Ad Hoc Fiction

 Life in the No Flex Zone
Esmeralda stores her jewelry in a box on the high closet shelf, trades her paisley sundress for a brown shroud, ties the kerchief tight around illegal curls. Tuesday is shopping day.
    She could take the steps two at a time, slide down the banister into the bed where floral rainbows used to grow, but a soldier stands across the way, watching, waiting.
    Cans line the market shelves, black writing on white paper. Plain. Uniform. Esmeralda fills her basket with the week's rations, shows her card to a drab-dressed checkout girl.
    "Better tuck that back in", the girl says, points to Esmeralda's temple. She does not smile. Smiling makes you look pretty, stand out. Smiling is a flex. Smiling gets you a warning.
    Esmeralda walks back to her house, locks the door, trades the brown shroud for a bright floral, lets her curls free, pretends the soldiers aren't waiting outside. Watching.

Broken Splinter
I hear them every night, the walls can never hold his temper.

Each night I lay in bed comprehending the wife’s role to a powerful man and every morning she is at the kitchen sink, her spine slightly more bent, her left arm, a little limper from his fresh beatings.

Today I stare anxiously between her and my report card.

I am suddenly realizing how dark our kitchen is, how hot and slow the spinning overhead fan is, how strong the contrast of the dirty beige wallpaper and her black pots hanging on the window rail, blocking that morning sunshine is...

I wanted to tell her.

When she turns around and sees my report card the smile disappears from her kind face and the single sentence that escapes from lips makes me see the darkness he has given to her. “I'm calling your father,” she says and my heart splinters.

Role Reversal
Fresher’s week. No peanut butter spattered work top, or wet tights cluttering the radiators. The toothpaste lid remains on the toothpaste tube, lined up in a neat row with our two toothbrushes. There’s a noticeable gap where the third one was. I spread the two brushes further apart.

Her room, a discarded hermit’s shell. The photograph on the side shows a little girl in braces holding a pink fishing net. I pull sheets from the bed, her adolescent scent hits me. I close my eyes. I will only allow myself this one moment.

The back door slams. He’s mounting the stairs two at a time, running into the room like an excited puppy, waving keys to the campervan he’s just parked on the driveway. His face an explosion of the youth I’d forgotten. I smile back at him and close the bedroom door.

The sheets can wait.

In This Room
He’s worried about the others.

The others who might get hurt.

I tell him, there are no others. There is nothing outside of this room, this locked door, this bed.

This moment.

People are always telling me to be more mindful. I’m being mindful now. Removing his shirt, mindfully. Pulling off my t-shirt, soaked with anticipation, it catches on my earring. I’m mindful of the earring slicing down my earlobe. I make a mental note to buy antiseptic tomorrow, on my way to the station. On my way to the train. The train that will whisk me back, belch me out in that other life, where I am all kinds of things to other people. Their entire universe, making it rotate.

But tonight, it is me rotating, spinning off these sturdy casters. The bind that has held me unbridling, unravelling.

In this room, with this man.

Moving On
A strip of passport photos in innocent black and white; she’s looking cross-eyed, I’m sticking out my tongue. Two ticket stubs from David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight Tour, old Valentine cards; my name always spelt out in kisses. That first hospital appointment card; she’d written on the back a list of names we would call the dog we were going to get, she’d circled, Titus. The small wind-up robot, with the now lost key she’d bought for my birthday one year – her little joke. Magazine cuttings of the couch we saved up a year for; it was a lovely pale green colour, she said it was called Silent Peppermint. The plastic Tomato-shaped sauce-dispenser we stole from a café in Hebden Bridge.
      And each night, as the world falls silent around me, I pick out each item from the old shoe-box. Lay them carefully on the kitchen table, in chronological order. 

Mother Knows Best
Femi puts an old teapot between us. It whispers steam, conjures memory.
 
    Talldark
    Everafter
 
When I was little Mum loved the game as much as me, headscarves, wide staring eyes, the sombre room. The anticipation.
 
Femi smiles, her eyes bright. My heart quickens. Breathless, the air all possibility and my mind reeling, could it be?
 
It was the magic of the scrying I craved. ‘Time needs time, girl,’ Mum would say, agitating the pot. Then the tea’s bitter tang, abracadabra, the up-ended cup and tell me, tell me. Her witch’s croak, her dazzling generalisations. Were they real?
 
Opposite Femi’s lovely smile I reach for the pot, my tongue flooded with the need to know. She stays my hand, her fingers lingering.
 
    Talldark
    Everafter
    But no prince for you
 
‘Let it steep,’ she says. ‘Time needs time.’ Her lips gently brushing mine.

And I always thought Mum was a faker.

...And tied in a bow
You tease my heartstrings out and tie them in a bow.  But not before you've YANKED with all your might, unreeled me to my spinning, naked core.  Not until you’ve run with my quick around the neighbourhood, twice, (I grab the door frame with both hands, not to be dragged after), wrapped my sweet and tenders ‘round house and lamp post and dazed-looking dog.  (The door frame’s splintering.)  THEN we get to the neat, tidy bow.
 
Not as light as you’d think birds alight on my wires.  After-school kids use my innards for skipping. Total strangers stumble over me.  The Special Brew crew use my elastics as hammocks in the lager-y light of evening.  
 
I’m all out there.
 
Spooling through this pinhole in my chest.
 
That's what you do to me.  Every single day.  And every day I come back for more.

Blot

She is like an ink-blot – this is what I thought. Dark, shapeless. I grew used to having her there, she became... part of the furniture. I felt happier, in some vague way, when she was present. And then one day I came down to breakfast. The room lay brilliant, stroked by sunbeams. But her face turned as I sat down; she looked not at me, but at the newspaper. It was the subtlest gesture, the slightest sign. And I felt slighted. Cut, to my very heart. I was surprised at the pain of it, and at how the ache persisted, as I drank my coffee and discovered I could not eat. The bread became tougher as I chewed. I glanced up, just twice, and yes, she was like an ink blot. The longer I looked, the more I saw in her.

Telegraph

First came men with stakes and measures, next the hole-diggers, then the pole-setters, last of all the wire party. Ox-wagons, heavy with felled trees, shook the dust from the earth.

The workers had such a thirst she feared they’d drain the well. Her silent husband counted the bills they paid him into the strongbox under the bed.

A young Irishman showed her the tiny machine at the head of the line. It clicked like a locust, devouring words.

They rumbled onward, straight, across the plains. She shaded her eyes until all she could see of them was a dot. Her husband flattened her, then, for talking to the Irishman.

Now, while he harrows the fields, she leans against the pole, one hand on her swelling belly. She listens to the wind humming through the wire, imagines the words chattering up and down, the swarms of unseen people in cities faraway.