision to make: to give up on me or go on. I’ve had men rev up to burst in thirty seconds, trying to escape the orbit of that deathless star. Balls clench-fisted with efforts of speed, I know they think I’ve played some sort of trick on them. As I watch them sponge their baggy semen from my naval with terse precision, I remind myself it has to be their choice: to give up on me or go on.
He was a young Philosophy academic and he spent his days reading Blanchot and his nights sitting cross-legged on grass verges wearing worn out cable-knit. He wrote poetry and he had won prizes for a pamphlet about swimming. I felt he contained the promise of great works – he had bright almond shaped eyes and just from his photos, I could tell he was a Person, and that between the two of us there were things which might die painfully in order to be reborn. I didn’t eat all day before our first meeting because I was worried a bit of gluten might find its way into my body’s temple. Nonetheless I was stupid when we were drinking and said a lot of things I didn’t mean.
“I’ve always thought since we can’t know what caused the beginning of motion, everything that happens is at the level of paradox. If you think about it, the most ordinary things are actually impossible.”
“We’ve gotten awfully high minded,” he said kindly. “I preferred when we were talking about how we both cocked up our taxes.”
The pub had stained-glass windows that inked my left hand mottled red, and I tooth-laughed, wildly depressed and desperate to get into the aftermath, where my great abilities were waiting to unfold.
I couldn’t believe my luck when he took me home – jittery as a car-crash survivor, I felt I didn’t deserve to have made it so far. On the late tube he apologised for the tube, and as I teased him I felt a twinge of what it might be like after, when I’d remembered how to be luminous. For the briefest second I put my head on his shoulder, just for a moment, before realising I hadn’t earned it and lifting my neck away. I was worried he would laugh at me but as I looked out at the tunnelled concrete he squeezed my hand, and I felt warm in my belly. I was excited for my transformation.
Beside his bathtub there was a peach stone with shafts of fruit beaming out of its craters. In the whole flat I found only one plant, a thick leafed Monstera in the living room, alive in places and in others dying. He told me he didn’t feel like an adult and I found myself wanting to be his mother and his child.
Yes, I said, when he asked where I wanted to be touched. Yes. Yes. On his bed was only a white sheet and underneath it we were like twin foetuses, large headed and gummy, pressed together in the half-light under a tent of skin. Even I could tell that it was wonderful.
“Did you cum?” he asked.
I can’t. I never have.
His eyes beneath me were a pair of letter-boxes.
“Climb down,” he told me, and hoisted me towards the mattress. Disentangling from the sheet he laid me out with my face in the pillow, and I turned to see him kneeling up behind me.
“Oh my god,” he said. “You’re so wet. You’re so wet.”
I craned at my body behind me and below. Wounds had opened up all over my skin – in my arms and my torso, my legs and my feet. Stretched across the bed like an unwilling apocalypse, I was suddenly impossibly thirsty. I felt infinite fields of absence gaping between the rungs of my ribcage. The wounds were elliptical and the blood coming out of them was clean and quick as shoaled sardines.
The following night I woke alone with pains in my uterus and the sensation of desiccating. I searched my body hoping for abrasions but found only my useless vagina, unlubricated and mundane. I squidged its spongy clitoris. Nothing happened. But all night I couldn’t sleep because of shocks inside my uterus that I couldn’t get at. They disappeared whenever I thought about them but came back again soon after.
Before I left, we’d arranged to meet again in two weeks time. With the men who came before I’d been more than happy to dissolve into the morning. My phone was a coded graveyard of numbers which once had names. Some tried to keep up the conversation and others didn’t, but either way I had up until that point felt one miracle was enough to give each of them the foundation for some kind of faith.
With him it was different. Our miracle kept returning to me like a tic of the brain. All the nights that had gone before seemed like magic tricks by comparison. It came back to me in spasms of memory – him putting his fingers in my side and tasting my clean bright blood. His penis finding where my spine should have been and unseaming the slippery junction between my heart and lungs. He after sunrise standing me by the window and telling me that he could see the light shining through my torso.
It was so different from what had gone before I began to wonder if it had been my miracle at all. Maybe it was his.
In my contacts I decorated his name with emojis – a crescent moon, a hazelnut, a dromedary. Having deleted my apps, I arrived each day at my desk in manic spirit, and without my usual morning sickness the work sprung from my keyboard like spontaneous brail responding to the needs of a blind man.
Praying didn’t come naturally to me, but nevertheless at night I knelt beside my bed like a Victorian and looked for signs of him on Whatsapp, traces of presence nudged through scrolling timecode. Sometimes as I watched, the word ‘Online’ materialised in place of numbers and dazzled me, and immediately I closed the app and hid my face, gripped by the terrible sensation that he was watching.
On the fourth day I sent him a well-composed picture of my breasts, and waited in agony for a response. He appeared and disappeared behind his last seen like a tiger in grass. I spent the afternoon reading his poems on the internet – one was about a man wearing a swimming cap for the first time after going bald. Another was about a man trying to play it cool whilst drowning. I read them both three times, then went into the office toilets and tried to masturbate. It didn’t work.
In the evening he responded. It was an image, dark and obscure. A forearm – his? – held inside pyjama bottoms, handless and without shoulder. There was no sense of motion in the picture, as though the arm was the root of a riverbank tree, inert and drooping into the water. At first I thought the flesh of the arm was the shaft of his penis, swelled fatty and monstrous. For three days and nights I mediated on the image until it lost all shape and form. It elevated me, opened up a gap in the universe. I climbed through it, and sat in darkness, contemplating something very still.
My uterus continued to give me trouble. At first I thought there was some gluten sneaking into my food, so I ate only celery and radishes, which scoured the base of my throat, clean and bitter. When the stabbing pains didn’t abate, I tried to believe they were an omen of great wonders on the horizon. Over and over, I imagined him kneeling above me, scooping handfuls of my body into 5000 parcels as I lay on his bedsheet and gradually shrunk to a Mother of Pearl skeleton. On the back of his fixie I’d balance my pelvis on the seat to ride weightless behind him, ulna and radius digging into his waist. Together we’d feed the city’s homeless with the steaming packets of flesh I no longer needed.
After two weeks I had forgotten what he looked like. All I could remember was that he was very kind to me and he had honey in his eyes. I had not heard from him since the image, but I told myself that just the picture had said enough. The night before we were due to meet I dozed thinly through the dark hours. Sometime around 5am I had a vision of black iguanas on a moonlit island, hundreds of them thick-tailed and hefty. They stared cultish at a white orchid growing on the volcanic rockface as the tide rose around their weird and crooked fingers. I woke sharply and with a sense of great heat inside my brain.
Shall I come straight to yours? I texted early afternoon. There was no response.
I went to the pub where we first met. I was wearing two necklaces because I couldn’t decide which made me look the most delicate. I’d oversprayed my perfume and when I moved I could smell it trying too hard with its cheap approximation of pheromones. I really thought he was going to be there. Alone I sat at a round table with a view of women’s cricket on a high up screen and tried to summon him by tracing ellipses on my forearm and my clavicle. I forced myself to hold my palm under the stained-glass red. He never came.
Why was that night different from all other nights? I sat alone for a long time getting drunk. When the pub closed I made my way to a council estate and walked past dangerous bald men with heavy-teated Staffies. I undid the upper buttons of my shirt but nobody noticed me. Making my way through the stiff labyrinth of identical buildings I watched the young drug dealers laughing and drowning in their own padded jackets.
Oi miss!” As I walked I heard a man’s shout and turned. Relief.
“You dropped your keys,” he said, and held them out to me. He was wearing all Adidas and his head was shaved.
“I know,” I said. “I dropped them on purpose.”
“Oh,” he said. He held them out to me by the ring and as I took them, I made sure to touch his thumb. I felt a pang in my insides. He drew back with a nervous smile.
How good they all are, I thought as I watched him jogging away. How lovely and kind and good.
The pains in my uterus have never subsided. Still I go into houses after dark and perform my magic tricks for men living low beneath Artex ceilings. Now the miracles seem small and sad and half the time they amount to the same vision, a stubborn prophecy that leaks out of my achy afterwards body. I sit on the edge of the bed with my feet on the ground and I tell the men how in my forties my hair will be eaten up by grey, and I will sleep my way around Rome, still hoping word of my saintly womb will make it to the Pope so my canonization can finally proceed. As evidence for the Catholics I will carry around a Samsonite suitcase filled with sixteen of my stillbirths, eyeless blebs that will smell like aniseed and forever refuse to putrefy. When I die of indigestion at fifty-three my frail mother will remember she’s a Jew and will procure me an Israeli grave in Beit Shemesh, not far from Jerusalem, but a year later the land will be returned to Palestine and she will always worry about what will happen to me if the end times ever do arrive.
After I’ve given the men my prophecy I start to cry, and they hold me in their solid arms and cradle me to sleep. In the morning I wake up first, and watch them lying soft and gently naked in the early light. Sometimes I wonder if I should close my eyes, go back to sleep, and stay like this forever with them, giving up on miracles and on the holy life. But always I must remember that I have a heroic choice to make: to give up on them or go on.
TIMNA FIBERT writes novels and short stories. Her previous work has appeared in The Oxonian Review, ISIS Magazine, and The Bedford Square Anthology, and she runs a creative writing group for carers. In her day job, she works as an audio-describer across theatre, film, museums, and galleries. She studied English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and has a Creative Writing MA from Royal Holloway. This year, she’s starting a Literary and Critical Theory PhD at Goldsmiths, researching negated vocality and Blanchot. She’s currently putting the finishing touches on a novel narrated by a copse of lecherous trees.