How I wrote Ancestral Virgins and got it into print

Pentecost Tempera with Pencil on Panel, Andrew Wyeth, 1989 Absence is your gift, your singular talent. You’re the master of negative space, of erasures as sharp and precise as an exacto knife, leaving only a beached and rotting punt or mothy curtains at an open window. It’s the notion that stirs you when news comes of the girl who drowned off Pemaquid Point. No one knows if she was swept away or walked into the sea with pockets full of rocks, but you don’t stop to wonder if a lover harpooned her heart, flooding it with sorrow and despair. When you hear her body floated in with the tide, you don’t imagine the feelings of the men who pulled her from the water and laid her on the quayside, who had to smell the sour gape of her mouth and touch her purple skin and weed-shackled limbs. Nor do you question, for all the drownings they’ve seen, if this one was different, putting them in mind of the daughters their wives had borne them. As you take up your soft-hair brush, your yolky eggs, and powdered pigments, all you picture are the black spear shadows of the drying poles and the billow of the seine nets taking flight, yellow and spidered as ancient lace. Yet, somehow, when we look at the finished work, what you’ve done with your crosshatched strokes and careful pencil lines is to show us the very thing we cannot see – the dead girl lying on the empty stones.  --- Fiona J. Mackintosh is the Scottish-American author of the a flash fiction collection The Yet Unknowing World (http:/adhocfiction.com). A past winner of the Fish, Bath, and Reflex Awards, her stories were selected for Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2019, Best Microfiction 2019, and the 2018-19 BIFFY50. www.fionajmackintosh.com.