11 December 2024
Good morning,
I hope you are enjoying Feathers, in which I’m dovetailing a story I’ve known since I first donned a dressing gown for a nativity play, with my current studies in Creative Writing. If you’d like to know a little more about this combination of faith and fiction in my life, you might want to listen to a free podcast which has just gone live, in which I chat with Stephen Sacco, a St Andrews PhD graduate in Creative Writing. The series he and Christian Livermore (who also has a St Andrews Creative Writing PhD) produce is called The Plague Remedy Podcast. Here’s the link. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/from-the-pulpit-to-the-page-rev-dr-donald-macewan/id1768062606?i=1000679869504
Feathers
Part 11
The story so far: Joe, guided by a vision in the night, has decided to commit to his pregnant girlfriend Maryam.
It took Maryam less than a heartbeat to forgive Joe. She could hear his broad smile on the phone, and found she was in tears for the first time since the library encounter.
“We’re going to get through this,” Joe said. “You and me and Josh.”
“Josh? How do you know that’s his name?”
“I woke up knowing it. I must have been dreaming last night and this golfer told me.”
“Oh Joe, it happened to me too. I was also told to call him Josh. On Instagram. I don’t think the guy I saw was a golfer though – he looked more like a student.”
When they met later, after the closest of embraces they’d ever shared, they opened up about their strange meetings and what they could remember of the words their visitor had said. They were sure he was the same figure who had swooped into their lives.
The doctor confirmed she was expecting, around the end of the year, and that all was well. In a couple of weeks Maryam took her exams. She enjoyed the way the semester’s knowledge came together as she revised, making connections between the modules Foreign Policy and Diplomacy in World Politics and An Introduction to Anthropology. However, just when she was in the midst of taking notes, she would suddenly have to rush away to be sick. She couldn’t study on the ground floor of the Library – the smell of a cheese and chorizo panini from Franki’s Café was enough to send her darting to the toilets. She began to choose the blandest food in Sallies dinners – she could see confusion in her friends’ eyes but she wasn’t ready to tell them. They were too stressed about their exams to cope with her news on top. Robin arranged for her to take her exams online – Maryam wasn’t sure she could spend two hours in the Sports Hall without being sick.
By the time she had finished her exams, they’d found a rental in Kingsbarns. It was small, and needed a lot of work which the landlord was more than happy for Joe to do in the evenings and weekends before they moved in. It was called Nazareth Cottage.
Guido Reni (1575-1642), Sibilla, Palazzo Tursi, Genoa
Yours,
Donald.
Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Chaplain