Anna Vaught, "All the Days I Did Not Live"

 

Dr Anna Vaught is an English and Creative Writing teacher and mentor, occasional lecturer, campaigner - and prolific author. Find her everywhere on social media as "Bookwormvaught." Her website is here.

About All the Days I Did Not Live, by Anna Vaught
After the death of her steady, constraining husband, Catherine discovers that grief can be a liberation. With her adult children appalled by her sudden transformations, and a strangely familiar presence in the house urging her on, she begins to test the boundaries of who she might become. A call arrives on her newly purchased phone – a widower, Alec, still dialling the number once owned by his dead wife. What follows is a transgressive, intoxicating relationship built on longing, lies and the hunger to feel alive. All the Days I Did Not Live is a haunting exploration of loneliness, taboo and the dangerous, but delicious, magic of reinvention – where freedom comes at a cost and even the ghosts refuse to stay quiet …

You can read more about All the Days I Did Not Live on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening of the novella. 

From All the Days I Did Not Live

1.

Yesterday I dreamed of that taste again. I dreamed of a deferential early summer. A kind breeze. I had taken the unripe and forbidden pear from the grass in the orchard. For a few moments, I sat cradling it as he watched. He had a camera and a scowl. In my dream, as on that hot day in the orchard, I lifted my chin and scowled back: it was the first time. Then I held the pear up, while his eyes said Do not dare; I held it up still further, before plunging it down to my mouth, biting into it lasciviously, though indeed it was unripe. 

As I said, it was the first time – the first time I had defied him – and in many dreams through my girlhood and all the way to middle age, and now, that dream comes back. I remember the sweet scratch of summer grass, wet, ardent on my bare feet. I am a teenage girl, shoulders back, the tart juice dripping down my chin. It is slightly obscene, and that is how I meant it. He does not move, and I think now, I can do anything. I feel, in defiance, that I am fully alive.

To this day a pear must be unripe, but yielding enough, and there must be juice, not only moisture. I must catch it at the right moment, if I can.

Yesterday I dreamed of that taste again. Of that time. Of my one invincible summer.

I dreamed at night, and then again when I awoke. Before I went to sleep, I thought I heard a drumming sound. I am used to that sound, I said to myself. Stress, anxiety: the blood pulsing and whooshing in your ears, then an irritation of tap, tap in your head, pinprick in your eye and a band snapping at your temples. 

But you see, I was wrong about that. And right before I drifted, with thoughts of that pear, the drumming sound was in the walls and under my bed. 

I am alive. I am fully alive.