My short story The Richest Place on Earth, set in Tanzania, East Africa, was published in March 2009 in Islamica magazine together with etchings by my sister Hanna Whiteman. You can see pictures of her artwork on her website, but unfortunately Islamica ceased publication immediately after publishing my story! I choose not to take it as anything personal.

Hanna has also typeset and made a beautiful linocut cover for another of my short stories, entitled Little One, which we hope to self-publish soon.

Below you'll find my short story An Opportunity Lost, which was published in The Means (an independent literary journal) in Sept. 06. Click here to read an ecxtract my first literary venture, a modest volume entitled Arthur the Spider. I make no apologies for my spelling, nor the extremely tenuous plot. I was only 6 and three quarters at the time.

I’ve also had a short story (titled Hazardous Waste) published in the SOAS Spirit magazine (summer 2001) which unfortunately has now been lost, along with a number of other stories I’ve written over the years, victims of near-constant house move. But as I salvage things and write new stuff I’ll put them up on this page for your perusal.

An Opportunity Lost

A short story by Medina Tenour Whiteman, Copyright 2006

I’ve always liked doing several things at once. It gives me such a sense of community. Like the time I was a wildebeest at the same time as a mortuary clerk, or that time I ran the olympic triathlon whilst watching from the VIP box – what a laugh! Pity the poor fools who have never known twoness; there's always space in one life for another, don't you think?

Of course, nothing compares to the time I tried to start and end simultaneously. Starting and ending are, as I'm sure you can appreciate, generally considered opposite directions on the same yak trail. 'You can't end what hasn’t been begun', that's what Mother always said, so of course I had to try and prove her wrong. She once told me I couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and I soon put paid to that idea.

So there I was, trying my hand at the first known attempt at concomitant commencement and termination. It was quite tricky, as I remember it. A bit like the strained reunion of the opposing poles of two gigantic magnets, or flattening the cosmos to the size of a gumdrop. It reminded me of the time I composed an aria for the bassoon whilst being head of the armed forces; a slippery task, but not without its rewards.

But then it occurred to me: what should I try to start and stop at the same time? A sandwich? A story? A race against my better judgement? The question plagued me for a good long while, during which I single-handedly concocted a pot of potato and leek soup and read the Financial Times with a baby strapped to my front. An idle moment is an opportunity lost, after all.

In this philosophical frame of mind – philosophical frames of mind come naturally to me – I ruminated on the nebulous dimensions of the Beginning and of the End. A sandwich, I mused, does not begin, per se, in a plastic wrapper on a chilled rack in a supermarket. Nor does it end when the last crumb is shaken out of a lap onto a picnic bench. Nay, it lives on in the bellies of the pigeons that scavenge them, and on the masonry they later decorate. Likewise a story; I often ponder in the bath stories told to me by grandpa before his tongue fell out, and they invariably grow legs and mouths and gnaw away at one's gizzards until they grow too big for a soul to take and slither like tapeworms into somebody else's bathtime cogitations.

What could it all mean? It was quite a headscratcher.

It was only then that my cousin, who had – poor thing – only ever managed to be a simple farmhand at any one moment in time, suggested that I should try to sink into a deep state of transcendental meditation, in which there would no beginning and no end, only the Now. And I thought, good granny - he might just be right. No beginning and no end, at precisely the same moment! Beginnings and ends do tend to inhabit discrete pockets of time - which, as everyone knows, is not long and straight like a length of licorice whip but rather a shapeless blob of candyfloss, completely inedible and mostly made of air.

So I settled into a comfortable spot of floorboard at 5.38 pm on a Monday afternoon and attempted to achieve a stateless, formless kind of existence, which would technically start at 5.38 pm on a Monday afternoon but would in fact be unbounded by either beginningness or endingness. Theoretically, I pondered, I could come out of my meditation at exactly the same point in the candyfloss that I had entered it, seeing as there was no physical place in candyfloss at all, only a lot of sickly pink sugared mess. Would I feel a sense of, say, disembodiment? Would I cease all thought and only - dare I countenance it - be? I wondered what it would be like to have the rest of the day to achieve other simultaneous things, like frolicking gaily in a barley field whilst also being deeply serious about poverty.

I could feel the licorice whip trundling softly underneath me as I began my meditation, hoping contemporaneously to end it. I focussed hard on making it fluff out and lose its linearity; it only seemed to unravel away blithely. The selfish swine, I thought, imposing its own temporal fetters on me, I who was trying so nobly to escape them. I became suddenly - horribly - aware of a clock in the neighbouring room, winching out the licorice whip at a fearfully regular pace. It must already be 5.39 pm. It was only doing it to torture me, I was sure. Torturing me with the ineffable trap of worldly time. Teasing me with my own desire to escape it, as if I were a lowly sandwich willing its way out of the plastic wrapper and the chiller cabinet, imagining itself floating freely above the pigeon-embellished steeples of the towns and the becrumbed park benches of the cities - God, how I wanted to float like a manumitted sandwich at that moment! Of course, I was still in the thrall of the moment, the link in the devilish iron bilboes that held the whole human chain gang prisoner - why was it so difficult to escape it for me, who had once led three concurrent lives as a parking attendant, impressionist painter and Cuban revolutionary?

It was futile. I was manacled to the simultaneous achievements of my past and to my anticipation of simultaneous achievements in the future. 'Once' became a poison contaminating my whole internal candyfloss. Once upon a time I did this, once I was free I would do that - it all depended on a single fraction of the infernal time tether! I had met my nemesis, and it was what people watched at work, waited on patiently, wasted as if they had too much of it while others clung to it as the only thing they had in the world.

It was only when I heard the office workers next door leaving their desks and hoisting on their coats and bags that it started, or ended - I was never entirely sure. It was like - no; it was a supreme lightness, descending on me or ascending from within me, one or the other or both at once. I felt suddenly opened, as a cardboard window on an advent calendar is opened - furtively, as secret little fingers crept in and took out my heart and rolled it around hurriedly against a sticky damp palate, savoured in an instant and then - oblivion! Yes, I had achieved that exquisite fragrance of non-beingness; it felt quite nice. The flourescent lights overhead faded into an artificial sort of twilight, the biting cold of the staffroom took on a dusky warmth and even the voice of the man who is at once my boss and also the most insignificant wretch ever to slither out of a crack in the earth shouting at me to get up off the floor and start cleaning computer keyboards was not enough to rouse me. No! Not for me the slavering drudgery of the time-bound world! I was above, beyond, within and without! No more would the phantasms of my past haunt me, nor the lure of the impossible future draw me into its ravenous jaws! I was at last free!

It did take a little getting used to, I have to admit. Unfettering oneself from the constraints of time does have its advantages, but it tends to get in the way when driving home or dunking biscuits in tea or waiting in the queue for Jobseeker's Allowance. My advice to all those wishing to attempt a similar feat would be to be careful not to assume that just because you have exited the mesh of temporality does not mean that potholes automatically disappear from the road simply because at another point in time they do not happen to exist. The folly of youth!

Still, much as it's been a marvellous experience, it's just not exciting enough for me to only be ecstatically removed from worldly temporality, and nothing else, at any one instant in time. It is a little bit boring when you can't jump back into time in order to pat oneself on the back for having jumped out of it in the first place. One can't stay static, you know. In fact, I was thinking about becoming a motivational speaker and possibly also a full stop. I have always liked doing several things at once...