[Creative Nonfiction] Loss
Read the winning entry for our week of December 1, 2024 prompt, One Great Paragraph, chosen by guest judge Michael Dean
Loss
by
Loss. She wants to bite into the soft sibilance of that word and make it scream. She wants jagged consonants that cut and snag in the gullet. The first older brother who died was a solitary man. He died alone aged forty in the room in which he lived. He learnt Italian in that room for the purpose of reading Dante. He left poems. Piles of them. They published them after his death. There is a line of his that sometimes strolls into her head and then sits in a recurring groove for maybe a frozen second or two. Oh don’t shut me, babbling and pissing in your palms. But he has been shut, her brother. For 33 years, he has sat on her shelf. But occasionally she takes him from the shelf and holds him open, in her palms. Together. Babbling. Pissing. Weeping.
A Note From Our Guest Judge,
It was fun to read through 96 significantly different paragraphs and think through the shared compositional themes that make them powerful. It was also hard. Each one of these 3 quickly establishes an unresolved scene, gradually unfolds it, and closes with power. There were so many creative and intriguing entries that would make great openers. I hope to see some of these expanded into full essays.
About Emma Parsons
Emma Parsons, ex journalist, editor, short-story writer and teacher for the last twenty years, is now writing more or less full time. Her non-fiction story The Teacher's Tale is published by Comma Press in Refugee Tales Volume III. She is currently serialising her memoir The Drying Rooms - Memories of an English boarding school on Substack.
This piece was written in response to the prompt One Great Paragraph.
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