The air smells like sage, and the candlelight is dimming because the wicks were lit so long ago. There is laughter that comes from the bottom of the stomach; there are absent-minded smiles. My shoulders do not naturally curl inward like a late November leaf. No-one is missing; every seat is filled. Someone passes a plate to the person next to them. When a glass slips from a hand and shatters on the hardwood, it is met with one single apology and half a dozen voices saying hey, don’t worry about it, everything is just fine. We never learned what it means to fight or how it feels to hang up without saying goodbye. Instead, someone asks me if I’ve tried any new recipes lately. They ask me to recommend a book for them. They ask if I’ve had enough to eat. For a brief moment, I catch the melted shapes of all our reflections in the window.
I stare until we are no longer separate entities, until we are one watercolour blur, until there is nothing I would change.
About the author
Janae is an aspiring writer who favours free-verse poetry and creative prose. She’s a junior at Tesla Stem High School and the 2024–2025 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate. More than one judge picked up on individual lines in her piece, drawn in by particular atmospheric details: how ‘rooms smelled like sage’, the image of shoulders that ‘curl inward like a late November leaf’. ‘It quickly and succinctly captured me,’ says Jeremy.
The more I look at it the more holes there are: clean-cut gaps in the timeline that have been tidily packed into tiny little boxes or placed into out-of-sight corners to gather dust. They’re difficult to recall not just because of the time that has passed, but because at some point I tucked my own will to conjure them underneath the stairs and left it there.
Leaning against a particle-board wall in the attic is the nutty-coloured frame of a pine bunk bed that was once adorned with complementary chocolate-and-green paisley-print sheets. Most of my childhood was spent playing kiss and tell on this bed, until I was banned from seeing a next-door neighbour after I kissed and then he told his parents. There were no more sleepovers – just awkward afternoons spent peering at each other across invisible lot lines. One day the moving trucks came and they went away to Houston. I never saw him again. I can’t even remember his name.
Somewhere in the nightstand of my old bedroom, there is a green or blue or yellow Bic lighter. I’m sure because those are the only colours I would buy at 16, along with the Parliament Lights I got caught smoking behind the azaleas when my parents returned early from their own trip to Houston, this time to visit my Uncle Paul who was dying of lung cancer after a pack-a-day habit himself. He was small and frail and wiry the last time I saw him in spite of his preternatural consumption of Twix candy bars, a habit he had picked up in AA decades prior. ‘Better chocolate than alcohol,’ he said at the dining table one evening, me quietly craving my next cigarette as I stared at my pubescent features held against his dying ones in the mirror over the buffet. Stuffed for the better part of ten years into a box in the garage that’s labelled TO DONATE is a fire-engine-red
Abercrombie hoodie that I wore every day during the summer I did nothing but watch TRL, afraid to leave the house for fear I might see the bully who tripped me in the school yard because I was most definitely gay, no matter how much I tried to change my voice to a cavernous baritone. I hated him because all the girls thought he was handsome despite his protruding buck teeth and turgid eyes. I hated myself because I thought the same. How amazing it is, this ability homes have to shelter us from elements not just natural but man-made, even when created by our own hand. It’s a sort of capaciousness that sucks away the marrow of memory until all that’s left is a serene mirage. What remains is an uncluttered vista: gleaming hardwood floors; fresh-cut roses in the kitchen; the golden thread of brocade curtains glinting in the July sun. How else could I go back?
About the author
‘This story was so complete,’ says Emily of Nick Spain’s fraught and nostalgic Domestic Bliss. ‘I found it moving, but funny in a dry way.’ Nick is a designer who works chiefly across interiors and gardens, dabbling on occasion with styling commissions and creating furniture pieces. Born and raised in east Texas, he now splits his time between Brooklyn, New York, and the foothills of western Massachusetts.
Mellors trudged up the rocky path that wove around the headland away from the quiet harbour up into the hill that looked over the Sound. The little cottage he called home was tucked away three miles from the small fishing village by the harbour and two miles from the nearest neighbour, and as the path climbed steeply he was just able to see the lazy drift of peat smoke from its chimney. Sally would have lighted it and stacked it in readiness for his return before heading out as usual to herd the cattle on the new spring grazing further up the glen. As he neared the dry stone dyke he’d built as a younger man, and the wooden gate – the wood of which had been stripped to pearly white by the salty sea air – the sweet tangy smell of the lavender from the garden drifted to him and lifted him liltingly the last few steps home. Sally had left a bucket of water and hard-haired brush by the front door. Seven and a half months at sea on the Tarbert whaler had had their effect, and he dutifully stripped down, bearing his stark nakedness to the whirling egrets. Once he had scrubbed himself raw, cleaned the filth from his fingernails and scrubbed his beard, he dunked his head in the freezing cold water. He straightened up, shook himself like a dog, and let himself through the low wooden door. A woollen blanket had been left hanging for him. He dried himself and wrapped it around his waist as the men were wont to do on the Hebridean Isles at the time. The peat in the hearth crackled quietly, and Mellors took a deep breath that filled his lungs with home. He felt the cold flagstones underfoot and smelt the fresh loaf Sally had left to cool on the window-sill, the sprigs of lavender and wild flowers in the cracked clay jug on the cracked wooden table in the middle of the room. The whitewashed walls glimmered, and the songbirds’ cheerfulness danced on a gentle breeze that idled through the small open window. Sally’s shawl lay draped over the back of her chair and he lifted it to his face and breathed her in. Taking the loaf from the windowsill and the small earthenware platter of butter from the cold store, he tore a knuckle from the loaf and lathered it in the salted butter from their six beloved cattle. Sitting down in his old wooden chair with the worn embroidered cushion, his feet resting by the fire, he took a bite and closed his eyes, savouring a freshness he hadn’t tasted in seven and a half months. After he finished the knuckle and counted his earnings and put them away in the tin under the bed and filled and smoked his pipe, he figured he must have dozed off because he slowly became aware of a jangling of distant bells and his wife’s voice as she whistled and cajoled the cattle back down the mountain. He looked down at his calloused hands and broken fingernails and thought of the months away on churning sea that only wanted to kill you for daring to fish her, the thick ropes and sails that tore at your hands and limbs and face, the cramped and putrid cabins sleeping head to toe with men who smelt no better than you, the stale bread and the vermin that nibbled at it – how worth it it all finally was, just to come home to this.
About the author
Though he is new to creative writing, Jack will not be unfamiliar to fans of Shetland and other British TV shows. The actor was raised in Perthshire, Scotland, and studied English literature and art history at the University of St Andrews before moving to London to work across film, television and theatre. He loves to write and run in his spare time. ‘This story was so palpable,’ says Jeremy of Jack’s expressive Highlands prose.
‘A young woman lives in Santo Sospir. It wasn’t a question of decorating the walls, but rather drawing on their skin... Santo Sospir is a tattooed villa.’ (Jean Cocteau)
Recently I had the number of my home-before-last tattooed on to the pad of muscle just beneath my right shoulder. The fact that it was the home-before-last, despite moving out of it less than a year ago, might hint at the state of the London rental market but actually tells you no such story. It was a place of settling where I lived for six and a half years. Through healing from an attempt to evict myself from my own body, making rafters from my ribs through selective starvation and through two years of my friend/landlord and I denying entry to the rampaging virus outside our front door. When I write that I had the number scribed on me, I mean it. No choosing of font, lingering over LA-gang gothic versus florid curlicue. Instead, I had the friend/landlord send me a picture of the actual metal numbers screwed into that shaky, gap-filled, uninsurable front door and showed it to the tattoo artist, who laughed gently at their terrible design. Serifed but ill-weighted, top-heavy in some places and poorly kerned. They look virtually handmade, we noted, and since then I’ve been seeing the same machine-resistant pieces all over the city. She observed that both designs I had etched that day had a quality of impermanence – ‘something that’s there and not-there’. And isn’t that one definition of a home?
I am not the only person I know to try and capture a sense of belonging in such permanent impression. Another friend has a fine-line rendering of the door of his childhood abode on his ribs, a door he’ll likely never open again. The design shows it closed, which seems accurate for an attempt to memorialise a place past. Despite this, everywhere you live leaves its mark, more than you leave on it. Whenever I see the poems-in-moonlight left by meandering snails I shudder back to the five-bed Victorian that was essentially an unholy permeable membrane between inside and outside, the kitchen regularly visited by these creatures (and by slugs, mice, woodlice, fungi...). As the artist bent over my awkwardly stretched arm wielding a stick-and-poke needle, I felt she was not writing the space on me, but stitching the idealised idea of it into me. We agreed to leave space to show where the screws were, and I asked for a shadow to make them seem more three-dimensional. More real. The size and space of this piece makes sense of my other tattoos. It gives me an excuse to extol the unusual virtues of my arrangement with my friend/landlord to anyone who asks about the number 392. This gives hope to those still wrestling with unconscionably cold-hearted landlords of their own. It helps me inhabit my first dwelling and, at last, to expel a holy sigh of relief at the possibility of always coming home to myself.
About the author
‘Lee’s piece is a great illustration of abstracting the prompt,’ says Jeremy. ‘It’s really strong, emotive writing.’ Shelley agrees that ‘there’s a lot of feeling here: I think none of the other entries are quite like this’. Lee writes, occasionally reads words aloud, makes books and zines and teaches literature. She is open to cross-arts collaborations and is currently working on a pamphlet of poems about the witch Sybil Leek.
Further reading on The World of Interiors Writing Prize:
- Meet the US winner, Mary Bergman
- Meet the UK winner, Tayiba Sulaiman
- Read the winner’s announcement, as featured in our November 2024 issue
- Meet the judges: Emily Tobin, Hamish Bowles, Jeremy O’Harris and Shelley Wanger
- Sign up to The World of Interiors newsletter, and be among the first to know details of the 2025 competition
A version of this article also appears in the November 2024 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
