The Bridge That Buñuel Built
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The Symptoms Of His Madness Were As Follows: from Sheryl Jenkins on Vimeo.
REVENANTS, a short film based on one of the stories in the collection:
“I don’t write short stories.” That’s what I tell people. And yet, somehow, here is a collection of short stories with my name on them.
Have I been lying all these years? I prefer to say I’ve been in denial. But why? My only excuse is the notorious difficulty of the short story form. To say I write short stories has always seemed too big a claim. Modesty forbids, and all that.
I don’t write short stories. I try things out, experiment, have a go. Take an idea and run with it. These are the results, sometimes playful, occasionally bizarre, invariably flawed.
The title story is a case in point. There was a Buñuel season on the TV at the time. I recorded several of the films and watched them back to back, Belle de Jour, followed by The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, followed by That Obscure Object of Desire. To be exposed to so much surrealism all at once obviously had an effect on me. It also coincided with a time in my life when my daily walk to the office took me past a sandwich bar called ‘Brunel’s’. It was named, I presumed, after the great civil engineer of the nineteenth century, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer amongst other things of the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
Now I have no idea why a sandwich bar had been named after an engineer. Perhaps Brunel had once been commissioned to create a new sandwich, having been confused with a chef of a similar name? I could only conjecture. As I pondered the mystery of that, I wondered whether a comparable confusion, in a parallel universe, might somehow have occurred between Brunel and Buñuel, whose names struck me as uncannily connected.
I must have been thinking a lot about Buñuel at the time, because every day I walked past the sandwich bar this thought occurred to me. I found that the only way I could release myself from this strange preoccupation was to write a story about it.
Whether this is the best way to go about writing a short story, I have no idea. But then again, I don’t write short stories.
Contents
1 mix-up:
The bridge that Buñuel built.
2 misfits:
The wigging of Samuel Pepperton.
A tenderhearted man.
3 horror stories:
The Church of Vengeance.
Beauty and the leech.
The symptoms of his madness were as follows:
4 fables:
Telltale Tom.
Seeds.
The forest.
The Devil’s drum.
5 speculations:
Revenants.
Not Miss Li.
The stricken.
An investigation to discover the comic potential of fucking with people’s minds. McKenzie, Pertwee and Fujitsu.
Stockshot City.