Yosola Olorunshola Extract from work in progress Still Life
H
er days were numbered. For another week only, her job title would be Assistant Memory-Maker. Fara had complex feelings about this. It was hardly a transferable position – more appropriate for a magician or a fortune-teller with a side-hustle than a person hoping to pass her landlord’s credit check. This was not how she imagined the future, as her dreams evolved from hairdresser, to artist, to okay, I should at least consider medicine or law, until quite naturally, but to the confusion of her parents, she settled for art historian. Today was a distant dream from the picture of herself swanning through Europe on the sails of wide-legged trousers, gesturing towards framed lines and dots, finding a narrative in sweeping landscapes, or translating sculptures described vaguely as “wooden fetish figure” into something more culturally precise. Instead of leading tours beneath high ceilings and echoing galleries, her life was spent in a basement beneath a colony of dead flies pock-marking a flickering electric light. Really, her job was glorified data entry. She converted handwritten notes into digital files, so that one day, if someone were to look for letters sent by Sir Francis Drake to his lover (his Virgin Queen could never know about Miss Ink Feather), her hands would guide them to the source through lines of code and formula across space and time. Not exactly the kind of work you think would keep you up at night. Fara had lived and graduated through a Digital Revolution as well as a Great Recession, or so she reminded herself when the pressures of real life became too surreal to contemplate. One day,
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yosola olorunshola
