Kissing Grace | Fiction
We bring you a story by the award-winning Welsh writer, Deborah Kay Davies, “Kissing Grace” from her Wales Book of the Year winning collection, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful (Parthian).
Grace first fell deeply in love when she was ten years and six months old.
Until then she had only been practising, going through the motions. Not that she knew many of the motions. She could only watch TV kisses on other people’s televisions, and her own parents never would kiss, that she knew for definite. Grace had thought about the best ways to kiss for a long time, long before she was ten even. She had started by kissing her pillow, at night. Instinctively she made her mouth as delectable as it could be, as soft and eager as she knew how. She took time to close her eyes, concentrating on the fall of her eyelids. She knew how they gleamed damply as they lowered; she felt them cooling as the night air breathed on them. She was aware of the way her thick, spiky lashes would first touch and then mesh together.
There came a time when pillow-kissing was not enough. Grace thought about who would be willing to practise with her; she needed a person to kiss. She had to be sure that kissing a particular friend would, in itself, be pleasant. It wasn’t easy to choose someone, but Grace knew that, of all her friends, Nina was the only one suitable.
Nina was very pretty. The same build as Grace, with heavy, auburn hair that always felt cool. The sort of hair that wouldn’t stay in hair-clips or ribbons, but dead straight, poured down Nina’s back. Of the two, Nina was the leader, and so it was arranged. All through the quiet evenings, in the autumn and winter before the spring that led to Grace falling in love, while they were supposed to be doing school projects, she and her friend Nina tried out all the different sorts of kissing they could think of.
To read the rest of this story click here.
Deborah Kay Davies’ debut novel True Things About Me was released as a feature film in May 2022 starring Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke.
When the book was first released the BBC, the Culture Show named Deborah as one of the twelve best new British novelists. Published in the US by Faber, Lionel Shriver chose the novel as her personal Book of the Year in The Wall Street Journal. Deborah’s first work of fiction was a collection of short stories, Grace, Tamar and Lazlo the Beautiful, which won Wales Book of the Year. Her second novel, Reasons She Goes to the Woods, was long-listed for the Bailey’s Prize and short-listed for the Encore Award.
Her most recent novel, Tirzah and the Prince of Crows, published by Oneworld in 2019, was praised by The Observer for its ‘profound sense of place’ and described by The Daily Mail as ‘spellbinding’. Deborah has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University and has taught Creative Writing at Cardiff.