The fence had sagged for years under the weight of a neglected hedge. Petra could see right through into the adjoining garden, which in most ways mirrored her own – washing line, yellowing lawn, shed in the back corner, fruit trees dotted around. Figs, mulberries and pomegranates left a vinegary tang in the air as they rotted on spindly branches and fell to the ground, their owners disinterested in making jam at the tail end of summer.

White sheets were sun-drying, draped neatly over the washing line. Petra eyed the clean squares of cotton. She thought of the sheets on her own bed, grimy with sweat marks, flakes of skin and hair. Sleeping on them now she would be aware of the filth, but it was too late in the day to start washing them.

Behind the largest sheet, a shadow moved. The sheet blew backwards a little, clinging to the outline of a woman’s body. The rest of the scene fell away, and all Petra saw was that white figure, statuesque, now stolen by the swirling breeze as the sheet billowed out again. A tanned, slender hand reached up to unclip the wooden pegs that held the sheet in place. Petra stood quickly, plastic chair clattering to the concrete behind her as she ran inside.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Evan grunted.

Petra’s nose crinkled as she caught the smell of saltwater and fish on him. Evan was almost permanently at sea, his boat a fortress against whatever he was avoiding on terra firma. He only returned to eat, to fuck, to leave in his wake a residue of grey fish guts and a bloodied filleting knife in the sink. Satisfied, he’d take off again, leaving Petra with nothing but a freezer full of cod for company.

Petra ate her kedgeree in silence. Evan flicked through a newspaper, greasy fingers marking each page in the same corner. He repeated shrill headlines, startling Petra each time he spoke.

‘Tax increase? When they gonna give a bloke a fuckin’ break?’

Petra concentrated on a fish scale that was caught in Evan’s hair. It reflected the light, shimmering faintly in the greying strands at his temple.

Pressed against the sheets and their debris, Petra felt Evan’s weight on top of her. His skin was rough and salty, hands grasping at her like crab claws. They didn’t kiss anymore. Petra closed her eyes. She saw that woman’s shape again, faceless behind its smooth shroud of white. She felt herself drifting, her body reacting to thoughts rather than actions. When their eyes finally met, Evan’s were questioning.

It wasn’t the first time Petra had wondered about being with a woman. The idea had been there as long as she could remember. She’d mentioned it to Evan, years before.

‘We can get you a girl if you like,’ he’d said, with a smile that had turned her stomach.

What he was suggesting was not what Petra wanted. If she touched a woman, tasted a woman, it would not be in Evan’s presence. It would be pure, sacred. It would go beyond the physical and into the spiritual, which was why she had always feared doing it. Being with Evan had been easy. Petra was able to deflect his criticisms, to stave off resentment at his long absences. She understood that his capacity to love deeply was lacking. A woman would be able to read Petra’s thoughts, to know her secrets. A woman could both love and hurt without limits.

Evan was gone in the morning, leaving nothing but a slight indent on the sheets. Petra stripped the bed of its dirty linen, throwing it into the washing machine. She made a cup of coffee to take outside. Even with the sun not long up, the ground was warm underfoot. Petra righted the chair that she’d upended in her haste the day before.

Next door’s washing line was empty. A bucket and a weeding fork sat abandoned on the lawn. They had not been there the day before. Petra’s pulse quickened. When had the woman been gardening? Had she been out there at dusk, working quickly in defiance of the fading light? Had she risen with the sun to steal an hour before the heat set in?

She’d wear loose clothing, a shirt with half the buttons missing. Buffalo grass would crunch beneath the bare, hardened soles of her feet. Her hair would fall over her eyes as she leaned forward and she’d raise a forearm to push it back, leaving a little smear of dirt across her face. Maybe she would sing to herself, brave without an audience. Or was she silent, lost in her thoughts? Sweating, she’d push up her sleeves, squint at the sun and put her bucket aside, heading back into the house in search of a cool drink.

Petra shifted in her chair. A door slammed. She put her coffee mug in front of her face and sat still, not even daring to breathe. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a figure dart out onto the lawn, grab the bucket and the weeding fork and disappear, a flash of blue and white. A man. Had Petra imagined the woman? No. There had been no mistaking the curves behind that sheet.

The washing machine beeped and Petra went inside, wrestling the heavy tangle of wet linen into a basket and carrying it out to the line. With effort, she slung the sheets over the wire and stretched to peg the corners, standing on her toes in a distant imitation of her dancing days. She put her face to the damp fabric and breathed in the fresh, cottony scent. The only time the sheets didn’t smell like Evan was when they were hanging on the line.

On the other side of the sheets, Petra could hear voices, rising steadily. An argument. The breeze was blowing in the wrong direction though, carrying most of the words away. Only one phrase reached Petra clearly, shouted by the woman.

‘You don’t think of me!’

Petra took the words inside with her, drinking cold coffee as she repeated them to herself. You don’t think of me. Evan thought of many things. He thought of the weather, of the tides, of the movements of fish. He tried to think them into submission, to bend them to his will. Petra had never tried to bend him to hers. You don’t think of me. What would their marriage have been like if Petra hadn’t volunteered to give up her career? Maybe it would have been Evan who stayed at home, doing the washing and watching the neighbours, while Petra travelled the world en pointe. But they were living Evan’s dream, both of them.

Wild lavender grew in a dense row along the front of the house next door. Petra crouched behind the unruly bushes, cutting flowers at the bases of their delicate stems. She tied a bunch of twenty or so with garden string and attached the unsigned note she had written. I think of you. Standing up, she threw the bouquet over the hedge and onto the front porch where it landed mostly intact, just a few tiny petals straying onto the concrete. Petra giggled to herself and ran home, jumping the low wooden fence with the pointed toes and light step of her past.

The afternoon dragged. Petra lay on her back, staring at the dusty blades of the ceiling fan as she imagined that little bunch of flowers sitting on the doorstep. What ripples would spread from the gift she’d thrown like a stone into water? She dozed, dreaming of pure white sheets on a bed that was not her own. The soft caress of cotton, and of a woman’s hand, were real on her skin. Whispered words played at the edge of sleep. I think of you.

It was early evening when Evan came home. His blue and white checked shirt was clean and there was no smell of fish for a change.

‘Where did you go?’ Petra asked. She’d never seen that shirt before.

‘Out and about. Just talking to the bloke next door there. Reckons someone’s interested in his missus. I told him, don’t look at me. One woman’s enough bloody trouble.’

‘How does he know?’

‘What?’

‘How does he know someone’s interested in her?’

‘Flowers. Romantic, eh?’

Petra picked up her book and feigned reading. How long had Evan known the neighbours? Why had he never mentioned them?

Evan leaned over and took the book from Petra’s hands. She jumped and he laughed softly.

‘Thought we might go out tonight,’ he said. ‘Do you fancy a Chinese? Get dressed, let’s get out of here.’

Petra blinked a couple of times. It had been months since they’d been out together. She put on a green silk dress, too formal but crumpled enough to make up for it. Evan jangled his car keys to signal he was ready to go. He looked her up and down, half-smiling as she walked toward him. There was a light in his eyes she hadn’t seen for a while.

As he reversed the car slowly out of the driveway, Evan turned to Petra, his breath forming the beginning of a question. She didn’t want to answer any questions, or ask any. Eyes on the road, she felt herself jolted forward slightly as Evan put the car into gear.

Alicia Bakewell is a short fiction writer living in Western Australia. Her work has been published by Flash Frontier, Fictive Dream and Ellipsis Zine, and she was the winner of Reflex Fiction’s Spring 2017 competition. She is trying to give up writing poetry. She tweets nonsense @lissybakewell.

Image: Karen Maes on Unsplash

Raucous laughter floats up the pier from the all-nighters at ‘Rum ‘n Scrum’ where Sirius has often spent the night. Heaps of tangled nets greet the old fisherman as he lurches across the pier, unsteady from last night’s rum, cursing the young scrap he threw a few dollars to, to untangle the nets for the night.

Sirius’s head pounds, his rheumy eyes peering through caked lashes. The boat lists as he piles in the knotted nets. Splinters of shattered conch shells slice into his gnarled, withered hands, weeping from years of gruelling dawn expeditions. Grumbling to himself while avoiding the threaded pole spear jammed into the hull, two skinny bruised feet skid into the mooring rope as Sirius pushes away from the creaking dock.

Tossing a disapproving look at the scruffy urchin, he sees himself in the young eager face, and frowns.

‘Let’s go, boy.’

Manoeuvring the beat-up boat past mounds of discarded conch shells, Sirius and the boy head to sea.

A tiny polyp stretches its longest tentacle past a porous sea sponge toward the closest shimmering plankton. As the sun fuses with the sea, anemones, by harmonious agreement, feed on cooperative algae.

Deep crevices hide the much-maligned black sea-urchin whose spines lurk in the waiting darkness. A sliver of diluted light illuminates a clownfish burrowing into the depths of the anemone’s swaying cylindrical tentacle stream.

A miniature turquoise sponge rebounds off the multi-coloured coral, inhaling the surrounding liquid, expanding and shrinking in a gentle breath as a giant loggerhead sea turtle generates wave after languid wave of oscillating hungry fingers, unsettling gourmet plankton.

The boat’s stealthy shadow looms over the coral reef.

As the distant rumbling fades, the threat of nature’s angry forces has been replaced.

The old fisherman will die but the boy is only learning.

Alva Holland is an Irish writer from Dublin. First published by Ireland’s Own Winning Writers Annual 2015. Three times a winner of Ad Hoc Fiction’s flash competition, her stories feature in The People’s Friend, Ellipsis Zine, Train Lit Mag, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Cabinet of Heed and Jellyfish Review. Twitter: @Alva1206

Image: Pietro Jeng on Unsplash

She began with a wide sweeping declaration of brush on canvas.

“There”. She said, somehow satisfied with that bold start.

“It’s a green streak”.

“Wait”.

I was eleven, waiting wasn’t my forte but I settled in, accepting my punishment.

She dipped, mixed, muddled watery swirls with her brush then dragged another layer, now dark grey. Her skirts swished against the floor. A shaft of sunlight threw down a blanket of gold, lighting up the fine straggles of hair that escaped her cotton cap. I wiggled in my seat.

“You like that?” She winked at me with half turned head.

“Yes”. No. The chairback was hard like Sunday pews although without the shadow of Nanny’s rigid discipline. The deep red seat, cold at first, heated with its occupant. My short- trousered legs peeled painfully from the leather when I shifted position. I wanted to go back to the kittens. This time I’d be more careful. I’d give Jemima back her ribbon. Fish her doll from the lake. Learn my spellings. Conjugate the verbs.

With a delicate tipping of brush she dabbed the canvas. It didn’t look like art. Dust spiralled in the sun stream that lit the wood around her swaying skirts.

“Miss, it’s dripping”. Black drops littered the parquet floor.

“Hush”.

Drawn back to the canvas, watching her bend to add a wavy line of black.

“is it a river”?

She smiled in response, waggled her brush in water then ducked it into another pot. A stream of shocking red, the colour of kitten blood, hit the canvas then in a wide arch spattered Mother’s drapes and in full rotation drew a red line across my face.

“Miss”! Tears close. This was not proper behaviour from a governess.

“Quiet.”

I put a hand to my face making things worse, smearing the chair with sticky patches. I pushed back attempting invisibility. Camouflaged in red.

She plunged her brush into pots. Blue. Yellow. Green smudged the canvas. Then I saw it. A cave. I leaned forward, peering into deep black as she threw on colours.

“Watch”, now a whisper.

I watched colours congeal to a uniform sludge and barely felt her brush my skin. Blue now along my arms. Wet, cold as lake water. A yellow ribbon trailed down my leg to the floor.

Thrusting her hands into a pot, she turned with etched smile and slimed my hair, ears, neck with purple then back to the sunless canvas to compose a hand-span sky. A dark tapestry where black dots emerged as seizing Furies, their screaming breath fumed around my head as I fled toward the cave.

Inside the dark sanctuary I saw her in distant light blocking the entrance with flourishing streaks of brown. My scream choked on a spew of rainbow paint that submerged into darkness as I blacked out.

I wake long years later from dreams that tweezer my heart and coat my body in the dank membrane of panic. I know why I dream in colour.

Theresa Ryder was PA to author, J.P. Donleavy before graduating MA (Classics) and a teaching degree. She won the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award, 2015 and was selected to read at the Women X Borders Readathon, 2017 and Culture Night, Cork. She has been published in various journals and nominated for Best Short Fiction anthology 2018. She is working on a novel.

Image: Derek Robinson

The motorway is his friend. Lulls him to sleep, a soft black cloak, and carries him away.

***

He hides in the woods at night. Beds down in a hollow under an old tarp, away from the main camp. In a soggy sleeping bag he stole from a boy just like him, a boy of fourteen who didn’t make it this far.

He tries not to think of the boy, or anything else. Blots it out as the motorway thrums in the dark. He’s not sure about it now, the motorway. He thinks it might be toying with him, with its gentle rhythms and seductive promises. For it can be brutal, too, can just as easily rip him awake in the cold dead of night with a screech of brakes and shriek of horns.

***

The trucks don’t stop now, the Afghan says.

They’re standing on the ridge overlooking the camp, watching the trucks roar by. Watching but being watched too. The men in uniforms huddled together, smoking. One of them looks up, stares at Tarek through the drizzle. Looks away, stamps his feet against the cold. Tarek flinches, but the Afghan isn’t afraid of them. Says they sometimes give him cigarettes in return for favours. He grins, his teeth wet and black, and shrugs. It’s not their fault, he says. They’re just doing their job. And they don’t want to be here either.

The Afghan is sixteen, seventeen, his face creased like bark.

“Trucks used to stop all time,” he says. “Trucks stop all time and take us far, far away.” He nods towards an indeterminate point in the distance, over another, lumpier ridge. “It easy then, Tarek, before border guards come. Trucks stop all time over there and you climb in and hide and they take you away and you free.” He roots around in the back of his mouth with his tongue, coughs up some hard phlegm and spits it out into the wind. “Now trucks don’t stop, even when they hit you, when they run over.”

He shakes his head. “You hear it, Tarek, in night?”

Tarek hears it, the brakes, the horns, the screams.

“But easy then. Like Yellow-Brick Road! You know, like movie?”

Tarek doesn’t, but nods anyway.

“Like Oz! Click heels and make the wish!”

Tarek digs the heel of his boot into the damp soil and wishes he was somewhere, anywhere, else.

***

They play football on the patch of wasteland next to the road. Tarek, the Afghan, some others. A woman, a new arrival, who reminds Tarek of his old kindergarten teacher, whose name he can’t remember. The gush of cold air from the passing trucks knocks them sideways, takes the wind right out of them.

One of the guards gave them a black and white ball, brand new. Tarek thinks it might have been the guard who’d been watching him on the ridge, but he’s not sure. They all look the same to him, their grey uniforms, their long white faces.

Gave them a packet of cigarettes too. Tarek asked the Afghan about it, how many favours that cost him. The Afghan wouldn’t say. Stuffed half the cigarettes into Tarek’s coat pocket and said he shouldn’t ask so many questions.

***

The woman turned up a few days before the Afghan vanished. Striding into the camp, her eyes darting left to right. Wide hips, big head of charcoal hair.

They sit on the ridge together, the three of them: the woman, the Afghan and Tarek.

“We’re the same,” she says, and they join hands. “The same but different.” They agree to stick together, to look out for each other, whatever may be.

Tarek notices the way she looks at the Afghan, and the way he looks at her. He hears them at night-time, in their makeshift tent. Laughing, crying. He can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. When they’re finished, the woman sometimes comes over to his hollow and they listen to the trucks. He tells her about his old kindergarten teacher, about his parents, his sister, his friends. She listens, sometimes drifts off, but he keeps talking.

***

They scour the motorway, in the days after the Afghan has gone. Heads down, eyes on the tarmac, on the grassy verge. Trawl up and down, a mile north and south of the camp, as far as they can go, sifting through the knapweed and gorse, looking for something, anything. A rucksack, a shoe, a splotch of blood. They find nothing. He made it, the woman says, crying. Tarek cries too. Shudders because he knows what might have been, what a speeding truck can do to a human body. He has seen it with his own eyes.

Image: Daniel von Appen on Unsplash

We are humble artisans. We have no philosophical education. We can’t even read. We work with our hands. Our nails are always dirty and our hours are always filled by the demands of our work, our foreman, our wives. And then Nico had to go and mess everything up.

Hey Philo, he says to me one day, leaning over my work so his shadow obscures the leather handle I am struggling to afix to the inside of the shield. The leather is brittle, unyielding. Nestor has skimped on materials again. What colour would you call that, he says, pointing upwards.

Call what? The sky, you mean?

Yeah.

I dunno. Sky-coloured, I guess. Nico’s breath smells like onions. I try to breathe through my mouth until he leans back over his own shield. He’s supposed to be polishing the thin bronze layer that covers the wood, polishing so it catches the sun and blinds the enemy with its light.

He nods slowly, chuckling, and yet serious too. But Nico was like that. Never just one thing at a time.

Sky-coloured, he says. That’s good.

Then it’s the sea he can’t shut up about.

Do you want to know if there’s a storm coming? I ask.

No, no. Just … can you describe it?

The water usually darkens before Poseidon unleashes his fury but today it’s smooth and calm.

Yeah, Nico, I say. It’s full of fish. Can I get back to work now, please?

There’s a large order on and our daily quota has increased. Neither of us particularly like Nestor, our foreman, or his filthy temper. Or the feel of his whip when his quotas aren’t met.

But Nico won’t stop.

It’s just that the poets call it wine-dark, don’t they? Only it doesn’t look anything like wine. And the sky? Hammered bronze, they call it but – and here he lifts up his shield – does that look anything like the sky to you?

I have to admit that it doesn’t.

The sun starts to slip behind the hills. Time to go home. Nico and I sometimes walk part of the way together – he lives just the other side of Diomedes’ field – but I make sure to slip out quickly, barely aware of the cool wind on my overheated cheeks in my hurry. I hear him calling my name, but I don’t turn around.

Myrrhine is worried. Whispers have floated up from the fishing village of foreign ships, of men speaking with strange accents landing further up the coast. Our farmers, dressed as soldiers, not infrequently march off to battle once the crops are in, but war seldom comes to us. The news does not look good.

I tell her about Nico and his questions, mainly to distract her. She frowns and says she is taking the children to her father’s. He lives far inland. They will be safer there.

You can come, she says. If you want to, you can come. You are no slave. Nestor can’t make you stay.

But Nestor gives me work. I don’t need to tell her this; she knows I won’t leave. The simple need to provide for my family makes me stay where my work is.

It won’t be for long, she promises, and kisses my cheek.

It is August now and the sea is troubled. It’s not just restless and heaving, though it is that too, but it seems filled with thunderheads and wires of lightning. The riverbeds are dry and the grass is yellow and crackles underfoot.

Foreign soldiers in dazzling fish-scale armor and pointed caps march into our village. The few of us who are left, who hadn’t run from the ships and the gods’ prophecies, are taken and slaughtered or merely taken. We’re bundled into the hold of their ships, our captors shout at us in babbling tongues. Sometimes they slow their speech, as if talking to thick-witted children, before striking us for not understanding them quicker. I don’t know where Nico is. I stayed behind because I thought he did.

But I am a slave now. The strangers have placed a metal collar around my neck and leashed me to a row of other men, marched me into their ship. We sit huddled at one end, behind the foreign slaves who wield the long-handled oars. I wonder what the strangers’ land is like. Will there be horn-curved oxen grazing in fields? Will they have rivers not yet drunk dry by invading armies? One day, when I have learned their terrible language, will I find they have a word to describe the sky?

It is so dark that I can barely see the others. Just the form of their bowed heads, defeated shoulders. Just the whites of their eyes.

Philo? Is that you?

Nico!

No, it’s Nestor, you fool. His voice is barely above a whisper. We have to get out of here. Can’t you feel it?

The boat is listing. The voices above us are urgent, the footsteps pounding the deck above our heads hurried.

Can you swim? Nestor asks.

No.

Better stick with me then.

Suddenly he is untying the rope that binds my metal collar to the others. I don’t have time to wonder, let alone ask, how Nestor got himself free. I bend toward the man next to me, the one who smells like he sleeps with goats, but Nestor grabs my arm, hisses in my ear. We don’t have time, he says.

Up on the deck rain pelts down on sailor and slave alike, pours into our eyes. Nestor propels me to the low wall of the ship. I look down. The neat rows of oars aren’t trying to cut through the swell; with the listing of the boat, they can’t even reach the water. There is a splash. And another. Another. Men all around us are turning into rats.

Quick! Follow me!

And Nestor, too, is gone, vanished into the heaving broth. I lurch in the direction of his voice, I reach for the low wall, I jump-

What a fool Nico is. And all the poets. The sea is not as dark as wine. The sky is not like polished bronze. The water, the air. They are clear. They are nothing.

Image: Max Pexel

Jack and I used to play this game: every so often, when life got difficult, or it seemed like nothing was going our way, we’d think of all the possible universes out there where things were better, easier. If we got fired from a job, we’d imagine a world where we got a promotion instead. Where we were finally able to afford all the things we wanted, but didn’t need. If we were stuck in traffic, we imagined a multiverse where we were already at our destination; or, we imagined a world where traffic didn’t exist at all, where everyone was a perfect driver, and the roadways clear.

If we got snowed in one weekend, we’d imagine a place of warmth: sunning ourselves on a beach, or drinking mojitos by a pool.

When we had problems conceiving, we’d imagine a place of growth: my belly, swelling more and more each day, life beginning for all of us.

We don’t play anymore.

I kiss Charlie’s forehead good night. Notice the skin dry and flaky there. He tells me he’s thirsty; we all are. I tell him to dream of rivers and lakes, somewhere. Gushing. Dream of the life teeming within them, Charlie boy.

Jack thought there’d be water here. He remembered all the trips to his grandparent’s farmhouse as a kid. Remembered the chickens and their pecking beaks. Remembered the pigs and their squealing snouts. Remembered the spring and its bubbling water. It gushed, cold and clear, even on the hottest day in July, just beyond the house in a thicket of woods. How lush it all was. How deeply he drank.

And so, since the house had belonged to him ever since his dad died, we packed up what little mattered anymore—family photo albums, a few books we thought we couldn’t live without, some toys for Charlie, and all of our life savings in a fireproof box—and headed north.

The spring had already dried up, though. The ground was brittle and barren. It crunched underfoot. Nothing lived here anymore. Nothing could.

Now, Jack makes monthly trips into town to buy food and collect the water we’re allotted. Sometimes I don’t even notice he’s gone until Charlie asks where Daddy went. We didn’t used to be like this, he and I. I’d like to blame it on the world—on the drought, all the dried up rivers and lakes, the water rations and how they’re never enough—but the truth is, we started to change even before the world did.

I could blame it on the miscarriage. Lots of women were having them back then—it was something in the water. But I know that isn’t true. We changed before. Before, back when you could still drink water from the taps. Before the poisoned waterways that started, but didn’t end, with Flint. Before the rain stopped. Before people got scared, so scared. Before the riots and the killings and the stealing.

All for water. All for something we thought we would surely never run out of.

Jack and I used to be insatiable for one another. We couldn’t imagine a universe where we loved each other more than we did right here, right now. It wasn’t possible.

Now, I don’t even remember the last time he touched me. It’s not our fault. The human body is seventy percent water, and even this is gone, too.

At night, I dream of jumping into bodies of water. Of bubbles rising around me, tickling my skin. I never want to wake up.

I crawl in bed next to Jack.

“He asleep?” he asks me.

“Yeah. Thirsty, again.”

“I’m getting more tomorrow,” he says.

“But it’s less, this time.”

He sets down the book he was reading. Rubs his eyes. Pinches his forehead.

“There’s nothing more I can do,” he tells me. “They’re cutting back. There’s not enough.”

“Maybe we should leave here,” I say. “Go back home, or to my parent’s.”

“There’s nothing there, either.”

Rivers and lakes, somewhere. Gushing. Teeming.

“We’re going to die here,” I tell him.

He says nothing.

“Jack.”

Lush. Bubbling.

“I don’t know what to say to relieve you. There’s nothing.”

If it were before, and if we still loved each other the way we used to, we could play our game, imagine a place where our tongues weren’t dry and aching. Where our bodies didn’t scream for water. Where rain fell, hard and heavy. Where bubbles tickled our skin. We could hold each other and wish. Even this is imaginary now.

Hannah Gordon is a writer and editor from Detroit. She’s the managing editor of CHEAP POP. Her stories can be found or are forthcoming in Hypertrophic Literary, Jellyfish Review, Synaesthesia Magazine, WhiskeyPaper, and more. When she’s not writing, she’s hanging out with her cat and watching cooking competitions. You can follow her on Twitter at @_hannahnicole.

Image: Gerd Altmann

At eleven all things are possible; I add my name to the list to visit the lab for Career Day. Miss Edwards with her spiral perm tells me that a lot of the other girls are going on the trip to the secretarial school. I look at her blankly.

I sit on the school bus, self-conscious in my newly arrived body. My knees protrude demurely from my checked school skirt. Their white boniness makes me feel vulnerable and I cover them. My fingers twist and turn with a life of their own.

The bus is full of the sound and scent of boys; socks and sweat and casual boasting. The boy behind me snaps my bra strap and their combined laughter is raucous. It sounds like entitlement.

Our guide walks towards us and something warm breaks open in my chest. She is taller than most women but she walks confidently in her heels, her eyes perfectly made up and her hair perfectly styled. As she dons her white coat, I realise she works here and I am in awe.

Her voice is low and confident. The boys’ attention skitters around the room, bouncing from item to item, but I hang on her every word.

I want to speak to her, but nervousness rises dough like in my mouth, pressing against the back of my throat, stealing my words. She senses my regard, and she takes my hand. Her nails are delicately shaped and beautifully manicured, her knuckles are too large. I resolve to have nails like hers one day, to paint them scarlet. I resolve to wear a white coat.

Image: qimono