Judith Hannah Weiss freelanced for clients like Time Warner and Condé Nast. Her short story “The Doctor Said” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima.
Beda Higgins works in General Practice in North England as a psychiatric and general nurse. In her story “A Life” (Intima, Spring 2021), each word used is needed. Each line used is needed. Nothing is extraneous. The result is stark, stripped, hard, but not cold. Ms. Higgins achieves an austerity of craft essential to this piece and its protagonist, a nun fighting breast cancer.
I highlight six passages below:
A young nurse asks a patient with breast cancer what she would like to be called. The patient is a nun and says she’d like to be called Sister Josephine. The nurse has “never met a real nun before.” Sister Josephine says nothing. She is good at that. “Not Josie then?” the nurse asks.
“No,” the sister says, "I prefer Josephine."
On the morning of the surgery, the nun can “feel her skin burn, thinking how they’d talk about her, and how they’d laugh about her virginity. No one had ever seen her naked; she even avoided looking at it herself. It wasn’t a sin, but still.” In this and all passages, nothing distracts or dilutes.
When it became apparent that she was gravely ill, Mother Superior visited her room and patted her hand. "Your faith will sustain you." Sister Josephine nodded and closed her eyes. Mother Superior was old; she didn’t want to argue.
She is taken by ambulance to the hospice, where she asks to be called Anne, the name she renounced when she became a nun. The hospice nurses talk about a TV show while they sponge her skin and comb her hair. Their kindness surprised her. Anne, too, starts watching Strictly Come Dancing. “It was good to have something to believe in and talk about. She told the nurses who her favorite dancers were as they... rubbed her back.”
Anne begins buying bars of “chocolate flakes. She’d always been partial to them but rarely allowed herself the indulgence.” She lets “the chocolate melt in her ulcerated mouth,” and thinks “how much there is to learn about life.” At night, “her face melts goodbye in tears.”
One morning, she sees a heron standing in the hospice pond. Anne, exhausted, props herself up on her pillow to glimpse him again when he returns each day. She watches him “lift his head... spread his wings and lift to fly.”
Good fiction makes the reader forget that s/he is reading a story at all. “A Life” made this reader/writer ache. Each line so bare, so spare. Renowned author Elmore Leonard said, “If it sounds like writing… rewrite it.” “A Life” doesn’t sound like writing. It sounds like Anne. Her human-ness. Her death. Her life.
Judith Hannah Weiss freelanced for clients like Time Warner and Condé Nast. Her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Rumpus and many others. Weiss lives near Charlottesville, Virginia. Her short story “The Doctor Said” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima.