THE LITTLE GHOST by Giselle Leeb / SNOWDROPS by Cliff McNish

THE LITTLE GHOST by Giselle Leeb

“The stumps shone white in the weak moonlight next to the gaping black holes they’d left behind.”

…black holes left by felled African gum trees that had been reaching out roots towards the house or colonial manse, at the back of which the girl narrator slept, and so much is magically and inadvertently in keeping with the previous four simultaneously published Nightjars just reviewed HERE and HERE, such as Stone’s black hole (here in the Leeb related to outer space’s black holes) and the little girl as arguable ghost in the Cooke, all, in varying degrees, with holes and roots as encroachment of foundations, here the girl living with her drunken mother, and stumps of the trees and her own ‘elbow’ explicitly mentioned, as joined to her hand that haunted her as the little ghost’s silver-mirror coloured handprint on an otherwise black mirror. This is honestly a ghost story to remember by reading it again and again in many future ghost story anthologies. 

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/giselle-leeb/

 SNOWDROPS by Cliff McNish

“….returning my wave, […] I notice that his entire upper arm is also dislocated. Horribly twisted not just at the elbow joint…”

As well as a finely written discrete portrait of an aging man being bereaved or dead himself, it is also a preternaturally synchronous coda of this symphony of Nightjars as shown by me to be embodied by the previous work above, and now this work, a mirror of self as stumps of some previous abject car accident involving himself and those he loved, the old man and his daughter or wife amid snowdrops springing open as confetti, even later atomising as parmesan, as he faces someone else’s house now become himself standing at his own bay window (“an obdurate black square of glass” as the previous story’s handprint mirror with a whiteness or silver upon it). A man viewing this time himself and his own disrepaired house as an encroaching sinkhole, while being in both at once? 

“A body remorselessly in situ, silhouetted against glass and stars.”

My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/23/nightjar-nuitjour-nightday-nightlight-nightjourney/#comment-23892