Countdown #2

I bury my nose in my duvet. She bought me these sheets. I can’t shake that from my mind. She bought them. Even though my old ones were perfectly fine, she hated them. Too masculine. I’ve never understood how bedding can have a gender. She went to Tesco and bought a cheap set of sheets, pale pink in colour, adorned by sequinned butterflies.

“Do you like them?” she grinned.

I smiled, because I didn’t really care.

I try to remember how long I’ve been here, cocooned in a cocktail of my own sadness and questionable body odour. I hear the faint sound of the ticking clock from that TV show coming through the walls. The scrape of a bowl, the shuffle of a chair. I can almost see Dan eating cereal in his pants at 3 o’ clock in the afternoon. He’ll be in here in a bit. Knocking timidly on the door to bring food and to check that I’m not dead.

“You alright mate?”

I reply wordlessly, hoping he’ll interpret my gratitude through my guttural groans. He sighs and goes, leaving a bowl on my night stand.

When he’s gone, I sniff the sheets. They don’t smell of her anymore. Just me.

She never showed me how to use the washing machine.

Countdown Chronicles #1

Sometimes simple words hurt the most. When someone dances around the point you can tell that they’re worried about what they’re about to say. They actually still care a little bit about you. But when they come right out with it, like it’s the easiest thing in the world… I don’t know. When she said it, I didn’t really hear her. It was like she was asking me what I wanted for tea. She just plopped her keys down on the side and turned to me. Hands on hips.

And I’ve said it more times than I can count. On the sofa one night when she said that Nicolas Cage was her favourite actor and in the kitchen when she told me she didn’t really like drinking coffee that much. But it was a joke. Always a joke. And she’d always laugh.

I ask her to repeat it and she looks at me, with those grey eyes that used to be green, I’m sure of it. She sighs before leaving the room in a huff. I wait in the living room, staring at the door, my eyes slightly wandering back to the TV where Countdown is playing. Someone just got seven points. 

She’s back. She’s got her suitcase in her hand.

“I don’t love you anymore.”

Reflections

There is a lake nearby, only a couple of miles down the road from town. Our parents used to take us, when we were really small, and watch from the sides as we splashed around in the shallows. We swam for the first time. Shrieking and gasping, our short baby fingernails caked in dirt from where we’d scratched at the waterbed in a wild heart-stopping panic.

“Now that wasn’t so bad was it,” our mothers would whisper later when we’d been pulled out of the dark water and wrapped in a pair of warm soft arms.

We shook our heads, “No…”

We got older, all of us, and soon our parents no longer sat at the side lines. We’d go every summer, every day. Someone tied a rope from one of the branches overlooking the water and we all had a go. Swinging through the air, the wind blowing our wet skin dry. We wanted to live forever.

You’re not supposed to go in the dark but we did. He took our hand, held our purse as we hopped the fence. It was always the same, for all of us. Sitting by the water, dangling our toes, head fuzzy from those funny drinks he’d made us have earlier.

“I love you, you know you’re the one.”

His hand, inching slowly up our thighs.

“No one has to know…” 

He got angry when we said no. Ripped our shorts off. Did it anyway. Forced our heads too hard against a rock. Rolled us into the water in a guilty panic. His fingernails caked with mud from the riverbed. No one found us ‘til morning. 

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Inspired by 'Reflections, Weston-On-The-Green' by George Davison (1899)