My short story titled "Some Pastel Morning" has just been published online in IZ Digital, the online sister magazine to Interzone. Initially it is presented as an IZ Digital supporter exclusive (print IZ subscribers also get access), however from 12 July 2023 it'll be free-to-read. It's very cheap to become an IZ Digital supporter. As usual, I'm blogging a few words discussing how the story came to be written. There may be spoilers within.
Unlike many of my short stories, "Some Pastel Morning" approached me in a variety of guises. I first had the idea when walking to pick my youngest daughter up from school. On a telegraph pole was a notice for a missing cat, complete with a picture. This led me to remember those instances where the faces of missing children were put on milk cartons in the United States in the early 80s, which further led me to think of what might cause children to go missing as frequently as lost dogs or cats. Like in much of my fiction, I then decided to reverse the idea. What if a childless woman who had seen such posters decided to invent one, a composite child that she might declare as her own. And then - of course - what if such a child were subsequently found and returned to her? How might that play out?
I had a title that had been kicking around for a while: "The Hello Station". I thought it might fit this story. Because I have to have a title in my mind before I write a story (and very rarely change it, maybe only four times over 170 published stories), I tend to let the story brew in my mind for a while. I'd booked a day off work to write this piece, and therefore had a self-imposed deadline. The pressure was on, but the idea wouldn't gel. A few days before I intended to write, I saw the word pastel. Obviously I knew this word, but my partner suggested it might be an evocative title. We'd also been listening to the Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood album Nancy & Lee, which contains one of my favourite songs, "Some Velvet Morning". A few days later I sat down to write "The Hello Station" which immediately became "Some Pastel Morning". It was this change which instanntly led to the story beginning as it does, and which is an integral part of the whole plot. This opening wouldn't have existed without the title change, literally a few minutes beforehand.
After the first disaster the air was thick with dust. Finely ground pigments stained the streets as though expelled from pastel-coloured puffballs or an explosion in a spice factory. Some of the surviving children made patterns on car windscreens, some even wrote their names, but mostly those names were appended to the posters which had begun to appear around the city, stapled to telegraph poles or pasted up in storefronts, usually accompanied by photographs which depicted poses they were unlikely to grow out of.
Heads up there's a spoiler in this paragraph. Once my protagonist's child is 'found' and returned to her I couldn't think where to go next. I tend to avoid explanations in my fictions, and I couldn't see how to progress without one. It was at this point that I realised another swap was necessary. I ended her story with the found child and began a new section from that child's point of view. Again, there is another soft apocalypse and this time it is his 'mother' who goes missing. I decided to explore the dynamic there. It is this second pastel morning which occurs at the child's school that Sumit Roy has captured so evocatively in his artwork that accompanies the piece.
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After the second disaster Hemmingway remembered the air was thick with dust. Within the school the building darkened, as though Edgar Degas were decorating windows, transforming pastels from simple sketching tools into a core artistic medium that might dominate the art scene for many years to come. Some of the children ducked underneath desks. Hemmingway did too. He could see his teacher’s shoes – the brown brogues that they were – gradually attain a patina of filth. Yet when the sky lightened, his teacher remained present. This wasn’t the case with the parents of some of his classmates. When his teacher moved, the floor was clean where he had been standing: inverse footprints of inertia.
