Kate Horsley
A queer writer who loves the uncanny and mythical, Kate Horsley's recent fiction can be found in Smokelong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, The Vestal Review, Wigleaf, Moon City Review, and Flash Fiction Online, and has been shortlisted for Bridport & Oxford competitions and Highly Commended in Bath Flash Fiction. Her first novel, The Monster’s Wife, was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Her second, The American Girl, was published by William Morrow and Harper Collins. Both books have been optioned for film. She’s the co-founder/EIC of Inkfish Magazine & Press, is on the editorial board of Best Small Fictions, and lectures in creative writing at the University of Hull.
If Jonah gets swallowed by a whale again
he decides he’ll make a better go of it, and that if disco balls and amps wash in, he’ll turn the whale’s stomach into a club space with a light-up dance floor, that this time around, Thursday nights will be Abba nights inside the whale, and Jonah will party with cuttlefish, who, on the whole, he’ll find to be decent dancers, and if Mondays turn out to be lonely days, Jonah will dial the whale’s extension to chat, and that’ll be how he learns this whale’s name is Sue, that she drifted apart from her pod because being a gay whale isn’t so usual, and he’ll find it in him to comfort Sue by reminiscing about when he came out, though he most likely won’t tell her about the first whale-swallowing in case she gets weird about it; then, refreshed by their companionship, Sue will become a destination for weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and eighties nostalgia discos, and soon hot, shipwrecked sailors will dance the Cabbage Patch, Robot, and Chicken Head in her, the Mashed Potato and Electric Slide, and sometimes sailor jigs like Miss Baker’s Hornpipe or the Wapping Landlady.
If, after long years, Jonah is diagnosed with depression because discos aren’t enough, the whale will patiently find him support groups for whale swallowees, and if the sailors elbow their way out of her blow hole to look for a better time, Sue will manage to persuade a sailor called Pavel O’Leary with a handlebar moustache to stay, and, on the day Jonah receives his 360,000-day stomach survivor chip, Pavel will be cheering, then, one night, when they’re lying in the pyloric stomach imagining the first stars of dusk glimmering through the oesophagus, Pavel will take Jonah’s hand and say, everything I want is right here, and if, after half a century, Sue tells Jonah that she doesn’t know how much longer she can swim, that she’s heading towards Sri Lanka’s bone-white scimitars of beach because she wants him to be happy, Jonah will struggle to sleep at night, imagining life on land, so Pavel will hold him close and say, I’m sad too, love - this life we made inside the whale was kinder than either of us dreamed.