Author: Jon Keevy

Tortoise shell

/ Jon Keevy / Leave a comment

The cat was a large and handsome animal, its fur thick and deep, brindle. Or tortoise shell? When was the last time Shay had seen something made out of tortoise shell? Her grandmother’s set of combs? Her fingers rub the cat’s warm belly. Her grandmother’s house had been her model of fantasy worlds. Rich and dark textures. Every piece of furniture was arcane and specific to a purpose, from the roll-top writing desk with its hundred tiny draws, to the cutlery caddy that opened up a green felt chamber in which all the ivory handled silverware waited in their precisely fitted positions. Even the wood of these wonders wasn’t the wood of the rest of the world. A thousand dark shades, a thousand patterns of grain and knot, arranged as inlays or in a symmetry that seemed magical – like the far edge of a lake, where the land meets its mirror.

Shay was twenty when they moved her grandmother out of her old house and into a care home. Twenty when they sold the treasures. The only thing that went with her grandmother to the place that could never be her home was a little vanity table. Her tortoise shell combs in their silver case in one of the secret drawers. Thirty-three now, Shay wonders what happened to the table and to the combs. The cat purrs, its ear flicks.

Flashback

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“Tell it from the beginning. Where ever that is. Where ever the story starts, that where you start telling it.” He was pacing in front of the whiteboard, holding forth on the failings of screenwriters. “Withholding information for effect is a cheap technique. But revealing it in flashback doubles down on the offence.”

“What about ‘Rashomon’? That’s a classic.” It was a small class and informal, Sara hadn’t raised a hand to speak out.

“If you think ‘Rashomon’ is an example of flashback then you have fundamentally misunderstood the film and the concept. ‘Rashomon’ is a tale retold from different perspectives. There’s no truth revealed by the stories. A flashback changes our perception of the present, immediate action by revealing new information, the viewer has no choice but to believe it.”

Sara blushes. He doesn’t notice.

“Here is your assignment for the weekend: Take a film with a lot of flashbacks and put them into chronological order. What does that do to the story? What’s missing? Where is the tension now? Where is the climax? Where is the inciting incident?”

The class gathers up notes and laptops snap shut as they exit with mutters and murmur.

“Sara.” He says. “Hang back a moment.”

She stays seated in the front row as the lecture room empties and she’s alone with him. The wooden desk is a barrier between them. He sits on it. Perches. So she has to look up at him.

“Sara, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt me during the lecture.”

She doesn’t know what to say, so she nods.

He puts a hand on her shoulder.

“You’re a very bright girl, I’m interested in your opinions – so if you want feel free to visit me in my office. Anytime.”

“Sure. Thanks.” She says.

He smiles and lifts his hand from her shoulder to give her a little pat on the cheek. Then he gets up, grabs his satchel and heads out the double doors of the lecture room.

Sara can feel his touch lingering on her cheek, and the weight of his hand still on her shoulder. It stays there for the rest of the day.

Like Me

/ Jon Keevy / Leave a comment

It’s always easier than you think it’ll be. Than I think it’ll be. Sorry, that’s a thing I do. Universalise. See, I want to say, ‘it’s a thing we do.’ Meaning humans. People. But it’s not universal. I mean, I know I’m not alone in doing it. There’s eight billion other minds on this planet. There’s probably about a million people exactly like me just in China. Mentally like me I mean – obviously they’d be Chinese and speaking Chinese. So I could say, ‘it’s a thing we do.’ Me and my million Chinese twins. But I think that’d be a lie, because it’s really not what I mean. I mean all of us. And that’s not true. Because I’m not like you. I could be – no, uh. I mean you could be. Like me. But it’s very unlikely. So when I say that it’s always easier than I think it’ll be, it’s probably better for us all to remember that it’s not universally true. It’s always easier for me than I expect it to be. But you might discover that it’s far, far harder than you would have guessed. If you’d even want to try of course. Murder isn’t for everyone.

Good Wine

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Every time I handed a wine bottle down to him there would be a soft clink of metal on glass. His wedding ring. I was elbow deep in the hall cupboard, helping my father to unpack a lifetime of dinner parties from the shelves. My lifetime specifically, as we had lived in this house since before I could walk.

I pulled bottle off the rack, wiped off the crusted years of dust with a damp cloth, and passed them down to my father to sort into boxes. ‘Spoiled’ – the corks flecked with mold. ‘Good’ – wine that would presumably find a new cupboard in my parents’ new house in Cape Town. ‘Jonathan’ – wine of dubious merit but probably fit for consumption. Wine meant for me to take. On many of the bottles there’s a label written in my father’s well practiced hand, a name and a date – the wine’s provenance as it pertained to my family: who gave it to them, and when. He has always been a note taker, a recorder of data. He has charted decades of rainfall and temperature on our little farm. He records daily life not in journals but in letters, most sent to my sister who lives abroad. An orderly mind that projects order on his world. “James, 1998” – my father reads aloud. Does this summon the memory of that night? He nods to himself and files the bottle. ‘Good’.