How the Light Gets In – Light Night teaser | Fried Chicken

 

On October 3^rd, Leeds-based, award-winning writer Clare Fisher will be running a brand new interactive storytelling installation for Leeds Light Night – ‘How the Light Gets In.’

As part of ‘How the Light Gets In’, actors will perform micro-stories on the theme of light, dark and how we find our way from one to the other, whilst audiences can contribute their insights and reactions to a display wall. Clare has written these stories through running a series of creative workshops and sparking creative conversations on twitter, thanks to funding from the Arts Council as part of the SHINE emerging artists scheme. 

Leading up to Light Night, TSOTA are exclusively publishing a small selection of 4 of Clare’s micro stories that will feature in the installation.

Read the first – Helping Elbow and the second In Praise of Cracks.

The third to be published is Fried Chicken.

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Fried Chicken

When people ask me how did I do it, I usually use big words like ‘faith’ and ‘trust’ and even ‘perseverence.’ But tonight is about shining a light on things worth shining a light on and so in this spirit I can reveal that the real answer is fried chicken.

Yes, that’s right: fried chicken.

Biologically speaking it’s more ‘fried’ than ‘chicken,’ it stinks and is a shocker to the vital organs and even to the not-so-vital ones. But back then, when loss was pushing me over the edge of time and way down deep to some anti-time in some anti-place where nothing and no one could touch me, not even the brightest stick of sun, I did occasionally make it from the bed to the window.

It was a grimy window; I had to press my forehead right up against the glass to see out. And what was out there but the red and yellow orbs of Dixy’s Fried Chicken. The fluorescent hamburger ‘Os’ of Mahmood’s. The unforgiving strip lighting of the shops themselves, showing up every pimple and wrinkle in every figure that flocked in empty-handed and out, weighed down with cardboard boxes whose outer skins were printed with pictures of flames which, I remembered from my Being Properly Alive days, were always slightly pixelated.

I never frequented these Fried Chicken outlets myself, even though I existed just across the road. Indeed, it was a long time before I began to do what from the outside looked like ‘recover’ or, dare I say, ‘live’. From the inside, however, from the place I am sharing with you tonight, the change began there, with those fluorescent lights, inadvertently showing me that most mundane and forgettable of truths: that life goes on; on and on it goes; no matter how much is lost, someone, somewhere will continue to want things, to hunger and to eat, and sooner or later, the day will come when you will too.

Claire Sita Fisher

 

‘How the Light Gets In’ will run from 5pm – 10pm, October 3^rd at the Local Artists Space, Central Library, Leeds.

claresitafisher.com
lightnightleeds.co.uk

Clare Fisher is Leeds-based writer, blogger and creative-writing teacher. She writes mainly fiction, and in 2013 Clare won the Spread the Word Writing Prize and the Cinnamon Press Writing Prize. With a firm attachment in both Leeds and London, Clare is currently working on a novel set between the two cities.