Short Stories

SHORT STORIES
of M. NourbeSe Philip

NourbeSe Philip has written a number of short stories which have published in journals and extensively anthologized. These include:

"Stop Frame" Raintiger, www.raintiger.com , Spotlighted Artist October 2004

"Stop Frame" Prairie Schooner, (U.S.A.) Vol.67, no.4, Winter 1993.
Lawrence Foundation Award 1994 (excerpt below)

"Bad Words" Wasafari, (U.K.) No. ll, Spring 1990 & Borderlines, (Canada) Spring l990.(excerpt below)

"Just a name," Matrix, (Quebec) No 31, 1990.

"Whose Idea Was it Anyway?" Tessera: Toward Feminist Narratology, (Canada) Vol. 7, Fall 1989.

"Burn Sugar," Panurge, (U.K) No.7, Oct. 1987. Listen to Audio

"The Tall Rains," Women's Review, (U.K.) Issue 12, Oct. 1986.

Stop Frame
(excerpts)

Is 1958. On a hot, dry island. Somewhere. In the Caribbean. Is 1958 and I hearing the screams of Dr. Ratfinger’s patients — the whole village of Bethlehem hearing the screams of Dr. Ratfinger’s patients and knowing them as their own. Everybody screaming like this at least once before on a visit to Dr. Ratfinger’s office.

Ratfinger not really his name, but Ratzinger, and is me, Gitfa, and Sara who christening him Ratfinger. We writing his new name on a piece of paper and burning it under the big chenette tree in my yard as we repeating an obeah spell we making up. After that he was always Dr. Ratfinger to us — it suiting him better.

He always there — in the village — Dr. Ratfinger. (It seems like that now.) He coming during the war. The War. That is how everybody calling World War II— the War. My mother saying one morning they getting up and brip brap just like that there he be —Dr. Ratzinger — high and dry in his house — one of the biggest in the town of Bethlehem. And is from the rooms he calling his surgery — at the front and side of his house — that the screams of friends and neighbors coming.

War babies — me, Gitfa, and Sara — is how our mothers calling us. All born at the same hospital in town, within a day of each other at the end of the War, so we not really war babies, but we feeling really important when people calling us “the war babies.” I couldn’t be remembering any of the things I talking about, my mother saying, since I was born after the war: “You too young to remember the screams of Dr. Ratzinger’s patients,” she telling me, but I knowing otherwise.

And why should I be trusting her memories any more than I trusting mine? My own crick-crack-monkey-break-he-back stories...

My own fictions...
…

“So, Miranda,” my mother saying to me one day as we sitting down at the kitchen table for the evening meal, “is why you biting the man hand?” I watching the hot water pouring out from the spout of the old black kettle she holding, into the yellow and blue enamel bowl, and the steam rising and the kitchen filling up with the smell of coconut oil the cassava farine parch in.

“I telling you, Ma, I not liking the way he touching my tongue and telling me how it not going to hurt.” My mother spooning some of the farine on to my plate and covering it with fish and gravy. “Hear him, Ma - ‘Dis will not hurt—you will not feel any pain - only ze pressure.” I talking like Dr. Ratfinger now and I seeing the laughing running all over her face, but she holding it in.

“Eat,” is all she saying to me.

“And I remembering how he making people scream, Ma, so I biting him, Ma - hard hard.”

And is Dr. Ratfinger turn: is he who screaming and yelling at me and I thinking he hitting me. But he not doing so. Instead, he refusing to fill my tooth, so I suffering weeks and weeks of the tooth hurting. And my mother packing the rotting hole with cloves that smelling sweet and sharp at the same time.
…

The next day me, Gitfa, and Sara celebrating and since is Saturday we running around town like we owning it, and in we own way we was owning it. When the woman who selling tickets not looking, we sneaking under the curtains and into the Strand, the only cinema in Bethlehem and watching King Kong Meets Tarzan.

“Is not Jane that that King Kong holding where Tarzan?” Gitfa whispering to me and I whispering to Sara. And we feeling frighten as the ape waving and waving the little, tiny white woman over the big tall building with a spike.

King Kong looming big big in my memory: he stands eighteen inches tall behind the glass display case — “A jointed steel frame, rubber muscles, and a coat of rabbit fur. Stop frame animation moves the model slightly...”

It is 1988. On a damp, cold island — a long long way away from 1958. On a hot, dry island. Somewhere. “. . . expose a frame of film, move the model again...”

Stop frame: me, Gitfa, and Sara sneaking under the curtain, over the Empire State Building, into the dark dark theater, finding seats, grabbing each other, and screaming for so as King Kong and Tarzan coming up big big on the screen.

Stop frame: “. . . use miniatures. . . glass shots.. . real and model aircraft” as King Kong waving Jane — “No, is Fay Wray that!”

Stop frame: Dr. Ratzinger. Ratfinger — was he a Nazi? It was a long time — a very long time — after he had left us and the screams had died down, that I learnt what the word meant, although it didn’t matter that I didn’t know — the way my mother saying the word “Nazi,” holding in it everything that evil, and I believing Rat-finger was a Nazi who fleeing Germany, and carrying out experiments on the people of Bethlehem. But bad teeth not caring about politics and despite all the mango wars and the cow-itching, Ratfinger still having patients.

Stop frame: move the model slightly — did Sara know about Nazis? She was Jewish. If she did, she and I never talked about them, running round the town of Bethlehem as if we owning it.

Stop frame! Me, Gitfa, and Sara sneaking under the curtain, into the darkened cinema, finding seats and grabbing each other for comfort in the scary parts of the Tarzan movie.

Stop frame! Tarzan — what did I know about Africa? Nothing except “me Tarzan, you Jane.”

Stop frame: Tarzan, Nazis, Africa.

Bad Words
(excerpt)

How she envied him! this new-found friend of hers. The way he cursed. Walking before the big mirror in her parents’ room, bony chest — almost as flat as his — puffed up with the trying, trying hard to imitate him.. . Miranda thought, maybe she would acquire his knowledge, his way of cursing.

Starting with words like damn and blast, Miranda was slowly working her way up her list of bad words — from the least to the most bad. They all shared a common quality — they were all too heavy for her tongue to lift up — so her mother pronounced regularly. “Prick! Shit!” Miranda looked at herself in the mirror; the smile that was reflected there was one of deep satisfaction. Her mother was wrong she could, would, and did lift the weight of these words, these forbidden words with her child tongue, the secret pleasure all the stronger for being visible in the mirror as she sharpened her mouth around them all. “Practice makes perfect,” her father had always told her — practice to be perfect, in control as he was — and her friend — of words.

When she got to “fuck” she paused, took a deep breath and mouthed the word silently then out loud. Her heart beat loudly now as she replaced the “u” with an “o” — “fock.” She felt the sharpness and power of the word — suddenly and involuntarily she shivered. Was it fear or excitement? She didn’t know — probably both — but didn’t care.

Now came the best — the baddest of them all. Whenever Miranda got to fuck she knew she had crossed a line — as palpable to her as it was invisible. A different world awaited her with the next word. A threatening word in many ways. For a long time she could never say it out loud. As with all the other words she had begun by mouthing it. The times when she was lucky enough to practice before the mirror as she was now, she thought she looked pretty stupid opening and closing her mouth on the word –like a fish gasping for air. But mouthing this word suggested nothing of its power, and for a long timr it remained at this stage, not even being able to whisper it as she had the others. The taboo against it was absolute –almost. …

Maybe only mothers had cunts because that was the only way she had ever heard it used. Never your sister’s cunt, or your grandmother’s cunt. Only your mother’s cunt. And she had wanted both to cover her ears and stretch them wide to take in the sound of these words. Would she have a cunt when she grew up? She didn’t dare ask her mother. Did she have one now? Was it something that came with having children? Once left on her own she got a mirror to explore exactly where she knew the word referred to — except she wasn’t a mother — not yet anyway. As she explored she said the word soft soft to herself, mouthing it, mashing it between her teeth, tasting it, whispering it — looking to see if she changed as she said it.
...

In her house there was no word for what Miranda explored with her fingers. Baby girls had pat-a-cakes, or muckunzes or pum pums. As you grew older, the safety of those soft domestic words disappeared leaving behind a thing unnamed, referred to only by the neutral pronoun: “Have you washed IT yet?” Or, sometimes, “Have you washed yourself yet?” She knew full well that the self referred to was not the whole self, but only that tiny part of the self that somehow became your entire self. If you were a woman. Until it became a mother’s cunt — harsh, jagged, the words intended to cut to the quick the man at whom it was aimed.

Lips would curl savagely around the words, “Your” shape the words with a blunt and rough-hewn style replacing the “t” and “h” with a double “d,” “mudder,” only to let fly the deadly missiles that home in and explode — “Yuh mudder cunt,” in the man’s face, dripping the bitter sweet sticky mess all over him. Miranda had seen grown men grow murderous at this insult. She had seen her brother come home in tears because of this.

It was only men she had heard saying these words. Did women curse it too, or was it only a male curse? And what did women say — “You father’s prick”? Somehow it didn’t sound as bad as mother’s cunt. She knew all the words now and cock or father’s cock just didn’t count if you really wanted to curse. Put together a bad word like sucker to make cocksucker the word become really bad, but it didn’t, at least in her books, come close in badness to “the word.”

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Bad Words (excerpt)

Bad Words
(excerpt)