She’s on Her Own With The Kids All Day and He’s Called to Say He’ll Be Late Home (Again!) by Mairead Robinson

 

a buzzing fly can drive you mad especially one that lands to sting-bite a bare arm, a bare leg, on a prickle hot soon-to-storm day like this one with the kids playing Lego on the living room floor and the TV blaring cartoons even though there’s a garden with a swing and a trampoline and every conceivable entertainment while she tries to think straight, tries to catch herself like a floating thread so she can reel herself into view, but at each glimpse the kids come with scissor voices wanting food or drink or he did this and that’s not fair and she becomes the gritted teeth arbiter of Lego battles and there’s this damn fly, so she rolls a magazine and thwack! but it veers in its fast-forward life where she’s elephant cumbersome in its buzz-fly-bug-eyes, fractured into mosaic, where thousands of her loom and galumph like she’s underwater and that’s how she feels today, every day, and it’s the buzz the constant buzz and it comes again so she swipes and says shoo fly and wonders do flies even have ears? surely not because if they did wouldn’t their tiny fly brains be driven mad? driven insane with the roar of it the never-ending roar and wouldn’t she want to land and sting-bite a bare arm a bare leg too, just for the peace? but it never stops never stops buzzing and there’s a sweat on her top lip from the heat, from the warm as blood rain that won’t come that won’t come from pregnant clouds and if only there’d be a white crack lightning to zig-zag and sting-bite the sky and blind everyone, blind everyone - herself, the kids, him, the fly - into that stark stunned breathless counting of seconds,

of silence,

before the storm