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Still Life

Still Life

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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.







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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!

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