Issue Three: Resistance Isn’t Futile
February 2025
Nostalgia
Lisa Farrell
I told them stories when they were small, of the place I’d grown up, with the lane so deeply embedded in the earth, shaded by trees, water trickling over the stones. I told them about the acorn cups left by fairies on the tree-stump, the goblins hiding in the spidery branches, the way gnomes followed me home and turned my pyjamas inside out before I could get ready for bed.
I promised them that one day I would take them from the city, and we would splash our way along that lane together, and at the bottom we’d cross the narrow road and they would see the sheep grazing in a field. Sheep so tame, they might come and let us feed them the long grass that grew at the roadside, lush and green. Then we’d walk home through the fields, our boots heavy with mud, and they’d see murmurations of birds that knew the future, and we’d have hot chocolate when we got home and pull burrs from our socks and throw them into the garden to grow.
‘We Once Were Here’ - original artwork by Jude Potts
They asked for those stories, over and over. They asked me to describe just how green the grass was, how noisy the birds. They wanted to be stung by a nettle, to sit in the ants’ nest like I did. (I had done it by mistake, but they promised to do it as a dare.) They wanted to walk right into my past and experience the life that was no longer there.
That was when they were small. As they grew bigger they made their own stories, which were darker and grittier but that was what they knew. Monochrome stories, full of smog, noise, and stinging rain. They stopped asking for mine. They no longer believed in the hope I’d tried to give them.
One day, I finally took them to see where my stories had come from. I took them when they were too weary to care, when the city had sapped their youth and left them empty. I took them because it was my time. I didn’t want to die in the city, and hoped there would be some fragment left; a beetle, a hollowed tree, a stubbled field.
There was nothing.
So I told them another story.
I told them about my mother, whose head tilted, as though she carried an egg under her chin and didn’t want to let it fall and break. It gave her a slight disapproving air. When she talked, which wasn’t often, she did so very slowly, very quietly, as though if she wasn’t careful something might escape that she did not like.
When I was young, I did not understand what it was like to carry such a secret. A secret so big, so vital, it stuck in the throat so you felt it with every breath. Every time she opened her mouth she feared it would reveal itself.
She wasn’t the only one. Many people could have spoken but thought us too young or ignorant to understand. Or maybe they thought it was too late to tell us, and knew we would not forgive them. They were afraid.
I understand that now.
About the author
Lisa Farrell is a freelance writer and a postgraduate researcher exploring interactivity in fiction. Some of her recent stories have been published by Trash Cat Lit, The Amphibian, and Litro.