Deadlines

Originally published by Neun Magazine (2025)

Winter. Early morning. Paris. Kitchen. 38 minutes to deadline. Lily lit two candles rather than face the offensive glare of the LED light. Empty wine bottles stood in lieu of candle-holders, and wax dripped down their facade. Notebook open, a cold cup of yesterday’s coffee for breakfast. 

The deadline was looming, and Lily hadn’t written a word. She didn’t really care and wouldn’t have bothered entering at this stage, if her flatmates hadn’t been entering too. 

As if on cue, a bedroom door opened and closed, and footsteps approached. Lily wondered how someone’s footsteps could annoy her so. She refused to react to Abigail’s entrance, instead deciding to scribble down whatever she could think of in an attempt to look busy. 

Abigail stood in the doorway for a time as though expecting a formal invitation into the kitchen, a welcoming committee of some kind, and when it didn’t appear she moved past Lily, who scowled and continued writing in her journal, her face inches from the page, her tongue sticking out slightly.

Abigail stared at Lily and felt herself almost burst into flames with envy. What was she writing about? What amazing little adventure had she been on the evening before? Look at her now, scratching away with her little chicken-feet handwriting, no doubt writing something fantastic based on the events. Abigail had done nothing the evening before, stayed in and watched White Lotus. She’d had a green tea at about ten, the late night caffeine the wildest thing she’d done all week. And now what was she going to write for this competition? She didn’t care so long as it was better than Lily’s. 

Abigail took her Nicaraguan coffee beans down from her shelf and put them in her grinder, noticing and ignoring Lily’s wince at the noise. She flicked on the light so they didn’t have to rely on candles like characters from some morbid vampire story. She lifted the lid on her MacBook and sat down at the table opposite Lily. She put on some Mac DeMarco. Abigail didn’t like Lily, she found her old fashioned and pretentious, and knew that Lily thought she was a better writer than Abigail was. Probably because Lily was English, which she thought made her intrinsically better than an American writer. Abigail breathed out and tried to push the thoughts from her head. She hated negative energy in the morning, and Lily was giving negativity.

Lily scrunched her eyes shut in annoyance at the long, self-important breath Abigail took, as if she were forgiving the sins of the world with her lungs. The way she skipped into the room with that balls-of-her-feet bounce. The way she would gloat about her daily meditation or her morning horoscope or her Ashtanga practice or her Duolingo or whatever it was she had done before the sun was even up. Like Lily gave a shit. Her downward dog wasn’t even that good. 

Writing something better than Abigail was important. But what to write? First person, or close third? Poetry or prose, and if poetry, should it rhyme? Tackle big issues, Trump or Pelecot or Putin or Palestine, or keep it simple, describe a walk in the French countryside?

What was that thing Salome said the other day, when she overheard someone at Au Chat Noir saying they were a pilot and they flew a whale across a continent in a cargo plane? That could work. Pretty mental thing to do. What would the point of that story be, though? Aside from that just being a funny thing to do, putting a whale in an aeroplane. 

Abigail, likewise, stressed over what to write. The blank Google Docs page was threatening her with a panic attack. It infuriated her that Lily was up first, already writing away. She was the early riser, not Lily. She wanted to scream at her to stop, she felt they should start again, at the same time. This wasn’t fair. 

She had a story in her head, it was just about getting it down on paper. That friend from her life drawing class out in Montrouge who’d gotten obsessed with pickling cucumbers, and that woman came round to take a census and she’d offered her one and it had turned out the woman loved pickles and wasn’t lying because she ate nearly all of them, and there was kilos of the stuff. It made her wonder where the woman put it all. Jars and jars of them, one after the other. By the end she was opening jars just to see how many she could eat. Eating straight out of the jar with her long thin fingers plucking them out of the brine, one after another and gulping them down in quick succession like a seal with fish. She didn’t speak any English so the conversation was hand gestures and smiles, as she offered jar after jar after jar. 

It was funny, for sure, a better concept than anything Lily was writing anyway, but how could she put that into a story? What would the premise be? The arc, the plot, the clock, the underlying political theme or poignant moral message?

Silently, inoffensively, Stina walked in. Lily and Abigail looked up. Stina, as always, looked perfect. Tall, Scandinavian, her blonde hair already washed and dried and blowing in the nonexistent wind. She beamed, and Lily and Abigail, despite themselves, felt warmer because of it. 22 minutes to deadline. 

She had, of course, already submitted. Stina was published in the Atlantic and in Vanity Fair, and had won some Fellowship or grant or something in her hometown. Lily marvelled at her command of language, her sentences which meandered like a river that knew exactly what it was and where it was going. 

Abigail hated how it seemed every time Stina left the house something absurd and interesting happened to her that she could jot down and record. Nothing ever happened to Abigail. Stina began making a granola/fruit/yoghurt breakfast and the two others went back to their work. 

Although both made furious attempts to look busy, neither could come up with anything to write. Abigail wrote a poem about her ex, then deleted it. Lily began a second person monologue in iambic pentameter. Abigail began a walking, pondering piece about Paris streets. Lily set a short story in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Both searched in vain for something new and organic, some eye-catching story no one had heard before.

Stina began chatting, in her friendly, sing-song accent, about her school at home, and how it was supposedly secular, but in fact turned out to be somewhat of a cult. She laughed as she remembered prayers being banned, then official textbooks, then chairs. No chairs! How silly that had been. They used to have to go into the woods at the full moon and worship Odin and drink blood out of a goblet. Not human’s blood, she assured, laughing, but some kind of animal. Pig, probably. Her breakfast ready, she smiled and skipped out of the room again. 

Lily and Abigail exchanged wild glances, then both began frantically writing and typing, as though whoever could get the words down first could lay claim to the story, take it as their own. 17 minutes to deadline.

https://neunmagazine.com/2025/04/08/creative-short-story-deadlines/