‘I’m ready now,’ you say.
Jeanette Stampone on Time To Go
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jdstampone | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jswritings
“My first full-time job was in a dementia-specific residential home. I was only 19 but it had a huge impact on me. There were residents who could recall parts of their lives in incredible detail, yet they couldn't recognise their relative who had come to visit.
The Separation Anxiety Award was a great opportunity for me to create a story around the theme of dementia, with the focus on the feelings and memories of a spouse.”
The Sentence of Love
Katarína Krajcirovicova
‘I need to go! I need to go to see her!’ Gejza’s frustration made him almost scream. He wanted to grab his brother by the shoulders and shake him hard to make his brother see how important it was for him to leave the Slovak borders and get to Austria.
‘It’s 1948. Do you know what it means? You’re not only responsible for yourself, but for the whole family.’
As much as Gejza tried to make Tom, his brother, understand, Tom was trying the same. The faces of both brothers were marked by grievance and the hopelessness of the situation. Getrude left Slovakia couple weeks ago, just before the borders were closed by a communist regime. Leaving with her whole family, Gertrude made it seem like she was leaving nothing behind, but the opposite was true. The dreams of the future she had with Gejza stayed in Slovakia and now the memory of them haunted Gejza night and day.
‘I know exactly what it means,’ sighed Gejza.
‘I’m not so sure, Gejza. It means you’ll lose your job, your position in society, and our family will be labeled as offenders of the state.’
‘I know, but…’
‘There’s no but. Our mother is terminally ill. I’m doing what I can to sustain the family, but if we lose your monthly wage, then we’re done.’
‘There’s nothing you could say to change my mind. They won’t catch me—before they realize I’m gone, I’ll be back. It’s only one weekend. Moreover, Getrude’s father could help us to leave this country for good.’
‘Really? Why would he want to do that?’ As much as Tom was losing the last bits of patience he had with Gejza, Tom also knew also knew that Gejza wouldn’t listen to reason. Gejza’s mind was made up and there was truly nothing he could say. They could argue as much as they wanted to, but they both knew Gejza would pack his backpack and illegally cross the borders that separated him from his love.
‘I don’t know much, only that a friend of Gertrude´s father could prepare new passports for our family. I will tell you more about the details once I am back. I promise you, nothing will happen. On the contrary, I will obtain for us a brighter future.’
However, jumping fourteen years forwards and looking back at the events of the past it might be said that the brighter future how Gejza imagined it was never obtained. Gejza was arrested in his family house as soon as he got back from Austria. No one really knows what truly happened, but rumor has it that the neighbor overheard the conversation of the two brothers and turned Gejza in to the police. Suffice to say, Gejza has never seen Gertrude again.
‘…And that is worse than the fourteen years I had to serve in jail and in the uranium mines,’ Gejza said to himself while seated in the living room immersed in the thoughts of his youth. Once again like every day after Gejza’s release, he came back in thoughts to the time he was the happiest – when not only he loved, but also was loved. Now, after fourteen years, those times were indubitably gone, with Getrude being married to another man. On the contrary, the years in jail made Gejza a loner who sought comfort in a fabric chair and in memories that, although painful, were the only thing that could make him smile.
Katarina on The Sentence Of Love
“I was inspired by a true story of my grandfather. As in the story, my grandpa was arrested for 14 years for crossing the borders to see his girlfriend. I decided to share the story as I thought it really fitted the theme of separation and anxiety. However, not all events were accurate and some of them were only a result of my imagination to convey the story effectively. For example, my grandfather never had a brother, his character is purely a result of my imagination to give myself a possibility to tell the story of struggle, lost hopes and fears.”
“Swirl” or The Mystery of The Missing Host
Andrew Szemeredy
‘Tiborrr! Tiborrr!’ Anne-Kathrin helplessly screamed the name of her old lover into the tenement of emptily echoing, bare, brick walls.
She had come to visit the old charmer, the rescuer of her life, who stole her out on a red-cross train from Lithuania to Germany when the front was moving west and the Germans were speedily retreating from the advancing Russian troops.
Tibor, then, in the war, was a young and dapper sous-sergeant; she, a seventeen-year-old blonde and blue-eyed innocent girl, had been sent by the Reich to teach the Polish people German, as complete germanizing of the region was the plan.
Tibor left Germany at the end of the war, went back to his home country, got married, raised three kids, had a fulfilling and busy life, being a lawyer, in the diplomatic service, and later in a medium-high ranking civil service job.
His wife, also a rescue woman, from one of the forced labour concentration camps somewhere in the German Reich, to where she had been wagon-transported during the war, stayed at home, raised the kids, had coffee with the neighbours, cleaned the house, until she died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage after over only twenty years of marriage.
Tibor was devastated, and the kids, in shock. He slowly regained his life’s momentum, and in a year’s time he was looking for a wife, a suitably honourable and hard-working woman to love and cherish, and who could take care of his kids reasonably well.
This search for a new wife took him to Anne-Kathrin, a by now happily married woman, residing in Cologne with three kids and a journalist husband. He visited her, and she accepted his invitation, with her husband’s knowledge and agreement, to visit him for a fortnight.
Now, then, nearly thirty years after they first met, she, a married woman, became his guest, there, in the back country of a deeply communist state. She was in a state: in a communist state, naturally fearful for her safety, and completely taken aback by the incomparable poverty to her West German standards which the widowed Tibor lived in with his three kids.
‘Tiborrr! Tiborrr!!’ Anne-Kathrin frantically called his name, as she roamed from room to room in Tibor’s and his family’s apartment. He was not to be found. He had disappeared.
Andras, his youngest son, was the only member of the family privy to the to truth of his disappearance. ‘Son,’ Tibor had said to him a few minutes prior, ‘watch my back. I’m going to the privvy. For a number two. I have been unable to get away from her even for five minutes since she arrived yesterday.’
Like all great love stories: Romeo and Juliette, Tristan and Isolda, The West Side Story, my father’s also ended up, like millions before had, and millions later would, with getting flushed down the toilet during the intermission.
Wrap Up
This concludes the shortlist for the Separation Anxiety Award, which ran from July 12 to July 19 2016. As mentioned in the introduction, Tobias Madden was the winner, but as an editor is was great to see a broad range of stories passing through this award.
If you liked the stories in this volume, were inspired to write your own story based on the prompt, or just want to check us out, head over to: www.needleinthehay.net
And thanks to all our writers and readers who continue to support our little writing community!
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