I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted with trying to work out what day it is. I’m exhausted with reading other peoples’ tweets about how exhausted they are with trying to work out what day it is. I wake at 5am with a heart which pounds just like the hearts in the novely-novels which not even lockdown is forcing me to read. It expects something; I don’t know what. I don’t know if I want to know.
I get up. Maybe I read a Lydia Davis story which consists of a complaint to a frozen pea manufactory vis. the photo on the front of the packet, which makes the peas look less appetising than they in fact are. Maybe I join a Zoom something or other. Maybe I go for my government approved run/walk/real life pacman, in which you are never quite sure if you’re winning or losing or what. Maybe I pass a supermarket whose roped off queueing area contains — plot twist! — zero humans. Maybe my heart expresses a novely-novelish excitement.
Read the rest of my response to Influx/Picador’s short story collaboration here.
Clare Fisher 