Menu 0
Still Life

Still Life

Home   The Waking   Still Life
Nadia Jacobson Short Fiction

April 27, 2021 4 Comments

She drew still lifes. Still lifes on the verge of putrefying. On the verge of putrefying, because despite their fullness, their glistening sheen, earthy scent, she knew there was a seed of rot on the inside. On the inside, invisible to others, but harboured within, waiting. Waiting in the bowl like a dark sullen aubergine, light deflecting attention from its wrinkles onto its neighbour, a dimpled onion. “Dimpled onion”, she’d been called by a man. A man with too many layers to peel back without copious tears being shed but with a green shoot rising, she saw. She saw it was a bid for escape. A bid for escape from her and the faded butternut squash and muddy sweet potato of his root-vegetable family, a previous incarnation, that he sought adventure, was ready for a new life. A new life of self-perpetuation, partaking in the cycle of life and death rather than die with her in a bowl. In a bowl she drew him. She drew him still.







_______________ 

Nadia Jacobson hails from London and lives in Jerusalem. She is a flash fiction editor at The Ilanot Review. Her fiction has appeared in Meniscus, Annalemma, The Binnacle, and a number of anthologies. She flips between writing flash fiction and revising two interweaving novels.

 

Photo by Jo Lanta on Unsplash



4 Responses

Tamara Tolley
Tamara Tolley

September 27, 2021

The end of a relationship; the end of a vegetable – the art form that immortalises all that has ended. A thoughtful piece.

Ruth Taylor Jacobson
Ruth Taylor Jacobson

May 12, 2021

Eerie and mysterious, i like the metaphor of the onion/ man ‘with too many layers to peel without copious tears being shed’. And his ‘green shoot’ – ‘a bid for escape’. At the end, was not sure whether the ‘artist’ was one of the vegetables, or a human observer’s anthropomorphic view of them. All very surrealistic.
Bravo on a very imaginative piece!

Jendi
Jendi

May 04, 2021

The innovative form is great!

Zehava Gtoff
Zehava Gtoff

May 04, 2021

Now this I can connect with…very juicy!

Leave a comment

Comments will be approved before showing up. We don't allow comments that are disrespectful or personally attack our blog writers.

Also in The Waking

The Naming
Sarah Damoff Short Fiction
The Naming

November 07, 2022 1 Comment

Did any of the first beasts resist their names? Did Adam grow weary of his endless task?

Read More

On the Endangered List
Bridget Muller-Sampson Short Fiction
On the Endangered List

November 04, 2022 1 Comment

Still, she remembers cradling that tiger of a beetle in their sunny, grassy backyard as the sounds of her parents arguing drove through the kitchen windows. She never saw such an insect again.

Read More

Go
Andrew Cominelli Short Fiction
Go

September 26, 2022

His idea is for the train to go into the hills and slow in the woods, and for the boy who’s been lost in the woods to see it, board it, and for the train to go full steam ahead back to town to reunite the boy with his lonely and shaken father.

Read More

+-

  • Short Fiction

    Short Nonfiction

    Image-Text Hybrid Work

    Prose Poetry

     

    Ruminate Community

    Reviews & Interviews

    _____________________________________________

    Sign up to get new work delivered to your inbox:

    _____________________________________________

    The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.

    READ

    SUBMIT

    SUPPORT: