Matt Kendrick
Writer | Editor | Teacher
WELKIN PRIZE 2026 - SHORTLISTED
The empty fork, the empty place
by Mary Harron
Before my father reached the end of the one-way street of Parkinson’s Disease, before he retreated inside himself and never re-emerged, there were the usual problems – manual dexterity, swallowing, facial expressions. One dinnertime I saw him carrying out all the motions of eating dinner – knife and fork to plate, raising them to his mouth, chewing and swallowing – but without any food on the cutlery. He carried on with the motions like a man under a hypnotist’s spell, acting out an imaginary dinner.
Empty fork to mouth
he swallows the space between
us and what was him
Mary Harron is a translator and writer, recreating the words of others under one name and creating her own under another. She has recently started working with haiku and related forms, enjoying the continual distillation of meaning. She lives in the East of England.
