Elissa Hunter-Dorans: The Empty Chair
Translated by Lisa MacDonald
It was Hogmanay in Inverness, on the last night of the Seventies. The crowded townhouse pulsed with life, a woven tartan of sounds. Fiddles singing out reels, laughter, boots striking dust from the wooden floor to keep time, sounds that were red and green and gold, a babbling chorus. At the centre of the uproar was an empty chair. It was silent and unmoving, a nightwatchman of wood and leather. Nobody touched it, nobody dared to sit on it. It was my grandmother who put it there, as she did each Hogmanay. We will leave a chair for the Free Church, she said every year. We didn’t know exactly what she meant, but we let her have her way.
We danced around the chair, making jokes. “I doubt she’ll come this year,” my mother laughed, her cheeks flushed. “But we can never be sure, no?”
An old school friend of mine joined in. “Once upon a time you could have stacked the members of the Free Church on the chair, and they’d have reached the moon and back. But now… now they’d hardly reach the roof.” We all laughed, and went on dancing.
[…]
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