I was the one holding his hand when he took his last breath. Not my mother who left because she forgot to sign the important papers. Not my sisters, one who hadn’t come home from the next town over for the last ten years, the other on the porch smoking a discount cigarette. Nor my brother, ashamed to make an appearance lest someone ask too many questions about his perfectly painted life with what turned out to be an unfaithful wife.

I plugged in the slow cookers and put the food on the tables. Pa had liked horseradish on his ham sammiches. Put the coffee on to drip. Pa had liked his coffee black. Straightened the photos around the urn. Pa had liked to wear his striped-shirt when it came time to get his picture took.

I said my piece in front of those who gathered there. I sang a song in a shaky voice. Shook all the hands, gave all the hugs, patted all the backs, saying, “Yes, we really should do lunch some time,” knowing I didn’t mean it and neither did they.

I put the leftovers in empty cottage cheese containers. Stuffed the paper tablecloths in the garbage cans. Folded the tables and chairs. Put them away.

I stared at the brown urn, broke off one of the roses and tucked it behind my ear, opened the old autograph book set amongst the memorabilia. Mama gave it to me for Christmas when I was seven. Saw his chicken scratch scrawl, one of three times he’d written something especially for me during his lifetime. He never signed them with to or from. Or love. “You’re sure a swell kid, Dad.”

I thought about the other two times he’d written something to me, those two notes in the box under the bed at home. One was when he asked me to prepare the conference room for an important meeting. “The pitcher of water with the oranges floating in it was a nice touch.” They were lemons.

The third time was when he borrowed my only homestead credit after my divorce. “I, George Bellings, owe Cynthia Bellings $3500.”

He never did pay it back.

COPPER ROSE perforates the edges of the page while writing unusual stories from the heart of Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and online journals. She also understands there really is something about pie. Connect with her at https://julieceger.wordpress.com/copper-rose-author/ and on Facebook: Author Copper Rose

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While he protested about the dangers she stepped gingerly over the barbed wire that ran along the top of the fence and stood laughing on the other side, kicking her shoes in the air. She looked down at her bare toes and noticed a scattering of small holes in the soil. Peering into one of them she found it was full of dead scorpions.

He handed her a torch. “Look down the other holes. You may as well know the truth. When you realise what I’ve tried to protect you from perhaps you won’t think so badly of me.”

She shone the torch down a hole and saw it too was packed with scorpions. Writhing red live ones. She clapped her hands to her mouth.

He shook his head. “You see? With bare feet you’ll never be able to walk past them in safety. That is why – knowing your propensities – I built the fence.”

She reached over the wire and handed back the  torch. “Thanks. But I know how to avoid that problem. I’ve been practising.”

His protest froze on his lips as she rose a couple of metres above his head, waved and glided across the fields with the wind in her hair until she reached the place where the factory stood glowing in the sun.

She landed with a little bounce and looked back. He was just a dot in the distance, but intermittent flashes signalled that he was watching her through a pair of binoculars. She turned her back on him and looked up and down the street. It was empty because the factory hooter had sounded long ago and all the workers had gone home. Free from prying eyes she explored. The building had been brought up-to-date and the surrounding area was partially landscaped. The front of the factory was covered in mirror glass which looked like a giant cinema screen. As she approached it she saw the hills and sky reflected on the screen and further back, a long way back now,  her home and garden were barely visible with her husband behind the fence.

She stood still to admire the greens and blues and golds shot through with bronze like the bolt of silk her mother had once bought in a sale because it was so beautiful. It was too beautiful to use, her mother had said, wrapping it in tissue paper and putting it in a drawer to keep it safe. Then her mother died and the beautiful material was thrown out with the rubbish.

A sharp tap on her shoulder made her jump at the unexpected intrusion on her privacy. An old man in a long greasy raincoat stood grinning toothlessly. “It’s comfortable behind those bushes,” he slavered.

“Piss off!” she hissed.

He flushed livid and bunched his fists under his chin then thought better of it and sloped away.

She moved out of sight into a doorway and settled down comfortably where she had a good view of the screen and could enjoy undisturbed the reflected scenes of clouds, trees and lakes. She waited patiently for the main feature film to begin. While restful music tinkled in the background, the faces of her parents, grandparents, school friends and  teachers appeared on the screen. Only those who had died, she noticed with a twinge of unease. Old scenes from her past were replayed so vividly she wondered if she had died too without realising it. To test the theory she walked up close to the screen to see if the other characters reacted to her. When they didn’t she sighed, vastly relieved, “They’re only two-dimensional.”

As the film progressed she was so engrossed in the story that she didn’t know exactly when he’d sat down beside her. He watched the film in silence and waited until the interval before interrupting. He’d always had nice manners, she reflected.

A girl walked towards them carrying a tray full of soft drinks and rainbow-coloured ice-creams. They both dug deep in their pockets for money and bought one each.

She licked the last creamy drop off her fingers. He set down his empty carton. The second half of the film was about to begin.

SANDRA ARNOLD lives in New Zealand. Her work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Bonsai: Best Small Stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (Canterbury University Press, NZ, 2018). Her third novel Ash (Mākaro Press, NZ) and her first flash fiction collection Soul Etchings (Retreat West Books, UK) will be published in 2019. www.sandraarnold.co.nz

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Book

The notebook lies on the table like a brick thrown through the window. It smells of dust, its pages are furred and grimy, and the cover is spattered with unidentifiable stains. It arrived a week ago – sent by the care home, though I told them not to bother. 

Just one look, before I throw it away. 

I put on my reading glasses. Your handwriting leaps out, bold and curvaceous: Queen of puddings. 

I expected an old woman’s script; faint and meandering. Like in the letters you sent until the end, the ones I never replied to. The writing in this book is assured; the paper is indented, the letters loop and swirl. A much younger you wrote this. Someone I barely knew. 

Queen of puddings

Warm 1pt milk in a saucepan. Add 1oz butter, lemon zest and 2oz sugar. Stir until dissolved. Lightly whisk 3 egg yolks then add the warm milk. Sprinkle breadcrumbs over base of dish and add custard mixture… 

As I read my chest constricts. Bile rises in my mouth; I clench my teeth.   

… Make meringue from 6oz caster sugar and 3 egg whites. Spread raspberry jam over custard mixture and pipe meringue on top. Cook for 25-30 minutes. 

The last word is written with a flourish. Were you proud of setting down your first recipe? There is a date – 1952. The year you got married.

I flick through more pages. Lemon cheesecake, Scones, Fruit Cake, Gingerbread Men. Memories crowd into my head. The recipes get shorter. The pen changes, ink gives way to biro. Towards the end some entries are no more than scratched lists of ingredients, linked with brackets and single words: Mix. Add. Then they stop. 

Kitchen

I’m sitting at the table, legs dangling. The warmth of the oven is on my back. Your pushed-up sleeves show bruises on your arms but when I ask how you got them, you don’t answer. Together we make pastry. You line a pie dish and trim the spare dough from the edge. I roll it out and use my special cutter to make stars. We place them on a tray and sprinkle them with sugar, then you put them in the oven with the pie. Soon the kitchen is filled with the golden smell of fruit and butter. The stars are honey-coloured and glistening when you take them out. You prise one off the tray for me. Careful, darling, it’s hot. I bite and sweetness explodes in my mouth.  

*      *      *

In the gloom my stomach growls. The ham is fridge-cold and the bread stale. Crumbs fall on my school uniform. I’m trying not to panic, but I’ve never come home to an empty house before. Outside the sky darkens. I’m still hungry but I don’t know how to prepare anything else. (Was it partly my fault? My constant demands, the selfishness of childhood?). Your apron is hanging on a hook; I go over and press it to my face, hoping to sense you in its fibres. 

I hear the front door open. Father is back. He listens, stony faced, to my wails, then pounds upstairs and into the bedroom. I hear drawers open and slam, the faint jangle of bare hangers in the wardrobe. He returns to the kitchen, face hard as a hammer.

‘Stay here,’ he says.

From the window I see his dark shape turn the corner. I hug your apron to me as the street lamps sputter on. Cars pass. Beyond the houses, tree branches stretch pleading fingers to the sky. A draught curls around my skin, penetrates to the bone, but I don’t move. 

Shelf

I wash my hands. On the counter is a mixing bowl and your book. I’m not sure how this is going to turn out.

Fruit scones

Sift together 8oz SR flour and 1 ½ oz sugar. Add 3oz butter. Crumble the mixture then add 2oz dried fruit and 1 beaten egg. (Save some egg for glazing). Knead into a dough.

It takes me a while to locate the kitchen scales. I measure the flour, sugar and butter and tip them into the bowl. Then I plunge my hands in and start squashing the butter into the flour. The greasy mixture gets under my fingernails and coats my skin. But after a few minutes of kneading, the contents feel smoother and more elastic; my hands look cleaner. I add the dried fruit. 

Roll dough on a floured surface until just over an inch thick.

I roll the speckled dough until it’s the right thickness. What should I use to cut the shapes? I settle for an upside-down glass. It descends through the mixture with a soft wumpf. I repeat until I have several round pieces to place on a tray. When I pull open the oven door searing air blasts out, steaming up my glasses. Blind, I push the tray in and slam the door shut.

There is a new scent in my kitchen. I don’t have words to describe it. The table is a mess of flour and I haven’t done the washing up. The scones are out of the oven. They’re risen and golden-brown, with tops that are slightly dimpled. I find some raspberry jam in the cupboard. Steam rises when I slice open the scone. It’s springy and pale yellow inside. I scrape on some butter, which melts instantly, add the jam, then bite. It’s sweet and intense, the scone is dissolving in my mouth. I take another bite, then another and another.   

When there are two scone-shaped spaces on the baking tray and my plate is empty, even of crumbs, I take up your book again. Flick through the pages, from back to front. My eyes linger on the graceful script in the opening lines. Then I close it and gently place it on the shelf. 

ANGELITA BRADNEY’s short fiction has been published in anthologies and literary magazines, most recently Riggwelter, Ellipsis Zine, and the Fiction Pool. She won the 2017 National Memory Day short story prize and has been shortlisted for the Fish Prize, amongst others. She is an alumna of the Faber Academy and lives in London. Twitter: @AngelBradn. Website: www.angelitabradney.com

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A rough hand rattles my shoulder. “Get up, Danny. The sun won’t wait.” 

I slump into the cold glass of the passenger window. Dad’s burnt coffee and cigarette smoke vie for dominance in the pickup. A wisp of outside air slips through and I lap at it. 

Our endless footfalls pulverize the frosted grass. Dad finally finds the perfect spot and we crouch in the biting wood, coiled for sound or movement. I allow my eyes to close and a second later feel the rousing shake. 

“Look. A ten-pointer.” (Like it’s Christmas.) “You take the shot, Danny.” 

My vision blurs. I travel back in time.

Bounding across our toy-studded backyard with his pink tongue flapping is my Scotch. He jumps and paints my neck with warm slobber. I dig my hands into his thick fur and hug him back. 

He isn’t real. Scotch is three-years’ dead. But still, I hold the vision like the wrestler I am. Like the wrestler Dad was.

Scotch, best dog ever. Pillow. Blanket. Monster-slayer… Sick. I begged for a pet doctor.

Dad snorted. “A vet? They’ll charge us out the wazoo for nothin—tests and crap that ain’t gonna make him no better.” 

“How do you know?” 

“I just do.”

“But how?”

End of conversation. It wasn’t about the money, Dad said. He was going to take care of Scotch. 

He prepped with a case of Budweiser and stumbled out the door, Scotch in his arms like a new bride. I pulled at his legs but he kicked me off. 

I followed. I thought by coming I could stop it.

The whole way from our place through the farmer’s field and into the copse beyond, I reasoned with him. “Scotch might get better. I’ll take care of him. We don’t need a vet…Dad?”

Dad slid back the action like he always did before a shot. Until that moment, I associated the noise with New Year’s Eve. 

I did what any boy would do: threw myself over Scotch’s wheezing form like Pocahontas. 

Dad swore and almost lost his footing. “Dammit, Danny. I almost killed you.” He grabbed me by the arm and held me aloft. With his other arm, he pointed the gun at Scotch and shot him as I dangled, thrashing. 

“Now look what you did.”

Scotch was hit in the leg. He tried to bring his tongue to the wound but didn’t have the strength. Dad dropped me and crushed my face to his thigh as he raised the gun again. I beat at him with boneless fists. 

The blast and Dad’s recoil and Scotch’s silence said it was over.

A rough hand rattles my shoulder.

The calloused, thick hand that wants me to grow into it shakes me out of the memory. “What the hell, Danny? Take the shot.”

KELLY GRIFFITHS lives with her husband and children in Northeast Ohio, where the sun always shines and her muse does the housework. Her work appears in Reflex Fiction, The Forge Literary Magazine, and Ellipsis Zine.

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Your flowers are dead so I pull them up, the rotten leaves and dusty roots. They give themselves up, give up their little white bulbs, and I pluck them out of the earth. I see life down there, a grey spider crawling slowly, a crop of shiny white eggs, a round brown slug like a jelly sweet, rolled on its back. 

When the plants lie like a beast on your lawn, I sit in the doorway and watch the sun sink. Beneath my nails are little dirt moons and there’s sweat in the dirt on my face. Up on the hill, clean and clear above the trees, stands the pylon. Brittle old frame, dull metal, gunmetal, a cowboy in a doorway. As a child I used to ride up there, lie my bike in the grass and stand in its shadow, hear the wind in the wires, shrill sounds of space. Now the evening sun lights it up, climbs on its shoulders and disappears.

It rains all night, as though something is forgotten and overflows. It chimes in the stone and pours and pools in the gutters, the low wet sounds of a wishing well. It rolls off the hill and under the house and the walls creak like a boat. I lie in my old bed and am wide as a landscape, then small and thin as a twig. I grow and shrink in this way, like the sea, in this old boat, this old bed, until I fall asleep.

I remember the rose bush and the perfume that we made, thin brown juice that smelt of nothing, soft petals bruised in a jar. I remember the cherry tree with a fat blossom bed where we used to lie, look up at blue sky and pink blossom hanging down. In each flower was a little green eye and the eyes swung together in the breeze. When I sat up, petals stuck to my arms like eyelids and you brushed them away, those cool little lids, with your warm hands.

In the morning I see a red pheasant in the red sunrise and follow it up the hill. The trees watch from the perimeter, bend towards one another, murmur together. I stand below the pylon and feel the blood that streams in me, curls like wings in my back. The wind is my breath and the grass is my hair and the sun is my skin. I remember all the old days, rolling back below me, and one day in particular, when the pylon seemed to fall against the moving clouds, bright white clouds whose shadows flew like birds down the hill, and you were standing at the gate, waving and calling me home. 

ALANNA DONALDSON works in publishing and lives in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by stories. Now and again she catches one and writes it down. She can be found on Twitter at @alannamadeleine.

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Ride through the rain because the car won’t start. Get soaked by the old people driving too close to you and the kerb. Hurtle down the identikit corridors, your husband’s yellow bike jacket dripping water on the floor. Watch the women with pearls and pinched faces and wonder if they are tutting at you or the queue at the hospital they come to each week with their husbands, who turn to them with deaf ears and Daily Mails.

When it’s your turn to be seen, watch the midwife prod your belly: ‘You still planning that water birth?’, she scribbles in your notes. Watch the pinched faces turn to smiles then pull on your husband’s jacket again to go into battle.

Repeat after four weeks, when you’re too big for the bike. Try to follow the midwife’s advice to ‘relax’, even though you’re on a trolley with someone’s fingers in your fanny, feeling for something they can’t find.

‘He’s sideways’, she says; you don’t hear the ‘don’t worry’. She sends you to another hospital, where they scan your son and you joke that he must be confused about which way is up: after all his Dad is a Kiwi.

Repeat at 37, 38 weeks. Try not to panic when they say don’t worry.

At 39, 40, 41 weeks, listen when the midwife says second babies rarely engage before labour. Try to relax. Fail.

Wake a week later with the rush of warm water. Watch as your husband carries your older child to the car, thinking how small she looks asleep. ‘Don’t worry darling’, you say more for you than her. Wait for the first pains. Short. Manageable.

Spend the day at the country hospital. Walk and walk in the summer sun, but only manage four centimetres. Listen as another midwife says, ‘I’m afraid we’ll need to induce you’.

Arrive in the city hospital, to a room with five other women and no air con.

Then the real contractions begin. When they crescendo you vomit all over yourself, pain like nothing you have felt before. Relax someone says, fixing you with fingers and now a monitor for the baby’s heart. A man appears from nowhere, an angel in scrubs.

No time now for no worries. They heave you onto the trolley, hurtle down the hospital’s identikit corridors. Try to sign your name as you scream. The needle scarcely has time to take effect before a voice says, ‘we need to go in’.

The next thing you hear is a silence.

Then a cry. You wonder if it’s yours.

After an eternity, the angel places your baby on your breast.

‘Don’t worry, you hear yourself say, Mamma’s here’.

HANNAH STORM is a journalist and media consultant, specialising in gender and safety. Although she’s been writing since she was a young girl, she’s recently discovered a passion for short stories and flash fiction, thanks to an Arvon course with Vanessa Gebbie and Cynan Jones. Her Twitter handle is @hannahstorm6.

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