by Jay McKenzie
Please explain what attracted you to the advertised position:
I haven’t got any qualifications and out of thirty jobs advertised in this week’s Courier Mail, this was the only one that didn’t require five years’ experience. I have a passion for creating order out of chaos, systems out of shambles and I’ve needed that skill just to make it to my forties because the inside of my head and my heart and my bones and lungs are a tangled knot of trying to make sense of it all, and I am ready to enter re-enter the workforce at entry level.
What skills do you have that make you a suitable candidate for this role?
I am a diligent desperate and organised woman who is hungry and stealing to feed your children is exhausting, especially when their father is on a great salary but expects you to feed him and four growing boys on forty pounds a week so I have learned to make my own yoghurt and my soup stocks can last us for months but I’d kill a man for a wheel of brie to learn new skills.
I completed the first two years of an English degree at Durham University but had to drop out when my Irish Lit professor knocked me up and despite saying he’d support me to complete my final year, there was always some reason why I couldn’t get back to it so my literacy and communication skills are of a high standard.
I have spent the last twenty-five years raising four sons and keeping a home and a successful man-child in pressed clothes and a stocked liquor cabinet. My youngest son just left for university leaving me proud and broken and my home full of empty holes where my sons used to be and just me and him and nowhere else for his rage and iron to go so I am now free oh God, what does free feel like?, to pursue a new direction.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Dead.
On a beach somewhere, sipping a margarita.
Prison maybe? The delicious sweet relief of giving in and getting rid.
I would like to work my way slowly through the ranks of your company and perhaps reach the level of a Personal Assistant.
If successful in this first round, how would you like us to contact you for interview?
I am currently between mobile phones, so if you could contact me on ><?/”:;{}[] my neighbour’s number because she hears him shouting through the walls and drops in occasionally when he’s gone out to check I’m okay and I say I am but I’m not and I know it and she knows it but we’re both too bloody English to say it but she gets it and would help me leave in a heartbeat, though I’m not that strong yet, not until I’ve got my own money, then maybe I’ll be far enough away before I got her to pass on a message, I will return your call from her house because he checks the phone logs forensically.
Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself to strengthen your application?
If I do not get this job, I am afraid that I will continue to wither like a wilting dandelion watching all of my parts blow away in the wind, and I’m afraid that I don’t really know who I am now, but what would become of me if there were nothing left but a bowed stalk and a drooping head and what then? Please give me this chance. I’ll open my own bank account for the first time in my own name and I’ll put my own money in there and I’ll make my escape to the hills, the forests, the pulsing magma heart of a volcano and maybe I’ll know what it is to breathe alone.
I enjoy classical music, making my own yoghurt and the poetry of Sylvia Plath because she gets it. Got it.
Jay McKenzie is a prize-winning writer whose work appears in adda, Maudlin House, The Hooghly Review, Fahmidan Journal and Fictive Dream. She has been recognised in prizes such as The Commonwealth Short Story Award, The Edinburgh Short Story Award, The Bath Short Story Award, The Bridport Prize, The Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and Quiet Man Dave Flash Fiction Proze. Her debut novel, Mim and Wiggy’s Grand Adventure (Serenade, 2023), is followed by How to Lose the Lottery (Harper Fiction, 2026)
Emerge Literary Journal 