Life Imitating Art

About ten days ago, I wrote a short piece for the ACW Flash Fiction Group, reflecting a pet bugbear of mine.  Here is the story below, which I entitled The Organist’s Wife, but before you read it, let me explain.  My husband, Bret, is a brilliant church organist, but there is one conversation I dread whenever I attend musical events with him.  

‘Are you musical?’  She tilts her head to one side, sure she knows the answer.

‘No.’ 

‘But you’re Peter’s wife.’  

Would she ask Posh Spice if she played football? 

‘I think you’re just being modest.’

‘No.’  This woman, whom I’ve never met before, has been annoying me from the moment she walked in declaring in a loud voice, ‘Music is my religion’.  I’m itching to challenge her, especially as we’re in church, but during my own husband’s organ recital is hardly the time.

‘You play an instrument?’

‘No.’ 

‘Maybe you sing?’

‘No.’  I press my fingers against my lips, although I needn’t have bothered because Peter’s thundering through Bach’s Prelude in D Minor. 

‘So what on earth do you do with yourself?’ she asks in the short interlude before the Fugue.  

I smile. ‘I hold orgies, rob banks.  I’m also trying to raise my profile as a hit-woman.’

She inches further along the pew.  Maybe I’ve stopped her prattle?  Unfortunately, no.  I come to realise she’s staring at my neck.  ‘Aren’t you wearing a dog collar?’

‘I think it suits me.’ 

I’m not going to tell her I write poetry.   

Now, some of the details do not reflect me.  I’m not ordained and my skills don’t extend to poetry.   But the rest is a composite of many conversations I’ve had with various different people over many decades.

What is so uncanny is that, just four days after I’d written that story, the whole ‘Are you musical?’ Scenario took place again, at a concert held during a village fete.  A really weird feeling! Unfortunately, as I was standing next to a respectable, church-going friend, I didn’t get around to mentioning orgies, bank robberies or hit-women, but I had this strange sensation of being out of myself and inside my story.   

I find this repeated ‘Are you musical?’ Dialogue frankly intrusive.  My friend mentioned that I had published a novel, and I would have preferred that she hadn’t.  What I do with myself and my writing are quite frankly mine to share and not to be squeezed out of me by strangers ready to scoff at anything other than music.  I subbed the story to a website which has published a lot of my stuff in the past and also recently, but they don’t want this one.  Maybe my experience is too personal to resonate with anyone else.

But I digress.  What I’m asking is have any other writers experienced an incident which mirrors a scene from their own writing?   I found it very spooky.

Rosemary Johnson is author of Wodka, Or Tea With Milk, a historical novel set during the Solidarity years in Poland and of many short stories and flash.  Rosemary is also the ACW Webmaster (although about to retire from this role).  In real life, she is a retired IT lecturer, living in Essex with her organist husband.