Sophie wrote her flash fiction piece ‘Breathing Out’ some years ago but decided it could do with another airing after listening to the recent debate on euthanasia.
‘Some elements of what I wrote as a science-fiction piece may be about to become a reality,’ she said.
Sophie worked as a journalist for 15 years. Her work has appeared in local and national magazines and on BBC Radio.
In 2011 she read at the Cheltenham Literature Festival after winning the
Gloucestershire Writers’ Network short story award and in 2015 was invited
to judge the short story element of that competition. She was long listed for the Fish Short Story Prize in 2020 and in 2021 her debut novel, ‘The Green March Hotel’, was one of the 12 finalists in the Mslexia First Novel Competition judged by Hilary Mantel. In 2024, her story ‘Hawk in a High Tree Nest’ was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.
Read her story at cirenscene.com – just search for her name on the online magazine.
Breathing Out
‘We concentrate on the exhalation,’ she said. He lay on the floor with the others and breathed out. ‘How long can you hold that out breath before you inhale again?’ she asked. His bedroom had reminded him of student days – a single bed, a small ensuite and a pinboard for mementos. It had been murky when he’d left home – the sun a smear behind sour, yellowish clouds. He couldn’t tell what the weather was now. He joined a tour of the facilities – the swimming pool and sauna, yoga and Tai Chi classes. The evening meal was excellent. ‘Can I go for a walk?’ he asked. ‘This is a sealed unit,’ she replied, ‘but we have virtual spring and autumn walks programmed in our leisure suites. Some guests prefer to jump straight to the views from mountain tops or from ships sailing west.’ Her uniform was both crisp and concealing. It reminded him of nuns. ‘How long?’ he asked. ‘Approximately a month,’ she replied. ‘We don’t want to rush anyone. You’re lucky,’ she added, ‘the state-run units are nothing like this.’
The place he loved and returned to again and again over the coming weeks was the poetry room. The poems, thousands of them, were written on A4 paper and protected from decay by sheets of glass fixed to the floors, walls and ceilings. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he had exclaimed on first seeing it. She smiled and nodded. ‘It seems to be an impulse,’ she said, ‘and we cherish them.’
His daughter had cried. His retirement notice arrived the day after his 70th birthday. He possessed savings enough to postpone it by five years but wanted his death to be his gift to her and his granddaughter. ‘The old must make way for the young,’ he said as he kissed her goodbye. ‘That is the way of things. I am happy.’
He read many of the poems. Often, they were awkward, shoddy things and this moved him more. What impulse was it that had led people to try and press some final expression of themselves into words they had rarely used in their lives? Was there some secret thing, revealed, at this moment of crisis in their existence, that demanded to be heard in this way?
‘They are the tuneless songs of the dying,’ he told her after he had, at last, asked for his own paper and pen. ‘They are a final, blessed exhalation of something we cannot understand.’
‘Close your eyes and breathe out gently,’ she said.
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