Christmas Rerun – Christmas Lights and Icicle Frost by Antony Osgood

Our Sixth Rerun of Christmas is by the elegant hand of Antony Osgood. Christmas Lights and Icicle Frost is a touching work about the way impending death sometimes creates lively miracles. “Torn by diagnosis, mocked by good fortune” Sarah H is able to appreciate and share the small good things in being. This one is not to be missed.

We have asked the author to add a few words, and this is what Antony has to say:

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This short story was originally called ‘Without Brakes or Puncture Repair Kit’. It struggled under the burden of its working title. The novel I was writing at the time – from which the story is an offshoot rather than an extract – is wholly concerned with a pivotal month in the life of Sarah Hope. Sarah’s life entirely struggles with a lack of brakes, and an insufficiency of puncture repair kits. Life is full of risks for Sarah Hope, when it ought to be crammed with joy. A short story with such a title didn’t begin to cover her story. Hence the change of title.

The story took about two months to write; I threw it at the tolerant editors of Literally Stories after ten redrafts and three rewrites. The story invites you to read it with nuanced care; there’s much beneath the obvious. I wanted to capture a quotidian morning’s splendour. To everyone else, a frosty day isn’t that extraordinary, though maybe it could be if we stopped to look closely at frost flowers. But for Sarah Hope, cursed by a lottery win, facing cancer, an amazing woman who happens to be labelled with Down Syndrome, a frosty morning is an elegiac bittersweet poem. When there is so little of it remaining, life is beautiful; being alive is an unfathomable miracle. Sarah is bruised by gratitude and anger, but she counts her blessing. (In the novel, she’s up to 574.)

In part, the language choices are coloured by Sarah’s perspective of a world the rest of us take for granted. (I wanted her first person experience woven through the third person voice.) A woman too often ignored, not heard, a woman with Down Syndrome, a woman facing cancer, can afford to take very little for granted, even ordinary words. Extraordinary language is required. For Sarah, each moment is a precious bit of wonder, a poem waiting to be yelled at the top of her lungs. This is the world felt by Sarah. Hers is a strange, kind, cruel, and esoteric place; we don’t find the world strange because we feel at home in it. Sarah feels like an imposter in her own life. Only the world’s Sarahs notice the fragile beauty of frost icicles hanging from Christmas lights. 

Sarah Hope charged rudely into my writing life – dragging other ‘alternative’ characters with her, such as the cross-dressing uncivil engineer father, and her late-blooming support worker – demanding I tell the world she felt. Sarah is drawn from many of the people with whom I’ve been fortunate enough to work alongside. Sarah’s name is inspired in part by that Biblical Sarah. God asks Sarah’s husband, ‘Abraham, why is Sarah laughing?’ But Sarah speaks for herself. She lies to God. ‘I did not laugh.’ God replies, ‘You did so laugh.’ Nevertheless, God blesses Sarah. What does this teach? I wondered. 

Sarah’s novel is pretty much finished. It is called Effervescent Hope. I promise to let it go soon, and to send it out. But I’m anxious about doing so. Much as Sarah’s controlling mother is fearful for her daughter. Vulnerable people, like vulnerable stories, may live in the same world as us but they experience a radically different milieu. This story, and the novel it orbits, echo Linda Pastan’s powerful poem For A Daughter Leaving Home: Sarah, to herself, and to others, feels ’More breakable/With distance.’ Submitting the tale to Literally Stories felt a fearful thing to do because it was so personally meaningful; but doing otherwise would have disappointed Sarah Hope.

Tony
November, 2023

Christmas Lights, Icicle Frost by Antony Osgood

Image: Wormhole by Pixabay.com with extra Christmas trimmings