Introducing Louisa Greene

1.

Introducing Ep 1 of my flash fiction novella: The Everyday Musings of Louisa Greene.

It had its beginnings as a weekly flash fiction exercise I set for myself on Medium.com in 2018. I am reactivating that exercise here on Substack with the plan to form the FF eps into a novella.

Here’s the blurb in progress…

Librarian Louisa Greene has lived a quiet life among the muted bookstacks of her working days. Now she is retired she wonders what her legacy might be and what she should do with all the thoughts she never spoke into her quiet world. In this gently satirical flash fiction novella, the character LG, a single childless woman of a certain age, finds the courage to share with you the reader, all the things she thought, but never dared say. She hopes it might encourage you to do the same.

1

Louisa Greene is feeling unsettled. It’s a slow seeping, narrow niggling type of sensation in nape of the neck, right where someone might grab a coward when dragging him into the bright sunlight to face his greatest fears.

Yes, LG is feeling cowardly because she feels she has failed the big test of realising what all the self help gurus call — her full potential. The trouble is she is not quite sure what that potential might be. Is it to become the best ukelele player in her suburban ukelele group? As yet, she has only learned two chords and finds it hard to keep the uke in tune. She likes singalongs so maybe she should just concentrate on becoming the highest note holder in the soprano section of her local choir, The Tea Cup Tinklers. Although she knows she has no hope of pushing her friend (correction, acquaintance) Hermoine Harris, off her Minnie Riperton perch.

No, I’m afraid it goes deeper than that.

When Louisa Greene retired after giving forty something years to the Department of Library Services of NSW, she was thrilled to finally do all the things that until then she had only dreamed of. She threw herself into activities and hobbies, classes and groups like there was no tomorrow. But lately with her interest in extra curricular activities is on the wane (sometimes it’s just too much effort to go out), Louisa Greene finds herself mulling and ruminating, ruminating and mulling, over things she ought to have forgotten long ago.

Like the time she didn’t go the full distance on a search for a hard-to-find reference for a little old lady client and fobbed her off telling her the book in question was out of print. Turned out that very intelligent little old lady client was doing her PHD on The Sexual Habits of the Common Garden Snail and complained to management, writing an article in the local paper damning not just Louisa but the whole library staff and its regional administration.

Louisa Greene, who has always thought of herself as overly patient and compassionate and prided herself on her great attention to detail, had to face the fact that some little old ladies and all their impossible demands just got right up her back passage! And on this day, the one day out of all the days of her long and flawless career, she got caught out!

And alas there were other instances too. Lately in the middle of the night Louisa Greene has been waking up in a sweat with the memories of past mistakes and distant failings hanging onto her like a wet sticky rag.

In the wee dawn hours before the rest of the apartment block stirs, she plays the incidents backwards and forwards, running through possible scenarios of how with hindsight she could have prevented the regrettable moments from happening.

But what can she do about it now? Surely the past must remain in the past, surely there’s no going back — isn’t that the reassuring thing about getting old? Isn’t all that stuff over, finished, dead and buried? And don’t all the Ted-talking-self-help gurus smiling their too-big smiles from the back of their best selling books say that our failings are our greatest teachers? Wouldn’t we all be failing on purpose all the time if that were the case? Wouldn’t we just all go to the International University of Failure and forget about Harvard and Yale?!

Louisa Greene knows what she must do.

As the first rays of sunlight creep through her kitchen window she puts on the kettle, gets out her favourite tea pot, makes a strong brew and pours herself a cup.

Potential schmotential she mutters

as she watches the steam rise effortlessly into the cool morning air.

Potential schmotential!

©Jan Cornall 2024

This is just a taster. More to come. Love to know what you think. Please leave me some words in the comments.