GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24

SARAH MESSERSCHMIDT

‘Twins’

ONE MORNING I WOKE TO A SURPRISE: two neat pears in a dish next to the kitchen sink. Not mine. Conference pears, I thought, a roguish council. The dish itself was curious. The depth of its blue was chipped in several places, forming something like an astral backdrop to the sweet and soft flesh. To behold it was to see a portal to infinite space. I hadn’t the slightest idea how the group had landed there, innocently arranged, but in truth I felt no alarm. Forced entry seemed unlikely, and to this I can offer no explanation besides a mood in the room that was preternatural but benign.

I rubbed my eyes, drowsy, and let a small stream flow from the tap, careful not to let drops fly when I filled my glass. Then I stood with my back against the timber worktop, regarding the newcomers. The arrangement pleased me. Living alone—no dependents, no pets—I felt a wave of companionship. It was impossible to interrupt such synergy with my morning hunger. Something about those pears, those independent pomes, asked me to let them lie.

The next morning was the same. I entered the kitchen, and there they were: two bulbous fruits asleep in a bowl. Closer inspection showed some browning on a wound I hadn’t noticed before. The pears had been perfectly ripe the day before, minus two blemishes, but now I was sure that the sugars had begun to multiply. I obeyed instinct and shifted the bowl into a warm patch near the window. Illogical, maybe, but the fruits were there for nurturing, not for eating, and the only way I knew how was to offer the conditions that I myself liked best.

On the third day, I sat on a stool under the sill and breakfasted on toast in the company of my new friends. They had developed a sweet, jammy odour—a candid and worthy expression of their spirit—that mingled pleasantly with the taste of seed and milled flour; I had resisted total ingestion, but nevertheless, here were our molecules incorporating. We passed an interval in happy silence while I chewed and dusted breadcrumbs into their dish—to share my breakfast, you see—then I rose to leave. But before I could, I was struck by the unease of neglect. I flicked on the radio. Up rose the tinny swell of music, and an even voice reciting a broadcast. I rummaged for a book, a dictionary, which I opened at random and set next to the dish.

A distinctly human reason called for more than a week of my absence, for which I prepared by propping three new books next to the window: the account of a man turned vermin (an obvious choice, I admit), a volume on metaphor, and a picture book of a mythic garden. I wondered if television might not provide good company (I’d heard of people who leave the set running for dogs); I contemplated recording my voice, to plant guilty traces of myself in my absence.

The interlude had been hot. On the morning of my return, according to my usual routine, I drifted into the kitchen to greet the in-edibles. I found them languishing in a sticky pool of brown. The bottoms of their rounded forms were pulpy and recessed, the stars beneath drowning in a viscous soup. The pears were almost unknowable: their two bodies had begun to fuse, and atop a newly conjoined head (what I had begun to regard as the head) was a crater of grey and white, like downy tufts of hair.

Common wisdom would promote discarding the little urchins, but I resolved to keep them. I still fail to say why exactly, only that the pears had appeared to me as though from a celestial source and so were beyond my mastery anyway. They were pitiable little beings, dozing in their own juices, and I felt saddened by their shrinking. But a glowing, maternal tenderness urged me to continue to foster them. The scene required that I take measures, so I gathered a small bunch of grapes from a bowl I’d deemed ‘for eating’, and transferred them gingerly to rest next to the pears. A collection of wine-red pearls to decorate the spoiling things. I wanted to ensure comfort, maybe to restore dignity.

After a time, the pearls too had begun to deflate and brown, and the sweet odour of the original fruits took on a sharp vinegar pang. When I nudged the stuff with my finger, I found that the pulp had reduced, forming a gummy adhesive between organic matter and dish into which I could press various hard objects. I tried it first with the bald stone of a plum. After that I became thoroughly absorbed in tending to decay, and carried on piling fresh substances into the depraved mass: a slice of apple, a handful of currants, a hedge of melon rind. I even took to bathing the little monsters with a delicate silver spoon, what pathetic fallacy. It was a vantias picture, a tableau vivant, I see that now.

In the supermarket, it was my habit to scan the aisles for new specimens, by then shopping for more than just myself. I had a whole brood on my hands: what had begun as two simple pears was now a congregation of entities, an orchestra of life, around which I was facilitating a grotesque little spectacle. I had an instinct to provide, and understood my role in the ensemble as affectionate caretaker. Let me be clear: I am a person with ovaries, and sometimes these ovaries send signals compelling me to nurture, despite my desire (or not) for human children. Traces of the pears were quickly fading, but I was duty-bound to keep the cosmic receptacle ripe. So the affinity continued.

One afternoon, there was a rapping at the door. An elderly neighbour stood on the threshold, begging my pardon but did I happen to know anything about the ghastly smell in the building, he was sure it was causing flies. I was a foreigner in the country, and the neighbour had taken something like sympathy on me, helping to translate complicated documents that arrived by post, or spending hours on the phone with passionless bureaucratic agents. Obliging as they were, however, the gestures came with a measure of formality, as per the custom, and so the neighbour hadn’t genuinely witnessed my private life. Today I was to be exposed.

On this day we faced each other in the entryway. I stood-off, reluctant to brave the publicity, and using my body to block his advance. It was no good. The wary eyes of my acquaintance hovered just at my chin, and with his peering over my shoulder he had a direct view of the kitchen window, under which was installed the radiant shrine and a cloud of devoted insects. His reactions were quick, but successive: stricken, unnerved, then bemused. Toward this I felt nervous and wicked; it was impossible to decide who most deserved my loyalty, my favour-doing neighbour or my defenceless progeny. I felt I owed something to the kindly old fellow, but my impulse to safeguard the kitchen community was irresistible. I can never be sure what kept the neighbour from blowing the whistle on me, but the last word he let slip as he turned toward the stairwell with a sigh was the German, deswegen, which I took to mean, ‘alas—!’

SARAH MESSERSCHMIDT is a writer interested in art, literatures, and interdisciplinary approaches to the (moving) image. She has been affiliated with Maumaus in Lisbon (2021) and ‘The Whole Life: An Archive Project’ at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2022). Sarah was a Writer in Residence supported by the Kunstverein München (2022), and is currently an artist-researcher on ‘The Expanded Librarian’ supported by CRASSH at the University of Cambridge (2023-24). A perennially shy but eager storyteller, a fledgling poetic contortionist, in 2023 she was the Bold Types winner for short fiction with the Glasgow Women’s Library. Her work takes many forms, and has appeared in Another Gaze, Artforum, Art Monthly (UK), Camera Austria, Cashmere Radio, MAP, Mousse, Texte zur Kunst and Third Text, as well as the forthcoming book Reading Kofman in Constellation, edited by Rachel Pafe (Pseudo Press).