Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
by Anika Carpenter, Sara Hills, Rosaleen Lynch, and James Montgomery
David’s favourite fish is bream, which he will only eat off of our antique dinner set. His old mother must be present, sitting in the chair to his left with a napkin to hand. If she is not present, he must go and find another one.
When I use our second-best dinner set instead and put my mother on his left with his mother’s urn on the right, he takes his wedding ring off, places it on the fish and leaves the table, walks out the door and calls me two days later from a phone box in Scarborough, reversing the charges.
‘Look, darling,’ I say, stirring a spoon of his mother’s ashes into the gravy, ‘sometimes you’ve just got to take it on the chin.’
He tells me he’s always thought of me as the third best dinner set; in need of polish but still good for eating from, and I don’t know what to say to that, so I say nothing and he says ‘I was looking for an excuse,’ and I say ‘I knew it’ and he says, ‘You always do, don’t you,’ and I wince at the lengths I’ve gone to save our marriage, the bechamel sauce I’ve poured between my breasts, the potato dauphinoise I’ve smoothed into my pubic hair.
Between them Anika Carpenter, Sara Hills, Rosaleen Lynch and James Montgomery have written about detachable breasts, masturbating gorillas, empty zoos and time machines. Find them in Gone Lawn, The Flash Flood and Bath Flash Fiction Award anthologies. Among other places.
