My sister and I marvel over meal prep for eight: serving up afresh the hours of our days. We laugh, as if caught caring for home ownership or parking. How many years since holidays were the two of us in a broken bothy? We danced with our thoughts, scuttled horizons, spoke with hills. Drank and ate the way we now breastfeed: urgently, on demand, or not at all.
Sleeves up! I yell, as my older daughter turns the tap and water bounces from an open spoon. No, I say to snack requests. I shrug, I mean it. The taxes have be filed, applications made, car insurance renewed and here. I am. The person we all refused to be when, young and bleeding, our babies fell from us.
My sister and I slice peaches onto small, white plates and snap photos to filter the dread. We know we share neither our grandmothers' grace nor our mother's fight. We smile, scrap and scroll in the face of idiocy, war, normality.
I am clumsy with knowledge and screw-top lids. I plan too late, forget birthday cards and milk. I know I should leave philosophy for lone commuters, peaceful inside their suited hours, but sometimes a view of hills makes me reach for my lost certainty. I trip and slide on all I have forgotten, await oncoming catastrophe.
My sister and I daub sunscreen onto wriggling miracles and I watch us meet relentlessness with that same bovine astonishment with which children once met marriage. Not disillusion: we never believed this would be any good. We are only shocked that after generations of resistance, we had the chance to choose only for ourselves; and picked this.
Frances Orrok works with people in crisis. Her stories can be found in Smokelong Quarterly, Gone Lawn, New Ohio Review and elsewhere. She won Smokelong's 2023 summer fiction prize, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize in 2024. She has recently finished a novel set in Orkney, Scotland and can be found on X/Twitter @FrancesOrrok.
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