This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots as a literary magazine in the 1920s, when our undergraduate contributors (including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and W.H. Auden) showcased the best of Oxford’s creative talent. We received nearly 30 entries, and they were all of an exceptionally high standard. The judge Dr Clare Morgan, Course Director of the MSt Creative Writing at Oxford, offered her congratulations to the shortlisted entries, including this one.
The one constant has been wealth. We’d get boxes at basketball games, fly first class across oceans, eat gauche meals at farm-to-table restaurants. Recently, though, we had ascended. My father got involved with a very hot business, commercializing psychedelics, and we had started, consequently, to rub elbows with the super-rich, the 5 decimals between 0 and .1% crowd who were so fucked in the head they needed elephant doses of ayahuasca to moderate their power trips. But psychedelics are an interesting elite phenomenon because besides the tech bros breaking in there’s a sizable crowd of old hippies who have lived long enough to see Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Sergey Brin pump their cranky nonprofits full of tens of millions of dollars.
That’s a long way of saying that I’m rich enough to go visit Oxford before attending, and my dad is well connected enough that one of these old hippies invited us to dinner at her country manor (I didn’t say some of these hippies couldn’t be rich themselves) on the weekend we visited.
I didn’t want to go. I was jetlagged and I had just gotten my camera stolen. But my dad insisted it was for business, and so we all piled into a taxi. We got out of the cab and realized we hadn’t reached our destination: what we had thought was the manor was just the gatehouse. But the cab driver was already putting off into the distance. I remember, past the gatehouse, a yawning expanse of English countryside, the early spring not yet broken through, the land unintelligible in dusk.
We began trudging through a shallow layer of mud over frozen dirt, down a country road that looked as if it extended with slight twists for miles. Over it stood oaks which bent over the road and towards each other to form with the road the appearance of a long, triangular tunnel from the gatehouse onward. Light refracted between branches that bristled against each other as we walked. The sound of the trees, shorn of leaves and any sign of life, settled in my ears as whispers. The three of us – my mom, dad, and I — walked forward and forward, beckoned by a warm orange glow floating in the distance. The glow grew until the windows framed themselves with the dim outline of an old brick mansion. It was in terrible shape; the roof was in desperate need of a reshingling and the path leading up to the door was overgrown with thick grass.
Next to the door (a huge, oaken thing) leaned a red wheelbarrow which seemed to glisten of its own accord; the image of it burned itself into my eyes. My father, after crossing a wooden moat, knocked on the door. An older woman wearing a wrinkled white shirt a floor-length flower skirt, and short grey bangs opened the door. This was Anne, the Countess of Wexley Manor, this was Anne, my father’s business partner’s mother, this was Anne, semi-famous psychedelic crank or disruptor or innovator. I remember her eyes, startlingly green. Beside her, watching us with a beady, serpentine gaze, was a man in his 60s wearing a grey three-piece tweed suit.
She ushered us in and offered us toast, which the husband, Bertie, slowly twisted over a blazing fire. The home was sweltering. The walls were covered with baroque paintings, all exhibiting dramatic uses of chiaroscuro. Shelves overflowed and books piled everywhere a few feet high. A couple of human skulls were perched on top of an old dresser, next to small bronze statues. Bertie sat closest to the fire. His white shirt was soaked through with sweat: it beaded on the tip of his nose, below his eyes, and between his mouth and chin. He chewed with his mouth open while we spoke, taking the pieces one by one, lavishly buttering the blackened crust. She talked endlessly. Bertie mostly looked at her, nodded with loving, dull eyes, and then looked back at us and vigorously nodded as if to affirm that he was in complete agreement. After an hour of conversation, he began to speak. He occupied himself, day-to-day, with family trees and family histories, but fixated specifically his ancestors’ sexual exploits: he described to us the ways they secretly documented the number of orgasms they had with illicit liaisons in their diaries. It was mostly incoherent.
She, however, was perfectly understandable. This perfect coherence and undeniable charm could only sustain itself for so long before one a) was completely entranced by her high, almost girlish voice or b) realized as if a switch had gone off, throwing the room into complete light – that what she was saying was completely and totally insane.
In between normal conversation, and tea, and dinner (fish next to a feculent sliced fig) – she’d find excuses to drop on the middle of the table the strangest facts: telling us, for example, that she had once read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents tripping on mushrooms (which I believed, though I doubt she did it with any lucidity). Or that she had once, on an aborted mission to join her uncle, an MI5-spy-turned-Buddhist-monk in Ceylon, she had lived in a Druze harem in Lebanon for two years. She could tell us about Lebanon as if she remembered every detail perfectly: the dryness of the air, the color of the sky, the guttural quality of the Arabic she never bothered to learn. I noticed that this story began to extend and fold into itself, like a microcosm of her entire bizarre life, taking up room in a way I had seen in meticulously crafted literature but never over dinner.
By the time the two-year mark approached the letters from her family had long since ceased, but she was tired of life out there. She gave the chief some advanced notice of her departure and he nodded and told her that if she must leave to wait until she celebrated her second year: he had something he wanted to show her. When the day came, he called her into his tent. It was the first time she had ever been allowed in and found the chief surrounded by his lackeys. The men strapped her down on the bed. She submitted out of curiosity. Then the chief pulled from his leather satchel a polished wooden hand-drill. He placed it against her forehead, firmly, and began to drill.
She woke up, she told us, with nothing more than a dull pain and an impossible clarity to her vision and hearing. A dull serenity, without joy, tingled at the surface of her skin. She asked the chief what he had done to her. Citing mystics and swerving in and out of French, he explained that his tribe had retained for thousands of years a ritual – only for the favorites of the chief – to eliminate all empathy.
She launched into her own research. Humans upon learning to walk had decreased the pressure of cerebral spinal fluid in the cranium. When they did so, they felt, for the first time, empathy. With it, too, came the first figurative humans – homo translatus. This marked the beginning of
representation which produced the Venus of Willendorf, and Lascaux, and in fact all subsequent art, culture, and history. But, she claimed (and she turned to me, or seemed to turn to me, though maybe it was just the sheer intensity in which she said it), we could lose empathy; we could discard the pain of simile and regain a primordial unity. All it took was a short, sharp shock to the skull: a centimeter-wide hole drilled carefully above and between the eyes.
As she said it, I felt a wave of anxiety. She turned to my parents, and resumed, suddenly, normal conversation. She asked about what I wanted to study. We spoke about culture shock. We had a saccharine dessert. As we scraped clean our plates, she turned to my parents and asked if maybe
their son – that is, me – would be interested in such a procedure. It would be brief, and she said that it was wonderful for young students who struggled with focusing, and she sensed that I was the perfect candidate the moment I had stepped through the door.
My parents looked at me expectantly. They had trudged to the manor weary and tired. Now their attention was razor-sharp, their backs straightened, their brows furrowed in consternation at the possibility that I could even deny such an offer from such a special woman. They wouldn’t force me: it was my choice. But what other answer could I possibly give with them looking at me that way? With the care and eloquence that she had explained her journey with?
“Sure, I suppose.”
So the procedure, which I don’t remember, was done. I stayed the night, and my parents picked me up the next morning. I woke up with a dull pain and overcome with exhaustion, but otherwise I felt completely unchanged.
Winner: “The Ghosts She Felt Acutely” by Polina Kim
Runner-up: “Letter from the Orient” by Dara Mohd
Shortlisted entries:
“SPLAT!” by Sophie Lyne
“A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull” by Jim Weinstein (pseudonym)
“Rhonda May” by Matt Unwin
“Any Blue Will Do” by Kyla Murray
The author is an editor of Folly Magazine.
