The storm swept
fiercely through Kansas, uprooting trees and sending people scurrying to their
basements. Being hurricane country, and well-used to inclement weather, the
houses were strongly built with solid foundations. Cellars were well-stocked
with tinned goods and calor-gas cookers; generators stood ready in dim corners.
Dorothy settled herself down into a comfy old armchair, Toto curled on her lap.
‘Make
popcorn, please, Aunty Em,’ she called. ‘I’ll get Netflix started up.’
By now, we’ve probably all read about them
on social media – the Three Bills, three recent graduates from Georgetown who
took on student loan giant Tröllbridge, and
– more or less – lived to tell the tale. When the company began dunning the
first Bill, Bill Morris, demanding that he begin paying $700 monthly within 6
months, he responded, “Oh no! Not me. I signed up to teach at an
underperforming school, where I can teach kids active shooter drills for
several years so the government will pay my student loans! As long as I
survive, I’ll be free and clear.” With a grumble, Tröllbridge deferred Mr. Morris’ loan payments pending his completion
of the program and moved on to the second Bill. This Bill, Bill Martinez,
responded, “Oh no! Not me. I did ROTC all through school, and will be going
into the Army for several years to get the government to pay my student loans!
As long as there isn’t another war, I’ll be free and clear!” With a grumble, Tröllbridge deferred Mr. Martinez’s loan payments pending his completion
of his term in the Army and moved on to the third Bill. This Bill, Bill
Jefferson, had been job-hunting since the start of senior year, and had
realized it was almost impossible to get a professional job that would pay
enough to manage the student loan payments without a graduate degree. When Tröllbridge came demanding his first payment, this Bill responded, “Oh
no! Not me. I’ve been accepted to the Master’s program, so I’ll actually be
taking out a lot more student loans to pay back when I finish.” With a grumble
that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle, Tröllbridge wished Mr. Jefferson luck in his graduate program and sat
back to watch his debt grow.
When my stepmother left me at the service station, I thought it was an accident and she would come back for me, but she never did.
At night I feed the pigeons breadcrumbs until they fly home. Pigeons always know the way.
During the day I sit outside Greggs until Gemma takes pity on me and brings me stale gingerbread.
Someone rang social services once, but I hid in an abandoned Pizza Hut oven until they’d gone.
The staff don’t mind my being here as long as I help with the cleaning.
Stale gingerbread and breadcrumbs aren’t the worst thing that can happen to a person.
At the Happy Witch café each table has a silver mirror with a marble effect mounted on the wall and handwritten note in Blackletter. “Ask me anything you want or anything you do not dare ask but die to find out”, followed by “Please read the small print” in Times New Roman.
I sat down with a double skinny cappuccino and thought about questions. I always wanted to know when people smile at me whether it is for me or to make themselves feel good or maybe I should ask something more fun. So I asked “What’s inside my ex’s head?” The mirror got misty for a while and in the blur I saw a long roll of parchment filled with words, poems, expletives. My ex had always been prolific like that. I was delighted that after all that time he was writing poems, presumably for me. I saw a glimpse of my name in gold leaf paint etched on his psyche.
That took only a few moments. “Thank you for your custom” said the mirror and went blank. “You are welcome,” I said, a happy customer.
The waiter, dressed like a Puss in Boots, approaches me with a copy of Health and Safety and a feedback card. “Because we value our customers, we listen to what they have to say. We have also put together these health and safety guidelines for the sake of our customers. We highly value our customers,” he gives me a toothy smile amid modestly projecting whiskers, cattishly walks away.
I skip through the pages. “Don’t punch the mirror. In the event that you punch the mirror and injure yourself, the Happy Witch takes no responsibility or liability for any incurred damages. Likewise, the cost of punched mirrors or any other damaged property will be recovered from the customers’ bills. Remember it was your wish to ask the mirror about others’ secrets. Sometimes secrets are best left to rest in peace. Thank you for your understanding”.
I carry the hedge-trimmer with its safety sheath on. I’m longing to expose the biting teeth, to hear the grinding whinge and split, cracking the tender bones, the expectant shoots.
I skate the blade, slicing eager leafy twigs, annoyed by their thrusting growth. I want a level, closely cropped hedge.
My husband expects me to mother his two children. To step in, filling the gap where their mother once was. I have no children of my own and step is too small a word to justify the leap, the jump, the pole-vaulting flight.
The children titter, with hands held over their mouths. They mither and needle. I tell them to sit on the step, keep well away while I’m busy with dangerous tools.
Sometimes I long to put them away in the attic along with the other detritus of life. Tucked out of sight, pushed up the retractable stairs into the dark, not seen and not heard.
Instead of the attic, later I will take them for a walk in the woods. We’ll pick berries and nuts, feed crumbs to the ducks on the pond. We might hear the woodpecker knocking its beak, an axe in the tree.
I’ll secrete sweets in my pockets. Lollipops they must eat without running in case of a fall and the stick jams, stuck tight, in their small throats.
I strim errant fronds into uniform shape. I climb the ladder, stretch for a rogue shoot. I cry out in the moment of wobble under my feet. Before I fall and let go, I give prayerful thanks for the safety device, silencing the grinding, tidying teeth.
The children rush towards me. They fuss, fluster and shout. They clutch me as if they don’t want to let go, and I wonder. I wonder, was I pushed?
Aurora was so freaking tired it felt like her eyelids were made of sandpaper. But she couldn’t sit down for a second before one of the kids shouted or cried or yelled “Mommeeeeee!” even though Phillip is right there and could easily separate them or pick up the dropped toy or get them a freaking snack for once in his life. But no, he was kicked back, scrolling on his phone, and Aurora was the one who pulled her heavy body from the kitchen where she hadn’t even had a chance to start washing the breakfast dishes. She separates the kids and picks up the toys so she can see the living room’s gray carpet peeking through. She goes back to the kitchen to prepare them a snack but the dishes are still piled up in the sink, and she thinks, “I’ll just wash a few to tackle the mountain.” She squirts dish soap and runs the water, watching bubbles form. One breaks free and floats closer and closer. She reaches her finger to pop it and falls asleep standing up straight.
Megaliths are found throughout the British
Isles. Of these, Stonehenge and Avebury are probably the most famous. However,
there are many more that are not so well known. You will see from the slides
that I’m about to show you that these collections may be the remains of ancient
tombs or long barrows, whilst others appear to have been arranged haphazardly
with no discernible pattern. Indeed, some early scholars believed that the
arrangements of these megaliths were entirely natural and not deliberately
placed by the ancient inhabitants of these islands.”
The lecture reminded Lizzie of a story that
her grandmother had told her regarding a collection of sarsen stones in a
neighbouring village. Lizzie had never visited the site in question, but it was
said that nobody knew how many stones there were as all attempts to count them
resulted in different numbers.
“I’ll go and count the stones,” Lizzie
thought to herself as she left the theatre, and before making her way to the site
she stopped at a craft shop to buy several dozen wooden blocks and a marker
pen.
Each stone bore the remains of markings added
by previous visitors, and similarly, Lizzie numbered the blocks in turn and
placed them on the stones. There were thirty-two in total.
Lizzie returned three
days in a row and, like those before her, she recorded a different number each
time. On her fourth visit, she left thirty-six blocks in place. When she
returned the following morning, she was pleased to see that the blocks were
still there, her scribbled numbers clearly visible. Triumphant, she collected
her blocks and was about to leave when she saw two more stones. On each was a
wooden block, bearing numbers that had been burned on, and the imprints of two
cloven hooves.
Once upon a time there was a witch. Well, there was a girl
really, but many people thought she was a witch, and she didn’t like to tell
them otherwise. So, we’ll say she was a witch if that’s ok.
So once upon a time there was a witch. What made her a
witch?
Well, she lived alone, had a black cat and liked to pick
herbs to dry in her kitchen. I mean that’s such obviously witchy behaviour that
it’s surprising she ever objected to the word witch.
Oh, she didn’t? Object that is. Well ok what else made her a
witch?
She liked dancing you say. Dancing under the starlight,
howling at moons, familiar twisting and writing around her legs? No? You mean
she liked going to nightclubs, dancing on podiums wearing nothing but
diaphanous sheaths and gold bikinis. She liked the boom of the base as it
reverberated through her body, used the rhythms to cast incantations with her
spine.
“Did they work,” you ask, “the incantations?” Well, if amorous
alchemy was her aim, they worked extremely well. She was beset with boys, and
sometimes girls, and sometimes those who were neither one nor the other. They
swarmed to her like hummingbirds to nectar, like beetles to dung, like ants to
the scattered remains of sandwiches and scotch eggs on red chequered cloths.
Was that her intention, did she want that, to find true love’s
kiss?
Well, no that wasn’t her intention. She liked living alone
with her black cat and her drying herbs. She just really liked dancing. She
liked the way the dry ice shrouded her body, she liked the bleep of techno and
the blink of strobes, the lift of the podium and the way everyone’s hair looked
different from above, she liked the freedom to expand without the press of
other bodies, the jab of elbows and the jar and jolt of dancers around her.
And at the end of the nights, like the witch she is, she
casts off those acolytes entranced by her charms, slips into starlight, takes
the first broomstick home.
Did
you know that a glass slipper is also a coaster for glassware on the table? In
the light of that knowledge, what if we’ve got the whole Cinderella story
wrong? What if it’s not about a shoe at all but a quite ordinary piece of
domestic line? Prince Charming producing the Glass Slipper with a
flourish and placing it upon his loved one’s foot becomes utterly ridiculous.
Cinderella, pretty foot outstretched, from which dangles a scrap of wine
stained cloth! Also pretty no doubt, but not very practical as footwear. And
how would P.C. prove she was ‘ the one’? Is it a unique glass slipper; one of a
set that only she owns having inherited it from her dead mother?
Imagine,
ny young woman in the land could go,
“Here, P.C. I have the other eleven with
only one missing! Now you’ll have to marry me...” Are they mass produced, do
you think, or especially woven by fairies at twilight? The possibilities are
endless. Perhaps there’s a store just for godmothers where they can order from
a special catalogue...or a click and collect for magic goods...or even fairy
eBay!
So,
the revised scenario. Cinders turns up at P.C.’s ball clutching her personal
glass slipper. On the stroke of midnight, everything else being as previously
imagined, she runs from the Palace forgetting her glass slipper. The Prince
discovers the odd item among the Palace linen and, as soon as Cinders produces
the other eleven, he knows her. Or he actually recognises her as the young
woman he spent the evening with; he doesn’t need a slipper of any description
to find her; she is so much herself that he would know her anywhere? Not much
of a story! But it works for me.
Everyone said my stepmother was a witch. I thought she was misunderstood. She wasn't always nice to me, said it was difficult to look at me because I resembled my father, and she never got over his sudden death. Sometimes I would cry thinking of him, and she would stand in the doorway of my bedroom. I waited for her to embrace me or say something to comfort me, but she never did. She wasn't that type.
There was the time she baked an apple pie (my favorite) and it made me violently ill. Fortunately, I was able to call 911 before I passed out. I woke up in the hospital. The doctor said I must have consumed something toxic.
I stayed in the hospital for about seven days, had a great Doc and six wonderful nurses who took great care of me. They were all kind of quirky. One had allergies and sneezed all the time. One was constantly yawning. One was really goofy. One was really shy and never looked me in the eyes. The other two were complete opposites, one always smiling and happy, the other constantly scowling.
The police went to my house to question my stepmother, but she wasn't there. When I finally returned home, I realized all her stuff was gone. She had disappeared without a word. At first I was hurt and sad, but then I was happy at the thought of moving on with my life. I had just turned 18. My father had left the house to me. And the really cute EMT who took care of me in the ambulance had come to see me while I was in the hospital. We hit it off and he asked me out.
I can't eat apple pie anymore though.
The pier has its purpose in summer. Where once I wore thin dresses and ballads — a clear disclaimer for what crimes I might commit between the humid palms of a stranger.
You stride barefoot on the rickety planks which feel too weak for four decades of you — pretend it's your stage, your time. Here is where the loneliest drop of ocean lands, amidst the trawlers, sliced by dusklight.
The daily catch of shimmering silver, a lost currency, heaped on a floating barge. I have never felt more detached from my humanness, wanting to lie down as part of a crowd that catches the light — reflecting it with grace until both source and sheen die in hideous red afterglow.
Meanwhile, a bearded man in a white shirt, sleeves rolled, shows us the illusion of not sinking. He is light enough it seems, casting his existential net lifetimes away into the wide unknown where islands appear like precious jade from above. Where the earth is good and calm to a tentative angel. A soundless meditation.
They watch me move with the crowd, supported by still-warm bodies, as he pulls us closer to shore. The effort is an odyssey. A myth that weighs a tombstone beyond measure. But his strength surpasses death, for now. We land heavy on a bed of rock, ready to unfeel the metal — the hook which should have reeled us in faster.
I gasp into your milky eyes, seeing the last of myself reflected back. But you've already left for the next world, exalted by sunset and a languid siren. I accept, this is a different surrender. The song dedication is for another. No second chance to float, discarded, or breathe beneath the surface, quiet bait drowsing in its own hunger — not even as a woman.
Once upon a time....
Welcome to The Write-In! This year, we're celebrating the 2023 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology theme of time. Throughout National Flash Fiction Day, we'll be posting one time-related prompt on the hour every hour from now until midnight (BST), for a total of 25 prompts in all. You have until midnight on Sunday (BST) to submit your responses for possible publication here at the Write-In. We'll start posting responses on Sunday, 25 June 2023....
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If you’re submitting this to us, make sure to note that this is a response to Prompt 7: Once upon a time....
You can submit responses until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 25 June 2023 for a chance to be published here at The Write-In.
You can claim the badge for this prompt until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 2 July 2023 by going to the here (hosted by the NFFD website).
