Photo by Callum Skelton on Unsplash
by S.A. Greene
By late evening the big wooden kitchen table is an island and the two of us are stranded on top of it as the words lap around us.
It started in the morning with untargeted words of frustration that overflowed and settled harmlessly into hollows in the uneven floor.
As the morning wore on the words grew deeper as long-hardened grievances splintered from our mouths like spat toast.
By lunchtime the whole floor was covered and the children were in obvious distress and the dog was whimpering and we felt so sad as we pulled on our wellington boots and hissed insults out the sides of our mouths.
By late afternoon the children had drowned and the dogs had escaped and our matching grief almost submerged our matching anger but not quite because when the tears dried we dug deep and we found the worst words of all, the true words, the ones we could never forget the other had said, the words we could never take back.
Now the accusations spill like waterfalls and even as we cower at the very centre of the island, even as we climb to the top of the pile of placemats which form the table’s highest point, we can only stare down in horror as the words heave towards us, rising and boiling, rising and boiling, in rhyme with our never-ending voices.
S.A. Greene’s short short stories have appeared in trampset, Mslexia, Janus, New Flash Fiction Review, Fictive Dream, Maudlin House, The Phare, Flash Flood, Reflex, Ellipsis, Sledgehammer Lit and other fine places. Her work features wombats, capybaras, testicles, whales, a foetus with dodgy political views, a musical vagina, lots of tables (kitchen, dining, picnic) and a blue sponge.
