Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

A young man, or perhaps he was still a boy, was attempting to direct the porter leading a donkey laden with cases. A stomach-dropping, blood-fizzing, breath-stopping, knotted lurch-and-swoop that I recognized, by then, as the first faltering step towards falling in love.Ī young woman, very red-faced and sweaty from the climb, attempted to control a girl of around ten years old, who was spinning on the worn-down steps so that her skirts blew out. The sight of a woman in a well-tailored jacket and trousers. The way her mouth angled around the cigar in a grimace that was almost a smile. The bracket of her bent leg against the stones. She swung a leg back over the wall, straddling it as though it were a horse. When she shifted her head a little I realized she was smoking, which was a tiny thing, the smallest thing, but you have to understand that in all my centuries on earth I had never seen anything like it: this woman-I had taken in the shape of her, collarbones, breasts, hips that swelled below her waist-who dressed like a man, kissed like a man, smoked like a man.

She dug in her pocket, fumbled with something I couldn’t see. They clambered over the low wall at the end of the garden and sat on it with their backs to me, looking out at the tiered fields of almond trees descending the mountain. She was shorter than him but seemed, now I had a sense of her, the larger of the two. He was pallid, red-eyed, looked exhausted. The man-who-was-in-fact-a-woman reached out to brush away a leaf that had caught in the hair of the man-who-was-a-man. And still, for all my expertise, there was no sign whatsoever of where these two people had sprung from: the same old corridors, same echoes, same spiders crawling from beam to beam across the ceiling.

I knew where the roof leaked, where the rats nested. I knew about all sorts: buried treasure, dead-end tunnels, which doors swelled shut in summer with the heat and which in winter with the damp. I knew the generations of monks, and after they left, the great silence of the place. I knew more about it than anyone else, that was for sure. Over the centuries, I suppose, I came to think of it as solely my domain.

I died in 1473, when I was fourteen years old, and had been at the Charterhouse ever since. She was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award and is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. Stevens is the author of Bleaker House and The Victorian & the Romantic, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. The following is from Nell Stevens' Briefly, A Delicious Life, a daring ghost story about a teenage ghost who falls in love with a writer who doesn’t know she exists.

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens