This dissertation is a piece of creative writing in fulfilment of the Final Major Project for MA Creative Writing. Highlighted passages identify where work has been submitted for another module as permitted by Creative Writing assessment criteria.
PROLOGUE
The birth happened in a nightmare three nights ago. She’d gone to bed early, dumplinged herself beneath the eiderdown, with her mother’s late night news trickling like a draft beneath the door. The first thing she realised was the room: a surgical theatre, white blitzed and humming with a dozen scrubbed apparitions. All of them had scissors. It was a girl. A sprawling little girl, all soupy with vernix, purple and beautiful. ‘Excuse me.’ She’d said to twelve sets of facemasks, laid like a centrepiece on the table ‘But where are her feet?’ This bright young thing she’d just expelled had no toes at all, not even a heel. Just two peachy stumps, flinging about like rounders bats. But nobody replied. The apparitions took the baby away, and the room streamed on before her in a faster pace. But there was a strange feeling. Dropping her eyes down instead, her stomach, she noticed, was still swollen. Still kicking. The feet were there, rattling about her insides. She’d kept them, snapped them off. ‘Vivienne.’ A voice spoke in monotone. It was a nurse she’d decided, though the figure moved more like a mannequin. ‘You keep them in there,’ the nurse had said, with a mouth that popped like a sock puppet. ‘and that way she’ll never leave.’
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